The hospitality industry is staffed by some of the most hard working and selfless people who work anti-social hours and dedicate their time to the service of others. Those that work in the luxury hospitality market face an even more demanding role with clients used to the highest standards and impeccable fare on offer. To enable the best service possible the teams working together need to be in tune with one another and play to each other’s strengths. Personality profiling or tests can create cohesion with a higher-level understanding of each team member.

Helping each team member recognise how they most naturally create value; personality tests also show how each member can grow that value by using certain processes, and via interactions with others. Each team member can discover how their own natural path links directly to how they lead or follow, how they perform best in a team and how they can most effectively impact the organisation in which they work.

The luxury hospitality business is a tough market. Clients expect the best and the staff members need to be highly trained and willing to work long hours, and for crew members, travel for long periods of time away from home. Finding staff who can meet these exacting standards and stay engaged and loyal can be a difficult process, so once a good team member is found, many luxury hospitality establishments will hold on to them.

Job satisfaction is determined by many factors, but the members that make up a team can have a huge impact on how much an individual will enjoy their role. Friction in a team causes issues with staff performance and will invariably lead to losing key members to competitors. A better understanding of how each other tick can go a long way in creating cohesion and can enable greater staff retention.

Luxury Hospitality, a Dutch company that is part of the GeniusU network, that knows this better than most and actively works to train staff members for 7-star locations, such as crew members for yachts, private jets, luxury residences, spas and hotels. Lynne Edwards, Insight and Service Trainer for Luxury Hospitality, offers her opinion on why personality tests are so helpful in this demanding industry, “Personality tests allow each individual to focus on the areas in which they can naturally shine,” Lynne says. “By helping individuals recognise that it is natural to have challenges in certain areas or skill sets and that these should not be seen as shortcomings, since they are invariably compensated by others’ strengths in the team, makes the work they do more enjoyable. Therefore, creating high functioning teams built of confident and competent individuals,” she adds.

With better understanding of each other comes a deeper insight into individual strengths, enabling each team member to play to their talents. Lynne continues, “It helps individuals to accept their own strengths and challenges, as well as those of others, making people less judgemental and more appreciative of themselves and others. This acceptance and understanding naturally creates a sense of identity and responsibility within the team dynamic and confidence and trust grow from that.”

Personality tests offer employers some great insight into their staff members but to gain the full benefits all the team members need to understand the results of their profile and be able to action the insight in a relevant manner. Julia Rogers, Head of Insight for Luxury Hospitality comments, “We looked many different personality tests, but we found Talent Dynamics to be the best fit, we even worked with GeniusU to customise it for the Luxury Hospitality Market.  One of the major benefits of using Talent Dynamics, was the very effective but very short test. In this increasingly ‘busy’ world, this is very helpful to our users.  The report however is long, and we discovered that few people were actually reading it due to lack of time or interest, therefore the only people who really benefited were the ones who had a debrief to assist in their understanding.  We now create a shortened, easy to read report that flows and keeps the reader engaged. We then provide links for the more curious individuals who wanted to dive deeper and explore more. The feedback has been very positive, and users feel that the focus is very much on them, gives them more awareness of their natural inherent talents and how they can use the information to be more proactive, less reactive and communicate far more effectively.”

Luxury Hospitality’s top tips to help team members understand each other better:

• Encourage members to understand what they are good at, what they are naturally challenged by, accept themselves and focus on what they love to do. Whether this is through personality tests or simply via observation, it is so important to understand each team member individually and place them in the correct role.
• From this individual understanding, offer each team member a role that includes doing what they really love. We all have to do things that we don’t like doing but if your team is doing what they love 80% of the time, they will be happier, more fulfilled, more confident and motivated and be more valuable to those around you.
• Communication is key in business and particularly within 7-star service. When team members have this awareness of self, it also opens their eyes to the behaviour of others and how to connect with each other on a far higher level. A team in flow, all understanding each other, communicating well both verbally and non-verbally, is crucial to giving the owners and guests the best possible experience.

Personality testing is far more useful that simply categorising staff members into different personality types. It can actively help teams gel and create cohesion, by understanding each other better, people become more tolerant, and conflict is avoided. The luxury hospitality market and the staff that work within it can really benefit from tests such as Talent Dynamics from GeniusU, but equally so can many other people-powered businesses. As they say, knowledge is power and empowering a team with the understanding of what makes each member tick really goes a long way to creating a powerful dynamic.

About the Author

Roger James Hamilton is a New York Times bestselling author and Founder and CEO of Genius Group, a multi-million-dollar group of companies including GeniusU, Entrepreneurs Institute, Entrepreneur Resorts and Genius School. GeniusU is an edtech company and platform providing over 1.8 million students with personalised learning paths and is currently seeing over 1300 new students join each day to take the entrepreneur quiz and identify their path to wealth. Genius School provides education courses for young people from 0 to 25 years old. Entrepreneurs Institute provides training courses from 25 to 100 years old, and Entrepreneur Resorts is a market leading group of entrepreneur focused luxury resorts and lodges, beach clubs and city co-working hubs, offering business leaders professional educational retreats in exotic destinations around the world, including Singapore, Bali and South Africa. Entrepreneur Resorts will be expanding to 10 further locations this year. Roger is the creator of Wealth Dynamics, Talent Dynamics and Impact Dynamics, used by over 1.8 million entrepreneurs to follow their flow.

https://www.geniusgroup.net/

About Luxury Hospitality

Luxury Hospitality was founded by Peter Vogel after an extensive career in the Maritime industry. Peter wanted to share not only his expertise in service and leadership knowledge but to bring the two together and create a unique and 360 degree training & development experience.

The Luxury Hospitality team believe in the power of the individual and are dedicated and committed to helping everyone to be the best version of themselves. Development doesn’t happen overnight; it takes consistency and dedication but with their unique and bespoke programmes they help support individuals, teams and organisations on the journey to creating stronger teams, healthier cultures, improving performance and productivity.

The Luxury Hospitality vision goes further supporting just the team and expands into every person involved in the luxury hospitality industry – owners, management companies, entrepreneurs and beyond. By including everyone in the process the Luxury Hospitality approach is 360 and the benefits are felt throughout all areas of the organisations.