Page 163 - The New Gold Standard

Build a Business Focused on Others
a big initiative. These quality improvement teams tackle impor-
tant issues and have representatives from every part of the organ-
ization.”
Alexandra Valentin, director of learning at The Ritz-Carlton,
Central Park, describes the quality improvement team process:
“We have a diverse group of our Ladies and Gentlemen meeting
together to improve our key quality targets. As these teams form,
we talk about the purpose of the team, what the data are telling
us about the problem, why each of the team members were se-
lected. We also make commitments to the team and discuss the
guidelines that we will follow. We then analyze the data more
thoroughly and look for trends from guest input over the short
and long terms. We look to see if we have faced the problem be-
fore and how it was handled previously. We then start mapping
out all of our processes that touch the problem area and break
down the process into steps to analyze what’s not working at
each step so we can fix it. All the time we are looking for some-
thing out of the norm that we’ve never done or possibly what
other hotels are doing to be successful. We make suggestions that
are implemented and track the changes for a period of maybe
three months. We usually look for a good pattern of positive
11
change in data like the Gallup CE to see that our solutions are
really working.” Alexandra’s description of the process she has
participated in at her hotel is but one example of how leadership
seeks solutions from the front line instead of diving into man-
agement-driven edicts.
In addition to forming T3 teams, Ritz-Carlton leaders also
engage their staffs in annual SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, op-
portunities, and threats) analyses of the company’s annual Key
Success Factors, thus producing input and participation from all
levels of the business. Jean Cohen, vice president and area gen-
eral manager of The Ritz-Carlton, Grand Cayman, notes, “Crit-
ical to the success of a complex resort in an international location
such as Grand Cayman is that the Ladies and Gentlemen em-
brace and live our service values by being actively involved in the

143