Page 218 - The New Gold Standard

PRINCIPLE 4: DELIVER WOW!
to serve customers and strengthen the business. Ritz-Carlton
leadership does this specifically by building the importance of
collaboration into Service Value 7: “I create a work environment
of teamwork and lateral service so that the needs of our guests
and each other are met.” By sharing stories that highlight effec-
tive partnerships, perceived psychological boundaries between
departments are torn down. Often these stories demonstrate
how two or more people working together have been able to de-
liver a greater Wow for the guest than each person’s working in-
dependently.
An example is reflected by the efforts of Cleria Ferreira, Mil-
dred Sjostrand, and William Gilbreath of The Ritz-Carlton,
Orlando, Grande Lakes, in-room dining department. Cleria de-
livered lunch to the room of a meeting planner who was busily
rolling up messages and placing them in bottles as part of an
amenity that would be delivered to 400 meeting attendees.
Cleria observed that the scale of the task would likely cause the
guest to stay up the entire night. She contacted her manager to
ensure that she would not leave the rest of her team short-staffed
if she offered to assist the guest with the project. Even working
together, Cleria realized that the project was going very slowly,
so she asked the guest to excuse her for a moment. Minutes later
Cleria returned to the room with a table and two colleagues,
Mildred and William. At that time, in-room dining calls were
slow, so the three of them worked around requested deliveries to
expedite the process of stuffing messages in bottles. While man-
agers can tell their staff that they want to see teamwork, there
aren’t many better ways to communicate that message than shar-
ing moments of exceptional team participation as demonstrated
by Cleria, Mildred, and William.
Teamwork can occur among a handful of individuals or in a
hotelwide effort. Such was the case in Miami during the 2007
Super Bowl held at Dolphin Stadium, when guests of The Ritz-
Carlton, South Beach, boarded five motor coaches bound for

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