Over the years, I have been hounded by tribemates looking for a raise in pay (not unwarranted, but alas, still pervasive). If you want a pay increase to materialize at a faster pace, you must do some homework in addition to your work duties. What follows is the hospitality- manager response I have given to those on the money hunt: Whenever you are being evaluated for hiring, a promotion, or a raise, start with the most significant accomplishments you can cite from your recent professional history. It is both the wide and the narrow definitions of success that will define your evaluation.

What was your specific involvement in achieving strong results, forwarding programs, changing the business climate, and so forth? What were the scope and the scale of your responsibilities? What was your total staff size, including direct reports? Did you have P&L responsibility? What was the size of your budget? Be prepared to quickly and crisply articulate your business results, not just your activities.

Itemizing a track record of your successes is the easiest way for the powers that be to evaluate and elevate you to greater responsibility, and hello, “mad stacks, jack!” Regardless of how well you have performed, seeking more money in the same role might provide incremental increases, but eventually you will slam into a hard salary ceiling. Most organizations usually calculate compensation packages based on titles or responsibility levels and pay grades. Rarely can you break beyond the pre-set ranges.

You must work, plan, dream, and scheme your way to bigger jobs (of course, only through honest and ethical schemes). This is the most direct route to pay raises significant enough to really upgrade your lifestyle. The simple fact is that all persons of the same “leadager” level or title are in a competition for the next opportunity, whether they buy into it, act above it, care about it or not. (Everybody sing: “It’s a dog-eat-dog world…”)

Assuming your performance earns you the right to get your hat thrown into the ring for a promotion, the next assessment hurdles you face are those of pace and progression. Never underestimate the positive effect on your wallet the aggressive pursuit of advancement brings. The death-knell for anyone seeking advancement is having the same level of experience without a promotion for five-plus years. You will then be deemed as not promotable, a poor career manager, and/or lacking drive or talent. Hiring/promoting managers will be wary of you. (“If you can’t do it for yourself, how will you do it for us?”)

If you were to ask a group of assistant managers to cite the major hurdles standing between them and more money, you would quite likely hear the following typical excuses (always someone else’s fault):

• “The company says there aren’t any opportunities right now.”
• “They say I don’t have the enough experience.”
• “My supervisor hassles me all the time.”
• “I’ve got a bad team; they’re holding me back.”
• “I didn’t go far enough in skool.”
• They like Joe/Jill better than me

If you were to ask a collection of team leaders what major issues they consistently assess when deciding to promote someone, you might hear the following:

• Poor transition from an hourly to salary mentality
• Questionable integrity
• Inconsistent follow-up/follow-through on projects
• Denial of accountability
• Lacking initiative
• Poor judgment
• Weak interpersonal skills
• Poor financial acumen/performance.

Ah, here’s a light-bulb moment for you: All of it is deemed to be within your control.

The perspective gap between these two groups is real, and it exists in some form or another in every workplace. The common complaint of my peers who provide the advancement opportunity is not, “Why is this C player acting like a C player?” but rather, “Why is this potential A player content to settle for B or C level performance? What is wrong with him/her?”

In short, if you would like to go fast and far, start off by packing the right bags with the right stuff!

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From Chase’s Hotel F and B “Staffing Doctor” Column:

CSM ASKS …
I’m the catering sales manager at my hotel. Earlier this year, I just missed making a bonus, but my colleague who specializes in wedding events received one. Our bonuses are paid on revenue goals, but I don’t think that’s fair. I don’t offer many “freebies” and try to keep our execution costs low. How can I suggest to our manager that she look at factors other than just revenue when determining incentive pay?

THE STAFFING DOCTOR ANSWERS …
CSM, for a business, cash is air, and, like a person, a business needs air to live. You can really get the attention of a business or a person when you cut off their oxygen supply. On the other hand, if all else is even, air is not what most people or businesses “live” for. A business can live for its customers, stakeholders, and employees, or ideally all three. People can live for their families, faith, or even to recklessly tempt fate by managing a hospitality business, if they so choose.

Now, follow me as we put our toes into the water. Running a business is a lot like learning to swim. At first, it can be a daunting proposition with a broad mixture of feelings and quite a bit of thrashing about—all fused to the sentient tracking of oxygen in and out. Hospitality businesses that focus primarily on the top and bottom lines (cash in and out) at the expense of other success factors, drivers, and line items, are essentially dogpaddling, which is elementarily effective but also stupendously inefficient.

Any business that rewards performance based upon simply “closing the books” or “coming up for air” from any accounting period is merely guessing at what’s really happening now and can be referred to as having an unbalanced scorecard. When it comes to the net profits or bottom line, most people share the opinion that the bottom line is the bottom line—either you got it done or you didn’t. However, at some point in any swimming lesson/running a business progression, a person grows in confidence or gets bored by just not drowning; though it will remain certainly imperative, it is not very self actualizing. An experienced business operator starts adding strokes to his or her repertoire, wisely looking for patterns and systems to leverage, in order to replicate successes.

Most hospitality businesses would (and do) benefit from tracking more push/pull triggers. For example, they need to further drill down on financial data such as revenue management, productivity improvement, risk assessment, and cost-benefit measurements or mission metrics—staff turnover ratios, a promotability index, innovation benchmarks, guest satisfaction ratings, referral percentages, etc. This, of course, requires detailed monitoring of many contributing factors and the gathering of information from far and wide and between the top and bottom lines.

So the smart trend is away from simplistically bonusing on month-to-month or top or bottom line results, even though that is obviously straightforward. Most companies are trying to achieve consistent positive financial results by rewarding the people, systems, and behaviors that drive better results, or, in our analogy, synchronized swimming.

CSM, here is the short answer to your question: Come up with a bonus plan that emphasizes equitably rewarding the drivers of sustained success. If your manager doesn’t go for your plan, at least you will have a greater depth of applicable knowledge on which to base your own actions. Or you could also go the long way around and leave this quote from Albert Einstein on her desk as a conversation starter: “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”

Chase LeBlanc is the founder and CEO of Leadagers, LLC, and is a hospitality management performance coach with more than 25 years of experience in the industry. He is also the author of High Impact Hospitality: Upgrade Your Purpose, Performance and Profits!

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