EHL’s new Hotel General Management Program aims to help professionals progress in their careers by enhancing their management, leadership and personal skills. Stéphane Haddad, director of the program, explains the impetus behind it in the following interview, sharing insights into the program’s vision and objectives.
As Associate Dean in charge of Executive Education at EHL, Stéphane Haddad’s focus is on lifelong learning for professionals. The department’s aim is to serve the professional world by giving employees the skills they require to step up into management and leadership roles, whether in hospitality or in the wider service industry, where such competencies are increasingly seen as key to success.
With hospitality suffering from a talent shortage since the pandemic, it’s evermore essential to nurture and develop the careers of existing employees who have the potential to go further. EHL Graduate School’s new Hotel General Management program aims to meet that need. Over nine weeks – eight online and one onsite at EHL – this unique program helps talented managers cultivate the hard and soft skills they require in order to master management excellence, take on further responsibility, and progress in their careers.
“The skills that we bring in this program really enable participants to tackle the strategic dimension of managing a hospitality business, as well as the leadership skills needed to manage people, either at the property level or at the corporate level where they may be led to continue their career progression.”
Management excellence really means mastering a combination of competencies – hard skills as well as soft skills. It is about navigating through complexity, making evidence - and data-based decisions, and that relates to a number of hard skills with regards to management.
It’s also about taking a new approach to leadership – leading people, leading teams – with a human-centric focus.
The program is built around a combination of online and onsite learning. Participants will first go through three core online modules,
In addition, participants will be able to choose an elective, which will either cover stakeholder management or develop their skills with regards to revenue management. During the onsite week, we will focus more on leadership, sustainability and technology.
The program will also comprise individual coaching sessions which will identify and develop participants’ leadership styles for more efficient management.
The program will provide a number of tools and practical examples as to how to develop a trust-based relationship. This revolves around mastering hard management skills and revenue management so that performance is delivered and communication is not just based on words but on hard facts.
The hospitality industry is very complex, with multiple participants at different levels. In the role of an executive a general manager of a property, it is important first to understand who those stakeholders are, whether we are talking about hotel owners, hotel operators, the brands that may be involved, as well as customers and, not least, employees.
Developing skills to influence, and communicate through influence, is very important to address each of those stakeholders, and this is a focus of the program.
It is all about capturing the information that hospitality businesses have and actually synthesizing it all to make decisions.
We cover multiple aspects in this program: analyzing financial statements and the effectiveness of KPIs; understanding the multi-dimensionality of hospitality businesses, such as the real estate side of the businesses; and integrating all of this. Another important aspect is maximizing revenues and performance, and therefore in this complex world of selling hospitality activities with different channels, to actually understand the environment and play within each of these channels of distribution with a view to optimizing revenues.
We have assembled a series of workshops and activities as regards to personal and professional leadership development. The whole underlying rationale for these workshops is about developing self-awareness, developing an understanding of how to manage individuals and teams. We do this through a combination of individual coaching sessions and leadership workshops, which will enable participants to develop their emotional intelligence and their awareness of those key issues for leadership.
Through exchanges with other participants, the workshops will help individuals build their own leadership style and have a better understanding of their strengths and their areas for improvement in the leadership journey.
The hospitality industry is faced with a number of trends that are impacting it quite substantially.
We believe in applied learning. This is the DNA of EHL; this is the DNA of the program.
So we offer a combination of learning and practicing activities through the online modules, through the onsite sessions, through the individual coaching sessions, which provide real life examples and case studies, and through opportunities for the participants to share their respective experiences with others and to learn from them as well as from faculty experts. We believe this is key to becoming a leader in this fast-evolving world.
It offers three key pillars towards their upskilling and personal development.
We expect that they will be able to drive not only performance in their future roles in the industry, but also address the substantial changes that are upcoming. Whether that be in terms of managing and leading teams and taking into account the new dynamics that have emerged in recent years, or addressing sustainability, technology and the impact of those two considerations on the industry.
And to enable the industry to promote itself towards the greater audience and to reinvent itself altogether.