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, Haddad’s focus is on lifelong professional development. The department wants to serve the professional world by developing the leadership capabilities of employees so they can step into management roles, both in hospitality and in the wider service industry.
With hospitality suffering from a talent shortage since the pandemic, it’s essential to nurture and develop the careers of existing employees who have the potential to become industry leaders, and to help aspiring managers reach their career goals.
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 management development program helps talented managers and future leaders 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 develop 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 and making evidence and data-based decisions.
It’s also about taking a new approach to leadership – leading people, leading teams – with a human-centric focus.
The hotel management development program is built around a combination of online and onsite learning. Participants first go through three core online modules.
In addition, participants can choose an elective to take a deep dive into either stakeholder management or revenue management.
During the on-site week, we focus more on leadership, sustainability, and technology.
The program also comprises individual coaching sessions that identify and develop participants’ leadership styles for more efficient management.
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The first is to have effective communication in place between the general manager and the different stakeholders that surround the hospitality business.
The second is to be able, through that effective communication, to build a trust-based relationship over a long-term period.
The training program provides tools and practical examples to help 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. It's key for managers to know who these players are and how they differ from one another in terms of needs, influence, and more.
Hotel owners, hotel operators, other brands that are involved, as well as customers and, not least, employees, all influence the workings of your hotel… and this means you as a manager need to be able to influence them.
Learning to properly assess the role each stakeholder plays and being able to influence them through skilled communication is a key part of a manager's professional development and one of the things we focus on in 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 that relate to hotel operations and finances:
As part of the training program, students attend a series of leadership workshops, individual coaching sessions, and other activities that drive personal and professional development by enhancing their self-awareness in combination with growing their people-management skills.
Through exchanges with other participants, the workshops 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.
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We believe in applied learning. This is the DNA of EHL; this is the DNA of the program.
We offer a combination of learning and hands-on experience through the online modules, on-site sessions, individual coaching sessions that provide real-life examples and case studies, and opportunities for participants to share their respective experiences with others and learn from them as well as from faculty experts. We believe this is key to becoming a leader in this fast-evolving world.
It consists of three pillars that together form an indispensable foundation for their personal and professional development.
Thanks to the hands-on approach of the program, students gain experience in leadership even before graduating and leave feeling prepared and confident about taking on a hotel management position.
They will be able to drive not only performance in their future roles in the industry, but also adequately assess and address whatever the latest industry trends are. They'll also have gained the skills to deal with the real-world challenges of not just maintaining staff, but also keeping them happy.
On top of that, the hotel management development program prepares them to deal with the still-increasing importance of sustainability and the ever-growing role of technology in the industry.
And to enable the industry to promote itself to the greater audience and reinvent itself altogether.