Peter Simoncelli wants everyone to understand his vision. But the general manager of The Westin Chicago River North doesn’t expect that he can simply speak and everyone will listen. He wants a two-way street at the hotel, which posted $38 million in 2008 revenue.
“You give them the chance to listen to what you have to say, and then you have to give them the chance to communicate back to you,” he says. “They may just need the time to vent. It’s no different than when you listen to a customer.”
Smart Business spoke with Simoncelli how to use a vision effectively.
Q. How do you create a vision?
I think what I do is not rocket science. I really think that it’s management by walking about. Creating a vision, the biggest thing might be listening to your customer. Your customer really tells you how to run your business. It’s whether or not you opt to listen to them.
You have the resources out there that you have. I guess it would be the tool kit to go out there and solicit feedback, or the gift of feedback, from your customer, then they provide it to you. Positive or negative feedback is great. Positive, you can work on and say, ‘Jeez, that’s a great idea. Maybe we should expand on that.’ Or negative in the way of operational efficiencies, ‘Maybe we need to retool our organization to better fit the customer need.’
If you have your own vision, it might be as simple as there is a crack in the sidewalk. That crack in the sidewalk, if it is a crack in one spot, what about next year? Is it going to crack coming off a cold winter? Is it going to crack in four more areas in the same thing? You better have a vision of what is going to be thrown to you. [It’s] no different than what a baseball player does: … ‘Before the ball is hit to me, I better have somewhat of a game plan. I better go into this and say the potential exposure is here.’ We can fix that crack, but three more are going to happen, so maybe we need to have a game plan going forward.
