Jacqueline Moyse - Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group: Hospitality, humility, and cross cultural leadership

Steve

Hi, this is Steve Hunt with People Performance Radio. This week we spoke with Jacqueline Moyse, who's the Head of Organisational Development for Mandarin Oriental Group, which is a series of hotels primarily in Asia, but also now in the United States and Europe, and pretty much all over the world, and Jacqueline shares some really interesting insights about working in this very multi-cultural organization, and the concept of humility as a leadership style, and some of the things they do to ensure that the leadership they put in positions in these different hotels across the world reflects Mandarin Oriental's core values and approach to service. It's a very fascinating discussion of a very unique organization that really has to get talent management right, and has as reflected in their very phenomenal growth in what is a very tight time for most organizations in the hospitality industry. So let's listen to Jacqueline Moyse from Mandarin Oriental Hotels.

Hi, this is Steve Hunt with People Performance Radio. Today I'm talking with Jacqueline Moyse, who is the Head of Organisational Development for Mandarin Oriental Group, which is a hotel chain, a global hotel chain, and Jacqueline is based out of Hong Kong. Jacqueline, thank you so much for appearing on People Performance Radio.

Jacqueline

It's my pleasure.

Steve

So can you tell us a little bit about what you do within Mandarin Oriental?

Jacqueline

Yes, I'm part of the Global HR team, and I focus specifically on the various aspects of organizational development, so my focus is on all of our learning and development activities, as well as performance management and succession planning and developing our talent pipeline for the future.

Steve

So Mandarin Oriental is, actually it's a pretty large hotel chain, I think a lot of people in the United States may not be as familiar with it yet, but can you talk a little bit about, where is Mandarin Oriental located, what sort of hotel chain or hospitality organization is it?

Jacqueline

Yes, our roots and our heritage is in Asia, and our first two hotels were the Mandarin Oriental Hong Kong, and the famous Oriental in Bangkok, and those two hotels came together in the mid ‘60s, and Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group was born. Our owning company is Jardine, which again is an Asia-based company, and we're gradually growing across the world, so from initial growth in Asia, we now have properties in Europe and also in America, we're growing in those two regions quite rapidly.

Steve

How many different countries are you operating in?

Jacqueline

At the moment, we're operating in 18 different countries, and we are growing at a rate that we haven't seen before, so it took us about 40 years to get the first 20 hotels, and now we're growing, for example this year we're opening four hotels, and it'll be similar next year, so that's what's creating some of our talent pipeline challenges, is the rapid growth over the next five years, so we're looking to double in size.

Steve

Wow, in this economy, boy, that's no small feat—you're clearly doing something right, because I think that's going against the tide of the current economy in hospitality. So what are some—when you look at the talent, what would you say, from a talent perspective, are the things that Mandarin Oriental has had to do really effectively to grow in this sort of international fashion in this particular industry—what are some of the things that you guys really seem to have figured out that maybe other people haven't gotten right yet?

Jacqueline

Well, I think the first thing was that we had to make some quite rapid changes, because in the company, we were quite a traditional hotel company, and we were relatively small in the hotel industry, and opening one hotel a year, or one hotel every other year, our talent pipeline was easy and our moves could be done by word of mouth, it was very much around who you knew, and it was easy to open up a hotel and to take a number of key managers from different properties and very successfully open a true Mandarin Oriental hotel. As we've moved more into Europe and the States, and as I say as the growth gets more rapid, then that's a little bit more difficult to do. We have two challenges: one is ensuring that in Europe or in America we still create a hotel which is truly Mandarin Oriental, and is true to its oriental heritage, and also that we have a sufficient number of managers to put into that hotel to make sure that it starts with a very firm base, and knowledge basis of what Mandarin Oriental is all about, and I think also just making sure that, in those different cultures, again we can create an oriental hotel as opposed to creating an American hotel or a German hotel or a Czech hotel.

Steve

I think that's interesting, what you say about making an oriental hotel—can you talk a little more about what do you mean by an oriental hotel, and how does that relate to how you make talent decisions in terms of development, promotion, selection, to keep this oriental culture, if you will—can you talk a little more about that?

Jacqueline

Yes, I think when I talk about creating an oriental hotel, we're not trying to do that in a sort of cliché, synthetic way. If you go to our hotel in Miami, it still very much has a feel of Miami, but we intend that certain features around the hotel will have an Asian look, an Asian feel about them, and in particular our management and our service style will be maybe a little bit unique. One of our core management competencies is integrity and humility, and I think this word humility is very important to us, in terms of, again our style of management and the style of service that we deliver to our guests, and what we intend is that that will be one of the elements that differentiates us around the world, and that's unique to us, but it's not easy to copy in every location.

Steve

That's interesting—can you talk about that?—that humility, maybe talk a little more about that as a cultural trait, and do you find it easier to find leaders in some countries that really exhibit that humility competency versus finding it more difficult in other countries, I'm curious—are people in the United States less humble than people in China?

Jacqueline

Now you're leading me down the path! I certainly think, and I've spent most of my career in the UK, and travelling out to worldwide locations, but based in the UK, and I've now relocated to Hong Kong, and yes, I do see a difference in service styles in Asia generally, and the colleagues are very, very proud of what they do, their service style in five star hotels retains that, it is humility, that humbleness, that if you go to five star hotels or upscale restaurants in other parts of the world, I believe that air of maybe over-confidence or arrogance can creep into the service style. So yes, I do think you see a difference, and that's something that we try and replicate when we open up properties in other locations.

One of our key training programs is called "Mandarin Oriental Delights", and it's a program which is always run by Asian learning and development managers, because they train in that style, and they also create experiences on that training, so that, whether we're in America or Germany or Barcelona, people, Spanish people, English people, American people, can just get a little bit of a feel of what we mean. And actually I've got another good example of that is, we're opening very shortly in Las Vegas, and we've recruited some excellent, very experienced managers for that property in Las Vegas, and predominantly American managers, and they have all been out on work experience to Asia, and they've spent a lot of time in both our offices, but also in the Mandarin Oriental Hong Kong, in Bangkok, in Singapore, some of them in Tokyo, to really try and soak up what that experience is about, and what we're trying to create.

Steve

So that's a good example, because that's funny, Las Vegas is not a city we normally associate with humility, so I'm curious, as you go to the Mandarin Oriental in Las Vegas, and you're trying to create this sort of different culture, and one which the key tenants is this sense of humility, which is going to come out in the service staff, because your typical hotel guest is not going to meet the hotel manager. What is it that a hotel manager at Mandarin Oriental does in terms of, if you can give some specific examples of behaviours, or how they interact with their employees, that in turn will translate to the employees, providing guests with a more humble kind of service, as opposed to maybe traditional, I almost want to say pretentious confidence service?

Jacqueline

I think there's a few subtleties—we don't call them employees or staff, we call them colleagues, and what we try and do is, right from day one, they are our colleagues and we try and create that environment. There's a lot about the two-way communication between our colleagues and our managers. We integrate the family a lot, family's a very strong value in Asia, and it's something that goes across our company, I believe, and in two aspects: one is about, the Mandarin Oriental is not only their employers, but they're also in a sense, they're part of the family, and also we take an appropriate level of interest in our colleagues' families, so things like when we're opening a new hotel, one of the most important days we do on that pre-opening is a family day, where the family will come in and they'll experience the hotel, and they'll see every part of the hotel, and they will see where their mum or their dad is going to be working, and through the year we try and include a lot of family activities, and I think that is quite an important aspect of our culture. Cross exposure is a very important aspect, and we do that with both our managers, but we also encourage that with colleagues further down the organization.

Steve

So when you bring, let's say, a US hotel manager over to get this sort in depth training in Asia, what are some of the things that you try to point out to them, some of the experiences that you want them to take away from that training, that exposure to that culture?

Jacqueline

It's interesting, because it almost isn't training, it is an exposure, so when they do their cross exposure visits over to Asia, it's not a highly structured program, so we will have them staying in the hotels and staying in very nice rooms and eating in the restaurants, or having a spa treatment, and trying to almost expose them to as many of the service aspects of the hotel as possible, and so yes, they will meet their counterpart, and share some of the things that they do with their colleagues and for the back of house areas, and the colleague restaurants and so on, but a lot of the time will be just spent experiencing the hotel, and also getting out into the city and experiencing the city as well, so that they're interacting with other aspects of the oriental culture.

Steve

That sounds like the kind of management training I want—go and have some spa treatments!

Jacqueline

You're very welcome, Steve.

Steve

Yes, but it would probably cost about $300 a day! I have a question, looking at all the different properties you operate in the different countries, and so you're trying to keep this sense of calm and humility, but you're also moving, I'm sure, employees across different regions and geographies. A very common question that I get asked quite a bit is, people talk about cultural differences—how important are cultural differences, and are there things that you see—you know there are some countries where it's just frankly hard to move a manager who's grown up in this country to another country—do you find that there really are significant cultural differences across certain countries that affect your talent management decisions? Or is it really more about the person, and not about what culture they were raised in?

Jacqueline

I think the cultural divides can be a little bit overstated, and I think it is very much around the person. It's interesting, in our industry a lot of the most successful people are from Germany, from France, a lot of people from the UK, and I think part of that is the, almost in a way the prestige that's placed on the hospitality industry and education in the hospitality industry at quite a young age, so I think you do end up with a lot of those cultures running very very successful hotels in both America, in Asia and the Middle East, and outside Europe, so I don't think there's necessarily the sort of cultural divides from that point of view. I think there's more boundaries if anything around, for our industry, language and work visas, and that's probably some of our bigger problems than necessarily finding different cultures who can fit in and work in different parts of the world.

I think it is a little bit more difficult for some of the Asian managers to move across maybe to Europe or to America, and it's an area that we're looking at, we focus on, and we very much look at developing our Asian colleagues up through the organization, but I think that is a little bit more difficult, and I do think there is an element of the cultural management style that works very successfully in some of the Asian countries, but maybe wouldn't be as successful in maybe Europe or America.

Steve

I'd like to talk a little more about that, because I think that's an interesting point, I mean two things: one, how the hospitality industry is viewed in general, I think that does vary from country to country, certainly the employment brand of the industry in the United States isn't viewed like—how people view working in a hotel I think is probably different in the United States that it might be in Hong Kong, and that's going to have an effect on the kind of applicants that you get applying for these jobs, people's expectations about, is this a career or just a place to make some money, and really kind of wrestling with that, and so I'm curious, you said that sometimes that people from Asian cultures coming to the United States from the hospitality in Asia, where there's sort of one view of it, coming to the United States, struggle—what are some of the things that they really encounter there?—and in terms of the US workforce, what makes the US workforce difficult—or I wouldn't say difficult, different to work with than the Asian workforce, and how do you prepare them for it?

Jacqueline

One of the aspects of it is, and it's something unique in a way with the industry, if you take a typical hotel, then that hotel is like a small town, a mini town, and you have so many areas of specialism, and that can be anything from finance, engineering, the food and beverage side, the sales and marketing side, and I think if people progress their careers within the industry, they tend to silo a little bit into those different functional areas. Now, when we're looking at moving people, it's often at the more generalist level of our general managers of the hotels, or what we call "resident managers", or number twos in the hotels, and there it's about people having, or being able to acquire, that sort of cross exposure and experience across a number of functions, but at that stage it's more about their leadership skills than it is about maybe their functional knowledge, and I think if I particularly look at the Asian countries, they have very very specialist knowledge, and they're very talented in their particular fields, but in terms of them becoming the more generalist leader, partly that's not necessarily their desire, and secondly, if you then put them into say an American environment, where again you've got these specialists underneath them, and I think some of the words you mentioned earlier—I can't remember which word you used, I think it was bolshie, but it was something along those lines—it's harder for say an Asian to manage, I believe, say a predominantly American culture or a predominantly German culture. Does that make sense?

Steve

Yes, well it is in the sense that, people I think, sometimes employees here, and that might go back to that concept of collectivist versus individualist cultures that Hofstede wrote about?

Jacqueline

Yes, and I think one of the problems that we're grappling with a little bit in terms of talent pipeline is, if we run assessment centers, and we run them across different cultures, then if we're doing group activities, group discussions, then maybe the Americans or the Germans or the English will actually dominate that type of discussion, whereas maybe the natural style of the Asian culture will be to do much more listening and thinking and assimilating the information, and therefore our perception may be that they're not performing as well on an assessment center, so we're still, and I wouldn't say it's something that we have resolved completely, is how do you fairly assess people for promotion when maybe the leadership style is quite different? And the same applies for different tools that we use, like psychometric tools or different tests, is really ensuring that those tests are equally valid and normed or tested against all cultures, and not just maybe a European culture or an American culture.

Steve

So that's interesting, when you're talking about making sure that the assessments are fair across cultures, because I also think one of the issues across different cultures is they're sort of stereotypical, what a leader is supposed to look like, and what a US leader I think stereotypically is going to look like is this sort of loud, take charge at the front of the troops, kind of visualization, which isn't the most effective, but I would think as people are going up, in a sense, I'm going to be assessed on leadership, it's like, well I'd better act like a leader, and when they act like a leader it will be acting like whatever leader, their culture traditionally thinks of.

Jacqueline

Yes, and I think there's a time and a place, and our succession management is very careful around taking each individual property, and looking at the needs and the requirements of that property at a particular point in time, and sometimes we need that type of leader in there, and there might be a particular owner that we have a particular requirement from the leader, or it might be a particular stage in the life cycle of that hotel. I think the type of general manager who can do an opening of a hotel may not then be the right manager to sustain the growth of that hotel, and build up its positioning in the local market into the future. We grapple with resorts based in a city center, increasingly we're opening resorts and we now have resorts, and again quite different cultures, we've got Thailand, we've got Mexico, and we'll soon open in the Maldives—quite different cultures, and we will look at the local environment, ones on an island, ones in a sense almost a city-based resort, or it's not by the sea, so each one is very unique, they've each got different owners, and working predominantly with a different culture with their colleagues, so we spend an awful lot of time matching up the right manager or the right set of managers for a particular culture, and there's certain positions where we would always try and localize that position.

Steve

Right, so it sounds like you have a very sophisticated assessment process, I think that's one of the things that's coming away on this backdrop, I think, is to reinforce that you guys are really growing, and at a time when a lot of hospitality companies aren't, so clearly you're doing some things right. Is this like a day long assessment center that these people go through, when you're looking at placing people for these positions?

Jacqueline

Yes, at the moment we're using one which is a day long, and we're at the moment again using it at the senior levels. Part of our plan for next year is that we would cascade that down, and we would use it or design a process that was relevant at different levels, at supervisory level, at junior management level, at senior management level, and make the process a little more sophisticated.

Steve

So if I can take one thing away from what you're talking about, it's like, you don't leave a couple of things you absolutely don't leave to chance, one is how you make these placement decisions for important senior leaders, you invest a lot in assessing, measuring, and really thinking not just about the person, but about the role; and the second thing is, you really invest a lot in developing people in terms of, not just same training courses, but really immersing them in the culture that you want them to understand?

Jacqueline

Yes, absolutely, and normally we would try and promote from within, but obviously with the growth, the numbers are easy to calculate, it doesn't always stack up, so we are looking externally for, occasionally for general managers, and it's very important if we bring a general manager in that they spend a lot of time out in other Mandarin Oriental properties before they even really touch the ground with the property that they're going to manage.

Steve

Wow, well the last question I have as we wrap up is, it sounds like these great processes, but I've got to think deep—does a lot of time, a fair bit of investment, how did the leadership come within the company, so you know, this is money well spent?—was it they always sort of believed we needed to do this, or was there some a-ha moment of, we really need to beef up or succession, assessment and development programs?

Jacqueline

I think there were a couple of a-ha moments actually, and I think one of them was when we opened a particular hotel outside Asia, and I won't mention which one, but we opened a property and we probably didn't invest enough time and enough effort in selecting enough people, or the right people, to ensure that that property opened as a Mandarin Oriental hotel, and I think we took a number of managers from some competitor brands, and we to a great extent I suppose left them to it, and the result was, it wasn't what we felt was a true Mandarin Oriental hotel that we opened, and it then probably took two or three years to backtrack on some of that, and to make sure that we got that property right.

So that was one big a-ha moment of, that cannot happen again, and then I think the second a-ha moment was the first year where we had three openings in the same year, and the realization that the manual systems and the word of mouth was not going to work if we were continuing to grow at that pace, so that's when we started to, in fact that was when my role was created, and we started to look at automating things like the performance management and the succession planning and actually put some systems behind that to ensure that we were doing that more efficiently. Now, we had to balance that with hotels had worked very autonomously, and it's not an organization that we're cookie cutter, so we have to get the balance right between having a process, having maybe an automated system, but not letting our leaders in the business or our hotels feel that we're becoming overly systemized and controlled, should I say, so that's a delicate balance for us, and that's a delicate balance for me in my role and for the HR team in general.

Steve

Yeah, I imagine that's probably hopefully maybe another podcast conversation is this one to come up with the processes that we should use, it's another to get people to actually use them, but it certainly sounds like you've had some fantastic success, learned from those a-ha moments, put the things in place that are allowing Mandarin to continue to grow and be very successful, and one, this growth sounds like it's picking up steam, so a very fascinating conversation, Jacqueline, I appreciate you sharing the experiences and the lessons that you've learned from working in such a fast-growing and incredibly global, high end hospitality chain, it sounds like exciting things are happening there and I look forward to a Mandarin Oriental opening up here in the north west soon.

Jacqueline

Well, you can visit our property in San Francisco.

Steve

Well, let me know when you open one in Portland, I'll be the first one there.

Jacqueline

OK, thanks Steve.

Steve

Thank you so much, Jacqueline.

Jacqueline

That's my pleasure, thank you very much Steve.

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