Management from a Teacher

We are three weeks into a new semester and I couldn't be more excited for one of my classes. I know that is very rare for students to actually like their classes, but their is about 100 to 200 people in this class and I am pretty sure everyone loves it. This class is not what you are thinking it is. It is not a blow-off elective. It is HTM 312 Hospitality Management in Human Resources. As a 300 level course I was expecting long boring lecture with mind numbing difficult exams. But on the first day everyone was pleasantly surprised. The secret to my professor's success is that he made sure we felt important. My professor, Dr.Lalopa, also taught us one interesting managing technique on the very first day. 

The first thing he the first day of class was stand on top of his desk. As you can see in the picture above we are in a very large lecture room. He then told us to sit on top of our desks. We did as we were told with excitement. It was a little exciting because I felt like we were being rebellions. Then he told us that we get to decide as a class what the structure of the class would be. We got to decide the syllabus. As students of course the first discussion was no exams and no final. When the professor said alright and told his teaching assistant to write that down, I was in shock. By the end of the day, the class had decided that the course would consist of.

As a student I can count on one hand the number of classes that I am actually excited to attend and this is one of them. But I am not writing this to brag about a really cool professor. I am writing this to discuss what he taught us from the very start of the class.

One really difficult job for a manager in the hospitality industry is to motivate employees. How do you get a person to come to work everyday to clean rooms for eight hours straight or to wash dishes in the back of a kitchen all evening? To do this yo must make them feel important remind them that their job matters. One of the best way to do that is to have your employees be involved in decision making.

In college, students skip class everyday and if they do show up to class they text or play games on there phones. They do the work take the tests and get by with decent grades hardly learning anything. By making us feel like we were involved in the planning and organizing of the course we are excited to go to class and to leaner the material. I wish that more professors were more like Dr. Lalopa. I think that the whole class will actually learn a the materials in this class. As a manager in the future I hope I look back on this class and remember this valuable lesson.