The Auditor: A Hotel Story
Do you like being audited? You know, like when a powerful external force with great power comes to poke around your life and work to expose your weaknesses and failings? How fun, you must be saying! I've experienced numerous audits in my career, but some more memorable ones came from when I worked in hotels. So let me tell you about one.
Late one afternoon, a nervous-looking guest services agent came to my office, "Jordan, our QA auditor has just checked in to the hotel and would like to see you." When I worked in a branded hotel, I could expect to receive two audits per year from the brand. There are two letters in our alphabet that will send a chill through the blood of any hotel general manager. These letters are Q A. They stand for Quality Assurance. A QA audit is what hotel brands use to evaluate if the hotel and management adhere to brand standards and achieve the highest guest satisfaction scores. These surprise audits have a way of making or breaking you, and they are always stressful. You don't know when these inspections are coming; you just know they are coming. Failing an audit would have a significantly negative affect on a General Manager's employment and career.
That whole day was tense; while I had a strong sense we would do well before the day began, the human element of a hotel is always present. Something could come up that we could not anticipate and damage our score. The stakes were high for me as well. I was a young leader with a very different temperament, and I know many believed I'd fail. This audit was memorable for my team and me because we passed the audit and achieved the highest level possible for that brand, an "outstanding" grade. I'll never forget when we finished the audit and our auditor, who I had known as a pretty tough individual, smiled and said, "Jordan, this is an outstanding hotel, and you are an outstanding leader. Well done, buddy!" and he gave me a big hug. He became my coach, friend, and mentor in the years that followed.
A quality Assurance audit is a record of how you and your team have spent time achieving the brand's goals for the guest experience. Our team had to be deliberate, and we worked hard to make sure the hotel was beautiful and that our guests loved staying with us. However, the daily acknowledgment of the fact that we knew the auditor was coming helped drive our efforts. We had a limited amount of time to achieve what we wanted.
Thinking back to this audit, I'm reminded that time is a limited commodity, and we only have so much of it. Time can be wasted, or it can be invested. There's little we can do to make more time.
I hate to take a morbid turn here in this post, but the clock is ticking for all of us to achieve the quality of life we want. None of us are immortal. All of our lives have a best-before date. The ultimate auditor will come for all of us and ask us the question, how did we spend our time? I say this as one who has often wasted time; there have been some audits I've been a part of professionally and personally that have revealed that I have not always been at my best.
But I'm trying to get better.
At the beginning of this year, I wrote down four goals I wanted to achieve for myself and my family. The due date for all four is the end of October 2023. I downloaded a free progress tracker, and I update it each time I take a step forward in any of those goals. The challenge of these goals is also significant enough that I had to decide what I could no longer spend time on. I'll give you an example, I love listening to music on my way to work, but I also have a reading goal that I want to meet. To meet my reading goal, I'm now listening to audiobooks.
It feels good, and I look forward to setting more challenging goals next year.
A few years ago, after I had left that hotel, I looked up my friend, the auditor, on social media. He had been very active online, and I was surprised to see his posts had stopped. His close friends had updated his profile to "Remembering" status, meaning he had passed away. It hit me harder than I thought it would, and it immediately brought me back to my last conversation with him. It was a phone call we had on my final week working at that hotel; his last words to me were, "Hey man, I love watching you work; thanks for spending time with me whenever I was in Edmonton; wishing you all the best, friend."
Friend, thank you for reading; wherever you are today, may you take note of your life and remember it has tremendous value. Make your life story count. Make some good stuff happen!