Why has the hospitality industry still not been able to capitalize on EQ?

By scientific definition, emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize, understand, and manage our own emotions as well as recognize, understand, and influence those of others.

It was not until the mid-1990s that studies about the significance of emotional intelligence gained momentum and parts of the business community eagerly picked up on it.

It was another 20 years or so before the hospitality industry implemented EQ standards in their hotel audits, complementing facility, service, and behavioral standards. Over the past years, the command of emotional skills for hotel staff has gained more and more importance.

Now, the vast majority of hoteliers and guests view the ability to “read” the guest and make him or her feel genuinely appreciated as paramount, especially in high-end hospitality environments.

What does “reading the guest” actually mean? The assessment of a person’s emotions is best based upon the existence and logic of the original emotional scale which has been applied with consistent success by tens of millions of people since its discovery in 1951 by L. Ron Hubbard (1911-1986). Commonly experienced emotions listed in the scale include enthusiasm at the top, conservatism, boredom, anger, fear, grief, and apathy at the bottom, with many emotions between.

The key point that has been missed by modern EQ proponents is not what emotion the hotel employee displays, but whether it is appropriate to the guest’s emotion at the time of engagement. The idea is that the employee matches the guest’s emotion or handles him or her at an emotional level that is slightly higher on the scale, aiming to bring him or her up the scale for the simple reason that the higher on the scale the guest is, the happier they are. This means that the employee is not supposed to engage with every guest at the same, industry-preferred, one-size-fits-all emotional level of cheerfulness.

In most cases, being jolly is totally fine because many guests are at that level or a bit below. But for those who are higher on the scale or lower, being cheerful will not resonate and will not improve the guest’s mood.

Imagine someone who is covertly hostile/fake or “doggy” smile/passive aggressive. Being cheerful with them misses the boat as much as being cheerful with someone who is mad as hell because the airlines lost their luggage or they just argued with their wife or the taxi driver.

You have to handle them at a different and appropriate level, bring them up the scale, and eventually or quickly, you will have the guests cheerful. It is a question of managing the guest’s emotion so they can actually come up to cheerfulness (or higher), and the employee’s cheerfulness would then resonate (literally, as different emotions have their own actual wavelengths) and the guest would bond with them for that reason.

If someone is enthusiastic or in aesthetics as an emotion, being cheerful is lower on the scale and so will actually bring the guest down—they will not feel empathy or understanding from the employee.

This failure to take into account the emotions of the guest is the basic and grave misconception of traditional QA (Quality Assurance) assessments of emotional skills, which only posits the “everybody must be jolly” requirement, regardless of the guest’s emotional level. This brings about wrong and misleading results that lead to flawed conclusions and decisions.

Employees will not be able to train and learn to recognize, understand, and influence the emotions of their guests because they have no clear understanding of what emotions are, nor the fact that they exist on a scale or hierarchy. The result is mediocrity where one expects excellence, and the continued failure to incorporate effective EQ skills into the tool kit of hospitality personnel.

Traditional QA refers to the result of a behavioral mix they call EQ and does not tell us how the employees were or were not using EQ skills properly. It is a bit like simply reporting that the employees achieved a hole in 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 shots, as opposed to analyzing the swing and whatever other skills go into persuading the ball down the fairway and into the hole in order to determine what was good or bad about the swing and thus be able to correct it and improve performance.

And technically, none of their so-called emotions, except contented and disinterested, are actually emotions, rather being attitudes or mindsets. The key being that an emotion is an actual wavelength emitted by the individual that reflects or is determined by his feeling, mood, or attitude toward something or someone—boredom, enthusiasm, sympathy, etc. This emotion then results in certain behavior.

When traditional EQ confuses and equates behavior (actions) or mindset (thoughts) with the wavelengths (energy) of emotions generated by the employee, it misses the key element that opens the door to effective management of guest emotions. The same problem exists with copycat scales created seven decades later without the original research available—they confuse mindsets, feelings, moods, attitudes, and behavior with emotions and so do not produce an actionable understanding and procedure that can achieve results.

Emotions are a very simple but deep-and-far-reaching subject that are critical to proper engagement with guests and the secret to successful communication and thus service.

The hospitality industry has traditionally been a slow mover. Quality no longer appears to be high on most executives’ priority list, even though it could be a real differentiator. Despite the honorable attempts of CEOs to convince us of the unique allure of their own approach, their efforts do not seem to resonate with the consumer, who, with few exceptions, perceive hotel brands to be homogenous and interchangeable.

If EQ skills continue to be mis-defined and limited to a bookkeeping function in audits that dead-end with no follow-on training on, and leveraging of, real-life EQ skills, a simple and very cost-effective opportunity will be denied brands, hoteliers, and employees.

Conversely, of course, those who sense the value of EQ and are frustrated by the lack of clarity and failure to bring about change—or who see in this article the potential of the emotional scale for hospitality—have a tremendous opportunity to shine.

Jochen Ehrhardt is the Founder of TRUE 5 STARS Advisory — Quality Assurance perfecting 5-star plus offerings through a heavy focus on human interactions, and the founder of TRUE 5 STARS, an online platform that focuses on just the top 1,000 hotels in the world. He has personally inspected over 2,000 of the world’s best hotels.

Jochen can be contacted at: jochen.ehrhardt@true5stars.com or www.true5stars.com/advisory

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