Check the System First
Horst Schulze, former chief operating officer of The Ritz-Carlton Hotels, liked to tell the story of how one hotel manager solved the problem of delays in serving room-service breakfasts. After several guests complained to the manager about their breakfasts being brought to the rooms both slow and cold, the manager knew he had to investigate. The traditional managerial solution to the problem would have been to call in and loudly criti- cize the offending room-service manager for technical incompetence and poor supervisory skills. The then properly disciplined manager would return to the kitchen, gather the room-service staff around, and yell at them. After all, in most organizations, blame rolls downhill to the lowest-level employee.
Schulze used the example to illustrate a different problem-solving approach. The manager organized a team of room-service people and asked them to study the problem, find out why the meals were not getting to guests within a reasonable time, and suggest ways to solve whatever problem they found. The team did exactly that. They studied the problem at great length and found that the cause was the unavailability of service eleva- tors needed by the room-service people to get the meals quickly to their guests. They studied why the elevators were unavailable and even had a room-service employee spend an entire morning in the elevators with a stopwatch to see where the elevators were, what they were being used for, and why they were unavailable when the room-service people needed them.