Mike Hohnen

Mike has his own unique style. He draws on more than 27 years experience. He has worked most positions in the service industry and feels at home in more major cities than most people.

Mike Hohnen

Archive for February, 2008

Bornholmstrafikken halvvejs igennem

Vi er nået halvejs – det vil sige 6 uger ind i vores 12 ugers GROW forløb med ledere fra Bornholmstrafikken. Dt kalder vi halvejsmødet. Her skal deltageren præsentere de personlige udfodringer, som de arbejder med, for chefgruppen, og samtidig får de for første gang indblik i, hvilke udfordringer de andre arbejder med.

Chefgruppen på besøg

For os er det altid spændende, når den øverste ledelse stiller op. Her var der fuld fokus. Vi fik besøg af den samlede ledergruppe, og de fik en konstruktiv snak med deltagerne om hver deres udfordring. Det blev virkelig værdsat, og det var motiverende – ikke bare for deltagerene men også for mig som underviser. Det er fantastisk, når en ledelse bakker så flot op om et kursus/udervisningsforløb, som vi så det her – men Bornholmstrafikken har nu også en helt speciel kultur.

Majken forklare Marion om kunsten at delegere

Min pointe er ikke kun, at ledelsenn skal se udfordringerne – det er også meningen, at de øvrige deltagere får en forståelse af, hvad deres kolleger tumler med.

Chief Purser Jørn hvordan man skaber en helhed

Vi sluttede dagen af med en lille kommunikationsøvelse. Mange af deltagerene har den udfordring, at de gerne vil uddelegere mere – men det forudsætter jo, at man kan forklare, hvad der skal gøres…

Kommunikation er en svær ting

Det viste sig ikke at være helt så nemt.

Men det var lærerigt er jeg sikker på ;-)

Focus on strategy….

We have started up module II of our Danish Action Learning set. This is a group of Danish Hospitality managers that are studying service management in a program that we are conducting in collaboration with The University of Chester.

We are using the the Service Profit Chain as our basic framework for this program, and Module II is all about how to create value – seen from the customer perspective. You could also call this the strategy module.

The big issue with strategy is not so much to create the plan – the tricky part is to implement the plan.

To try and illustrate this point for the students we first spent some time talking about the tools that one can use to create a strategy, we then asked them each to spend 3 hours on their own creating a strategy plan with the following objective: By 16:30 this afternoon you and your team must have built a complex LegoCity according to a briefing specification that will be issued to you. When building the legocity the person(s) with the manual may not be in the same room as the bricks – you will be issued walkie-talkies for your communication. You are required to make a plan as to what resources you will use (you have 17 fellow students at your disposal) and how you would like to organise your team (what kind of management structure, who does the work etc.) We will also require a time plan and a SWOT analysis. At the end of the 3 hours one of you will be selected as the CEO of this new company No Limit plc., and that person will be in charge of this project implementation.

What followed was 3 hours of intense planing:

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First step was to get a grip on the task (above) then to try and put some thoughts on paper (below)

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But this is an action Learning set – so where do you find help? From a fellow manager of course.
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Eventually plans started emerging:

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Anja was selected as the lucky/unlucky CEO who had to implement her plan:

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The team listen to Anja’s briefing

Trying to understand

And then they attacked the task:

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Communication proved to be tricky – have we heard that before?

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Four more minutes to go and the crane is still not working - things started getting a bit tense:

Only % more min to go

But in the end it all came right – well almost ;-)

Click to see the grand finale video clip:

We then spent quite some time discussing – what was the plan, how did it go, what could we have done differently and what did we learn.

It was quite some day and a big thank you to Lothar Friis (below) for putting the whole thing together for us.

Lothar Friis