Part 7. Teamwork and success

Teamwork is a hallmark of our corporate culture. It’s one of the company’s many strengths that I’m most proud of.

At the same time, the fact that we’re able to get nearly 225,000 associates to march in the same general direction on any given day does not mean that we have miraculously escaped dealing with maverick human nature. We haven't. Nor does it signify that the company is staffed by yes-men, robots, or mindless conformists. We're not.

The strength of Marriott's teamwork ethic simply means that we've successfully created an environment in which the rewards for working together outweigh those of working for one's own interest.

How did we accomplish this? Before I get to that, let me tell you about a brief period in the company's history when teamwork was not the order of the day. Although the situation didn't last long, the episode is worth highlighting because for us, it was the exception that proves the rule.

The trouble stemmed from a rivalry between two particularly ambitious Marriott executives. The situation arose when the company underwent one of its periodic restructurings designed to give a few people the opportunity to try on new organizational "hats." Both men began eyeing the same hat.

Given the personalities of the two, I was prepared for a certain amount of friction, but the competition quickly took on the characteristics of a blood match, marked by heavy muscling and back-channel agendas.

It would have been bad enough if the negative impact of the competition had been limited only to those two individuals. But people who worked with or close to them got caught in the fallout of their machinations. Judgment, morale, and productivity all suffered. No one—including the two executives—came out a winner. Neither got the hat he was hoping for. Both eventually left the company and found positions in other organizations.

The episode underscored a couple of fundamental truths. One, in a people-oriented business like Marriott's, it's critical to get the "people" part right. Both of the executives were bright, capable, hands-on managers, but instead of taking care of each other and those who worked for and with them—a key tenet of our teamwork-based culture—they let personal priorities get the upper hand. In the process, they destroyed a great deal of goodwill, wasted energy, and upset a lot of people.

The second truth illuminated by the contest of egos is that our corporate culture is at heart an egalitarian one. As an organization, we have a low tolerance for big shots. An emphasis on title and privilege goes against our grain. Those who put themselves the most forward have been, in general, the least likely to get ahead.

This brings to mind the story of how we got the teamwork ethic in the first place. When we were just starting out in the late 1920s, few, if anyone, in the company had special credentials. Everyone scrambled and worked hard; everyone also had a fair shot at moving up the ladder. Dedication and street smarts were more apt to win someone a promotion than academic degrees, the "right" connections, or a knack for playing institutional politics. By the time American business became credential-conscious after World War II, Marriott's "everybody-roll-up-your-sleeves-and-pitch-in" mind-set was already a cornerstone of the company's culture.

The result was a workplace that wasn't—and still isn't—a terribly comfortable environment for outsized egos or title-seekers. Not that we don't have plenty of well-trained professionals in our ranks today. Nor does it mean that we don't have our share of superstar talent. We definitely do, including some exceptionally savvy people who have since gone on to other exciting challenges. While they were at Marriott, however, they were not handled with kid gloves.

Creating a teamwork-oriented culture is one thing, maintaining it is another. One thing that I think contributes to keeping the teamwork concept strong at Marriott is the fact that we're not willing to dangle outrageous incentive packages in front of talented people to keep them on board as long as possible. We depend too much upon people working together toward a common goal to risk fracturing the team by setting up a reward structure that distinguishes a few disproportionately. Everyone who works for the compаnу is making a contribution to our success. There would be no quicker way to jeopardize, if not destroy, the special "we're-in-this-together" ambience of our workplace than by recognizing a few folks beyond their market value.

Does that mean companies like ours that have an egalitarian outlook have to forfeit the benefit of regular injections of superstar talent? Not at all. But it does require finding ways to balance (a word I've used again and again) the needs of the institution against the needs of "home-run hitters."

One of the most important, positive decisions a company can make is to welcome smart, ambitious people. Every business needs them to drive it into the future. Ambitious people have egos; they must have confidence in their abilities. What's important is whether or not they know how to manage their egos. If they don't, the system must be strong enough to manage it for them. That means keeping a check on their ability to affect others adversely.

It's also important to promote an open environment in which everyone can be creative. Those executives who truly crave off-the-charts financial rewards will eventually leave anyway, but you'll still have plenty of others for whom the challenge of the job—the opportunity to be imaginative and to contribute—will be more enticing than money.

Avoid allowing competitive rivalries to creep into the organization. It's important not to reward maverick behavior with promotions, attention, or money if the behavior costs the institution something fundamental. (On the other hand, do reward creativity and innovative thinking!) Encourage teamwork. It keeps the system in balance, reduces competition, and squelches agendas that aren't in the larger interest.

Finally, value the organization more than individual players. If your company's structure and corporate culture are both strong, the institution should be able to withstand the comings and goings of ambitious people. You never want the organization to be held hostage by the creativity or drive of a single individual or small cadre of hotshots. In that sense, a healthy company is a bit like a good marriage. No one has the upper hand, special talents and contributions are respected and appreciated, and all concerned know that the whole is worth far more than the sum of its parts.

Over the years, I've watched the separate parts of Marriott evolve into a strong corporate marriage. On the lodging side, for example, when we first started diversifying in the mid-1980s, each segment ran its own show independent of the others. The brands competed with one another for customers and didn't share resources or automatically refer guests to one another. That changed in the early 1990s when Bill Tiefel, head of our lodging group, orchestrated a merger of all of our lodging businesses into a single "brand-management" structure. Each Marriott lodging line now has its own brand manager who makes sure that the integrity and uniqueness of the brand remains intact.

The most important fallout of the restructuring is the way the brands have embraced working together. During the first year under the new structure, the brands referred more than $170 million in business to one another. Now that's teamwork!

Marriott International employs 225,000 associates—and counting. We're the thirteenth largest employer in the United States. We're also the biggest hotel management company in the world. The company dishes up millions of breakfasts, lunches, and dinners a year through our hotel restaurants and 3,500 food service units. Our distribution arm delivers 1.7 million cases of food-related products around the country each week. And more than 15,000 senior citizens reside in our retirement communities. As a whole, we purchase more groceries, make more beds, and serve more meals than any other enterprise, with the possible exception of the military.

As I've watched Marriott grow and change over the years, I’ve concluded that one of the most serious battles for large companies is the fight against "thinking big." I don't mean in the sense of dreaming big dreams or chasing big ideas. I mean the problem of letting an organization's large size become an excuse for complacency, self-satisfaction, arrogance, and passing the buck.

In an organization that has thousands of people and hundreds of locations, it doesn't take much for bureaucracy to creep in and strangle initiative. Ideas can get lost in a maze of official channels. Employees can lose faith in their ability to make a difference, so they stop trying. Or figure someone else will pick up the slack if they fail to pull their weight.

Those challenges are often compounded by the fact that big organizations can easily fall prey to isolation. Large companies tend to become their own mini-nations, their "citizens" bound together by special vocabularies, "governments," and, of course, unique cultures. At Marriott, for example, we've got a guide to company acronyms that runs nine pages! Internal meetings often sound like they're being conducted in a foreign language thanks to the shorthand Marriott-speak we've developed and become accustomed to.

When faced with the problems of "thinking big," one of the most effective counterattacks, I believe, is to remind yourself constantly, vigilantly, and diligently that your success didn't happen in a vacuum. We came very close to forgetting that truth during the late 1980s.

Any successful business needs—and will always need—a lot of people, both inside and outside, to make it a winner. We have literally millions of partners in success. First, we have our team of associates, our most valued players. Then we have our property owners, our stockholders, our bondholders, Wall Street, our peers and competitors, our franchisees, and, of course, our customers. Everyone plays a role in making Marriott what it is.

I've said again and again that our associates are number one. It won't hurt to say it one more time. Without the hard work and dedication of our team, Marriott wouldn't exist. That's why taking care of our employees is a top priority for the organization. It's also the reason why the kind of destructive personal rivalry is heartily discouraged and ultimately doomed to fail. And it's why I'm such a fanatic about having upbeat, involved, hands-on managers in every corner of the company. Every single person who works for Marriott should be excited to be a member of our organization.

How do you accomplish that goal when you've got hundreds of thousands of associates scattered around the globe? I talked about many of the employee-oriented programs, initiatives, and attitudes that Marriott has undertaken over the years: training, work-life programs, safety nets, profit sharing, and a bias toward promotion from within. These visible signs all contribute—I hope—to giving our associates the message that Marriott recognizes that they're central to the company's success.

Recognition also takes the form of celebrating our associates' contributions. At the companywide level, we've instituted an Associate Appreciation Day to remind everyone in Marriott on the same date, at the same time, that we're all in this adventure together. Parties, contests, special awards, and a lot of heartfelt thanking fill the day. The response has been so positive that we've expanded the program to a week's worth of activities.

One special event that takes place in conjunction with Associate Appreciation Day is the J. Willard Marriott Award of Excellence, named after my father and designed to honor our associates who go the extra mile on a regular basis. We've had associates from every walk of Marriott life win this honor: front desk clerks, van drivers, bakers, housekeepers, banquet assistants, and so on. This award is a true pleasure to bestow, because it recognizes people who epitomize the best aspects of Marriott's culture. It's a particularly important event, because the award recognizes our workers in operations, not our executives.

Another high-profile honor, given out on the lodging side of the company, is the Tiefel Award, named after our lodging group president, Bill Tiefel. Established in 1989, the award recognizes extraordinary service rendered by associates to guests and, on occasion, to one another. Tiefel Awards are given out throughout the year and are often triggered by a letter or other communication from a guest who praises an associate for service above and beyond the call of duty. Those selected receive a plaque and letter of thanks from Bill Tiefel. They are also honored in special ceremonies at their home properties.

Yet another corporate honor is the Alice S. Marriott Award for Community Service, founded in 1992 and named after my mother. Unlike the Award of Excellence and the Tiefel Award, this program recognizes not individuals but operating units of Marriott that have made outstanding contributions to their communities. The idea is to encourage Marriott associates to band together to help the company be a good corporate citizen in the locales in which we operate.

As important as companywide recognition programs are, it's even more critical to make associate appreciation a daily, ongoing, bone-deep philosophy. Celebrating the successes of associates should be every manager's daily goal. After all, their success is Marriott's success.

Every Marriott property has its own way of thanking and recognizing associates, but one of my favorites is the Hospitality Gold Star program at one of our vacation resorts. Each week, three guests are selected at random and asked to identify the Marriott associate who has been most helpful during their stay. Each guest receives a beach towel as a gift for helping out. The associates who are identified by the guests receive a monetary award, plus gold stars to wear on their uniforms. Simple enough, right? But there's a twist. The three winning associates are then asked to identify three associates in the heart of the house who have been most helpful to them during the week. That trio of associates likewise receives monetary awards and gold stars.

Why the second round of awards? The GM at the property knows that the folks on the front lines could not do their jobs and win guest plaudits and gold stars without the support of the people working behind the scenes. The second three awards make sure that heart of the house contributions doesn’t go unrecognized or unrewarded simply because they're invisible to most guests.

In addition to our associates, Marriott's financial stakeholders are also partners in our success. Shareholders, banks, and other investors may not be as visible in the daily life of the company as our associates and our customers, but they are extremely important to us. Not only do they contribute the financing that makes it possible for the company to grow, but they supply faith in our ability and drive to make things happen. It never hurts to remember that no one is forcing people to invest in us—they ante up because we've promised to deliver.

When Marriott went public in 1953, our first offering sold out in less than two hours. If my father needed any assurance that his company was on the right track, that fast-and-furious display of confidence supplied it. More than forty years later, we still have some of those original stockholders, plus many thousands of newer ones, including associates who belong to the company's profit sharing program. Our financial stakeholders provide us with plenty of incentive for doing the best we can to pay them back with continued growth and consistently strong earnings. And as any public company knows, they'll be the first to let us know if we're disappointing them.

Were you surprised to see peers and competitors on the list of partners in success? Competitors are often your best motivators and, consequently, a key factor in your success.

When Marriott decided to go after the limited-service segments of the lodging market in the early 1980s, the specter of competition was a critical factor in our planning. We weren't too worried about the complacent companies that weren't likely to rally in response to Courtyard by Marriott; we were worried about what our nimble and aggressive competitors would do the moment we were out of the gate. Part of the excitement of Courtyard's development was the secrecy we maintained until we unveiled the product. The reward was knowing that many of the first few months' guests staying in our initial Courtyard hotels were our competitors, checking us out!

Even while competitors are keeping you on your toes in the marketplace, keep in mind that your rivals are also your peers. The old saying rings true: "What goes around comes around." If you hold yourself above your competition, you risk isolating yourself and losing out on sources of help when you need it most.

We work constantly with other hospitality companies to deal with local, state, and national issues that affect our industries. Team effort takes place under the umbrella of our various trade associations. But many meaningful collaborations take place on a more ad hoc basis. Sometimes it's as simple as one hotel helping out free of charge when the other's laundry service breaks down. Other joint ventures are more strategic. Just to give you an example, Marriott and two other lodging companies have jointly opened and heavily subsidized a child-care center in Atlanta to be used by the city's lodging industry as a whole. By sharing costs and promoting industrywide involvement in employee work-life programs, everyone benefits—the companies, the employees, and the kids.

Our franchisees constitute yet another important set of Marriott partners. After a long history of being somewhat shy toward the lodging franchise community, we're thrilled to find so many opportunities today to ally with companies and individuals who want to be part of the Marriott family. Our partnerships with our franchisees really are partnerships; both sides make significant contributions to create and sustain the relationship. Among other things, our franchisees must share our bias for action, long-term vision, and values. They must be willing to live up to the same high standard of customer satisfaction that we expect of ourselves. To help them achieve that goal, we provide franchise properties with the same resources and support that we know from our own experience are critical to succeed, flourish, and grow.

Last but not least among our partners in success are the millions of customers who use our services. We certainly wouldn't exist without the people who choose to stay in our hotels, retire to our senior living centers, dine in our cafeterias, or vacation at our resorts. They've got plenty of alternatives, and we know it!

Like our competitors, our customers keep us hopping. Part of what gets us out of bed in the morning is the search for new ways to keep them happy, earn their loyalty, and win more customers. I'm the first to admit that providing food and shelter doesn't qualify as rocket science, but there have been plenty of things we've pioneered or tweaked over the years in the name of improving customer service.

Some of our more recent innovations have focused on trying to help guests get in and out of our hotels faster and on to the business or pleasure that brought them to us in the first place. One is the in-room video checkout service that we initiated in the early 1980s. By 1986, the service was in use in fifty of our hotels and spread from there. But before in-room video, we instituted Express Checkout that keeps our nighttime associates prowling the halls as they slip a bill under every departing guest's door by 4:00 A.M. Today, customers shouldn't have to go near the front desk on their way out the door.

To improve the experience at the other end of the guest's stay, we unveiled our First Ten program in 1991. The idea was to eliminate the need for guests to stand in line at the front desk. First Ten ended the practice of handing off guests during the crucial first ten minutes after their arrival. Remember the importance of the human touch? When guests first come in the door of a hotel, they're usually exhausted from travel and anxious to get to their rooms and recoup. How their needs are handled during the first few minutes after stepping out of the cab or parking the car forms a lasting impression of our ability to help them pull it all together again. First Ten puts an arriving guest into the hands of just one person, who greets the guest at the door, key in hand, and ushers the newcomer to a room. It's a small touch, but an important one.

One of the most sweeping customer-service innovations we've introduced is our Marriott Rewards frequent traveler program. If you stay at Marriott hotels (and I hope you do), you might already be familiar with one or more of the stand-alone frequent-stay pro- grams associated with our hotel brands.

Our first program—Marriott Honored Guest Awards—was started in 1983 and quickly became the industry leader. Guests at our hotels, resorts, and suites earn points for every visit. These points can then be applied to future room nights, cruises, and other options. We complement Honored Guest Awards with one of the industry's first frequent-flyer programs, Marriott Miles, as well as a special Club Marquis membership for our most frequent guests. When Marriott diversified into other lodging segments in the 1980s, we added Courtyard Club (Courtyard by Marriott) and Insiders Club (Fairfield Inn).

By themselves, each of our frequent-stay programs gave our guests nice incentives to come back to us again and again. But the new Marriott Rewards initiative (rolled out in 1997) combines our separate programs into a single program. Why? Because customers asked for it! By listening to our guests, we learned that many of our customers choose one brand of Marriott hotel for business travel and another when they're on vacation or looking for a luxurious weekend getaway. The Marriott Rewards program allows guests to earn points at almost any property in our system and apply those points to stays at almost any other—regardless of brand. These innovations—Express Checkout, First Ten, Marriott Rewards—were all galvanized by our drive to bring guests back to Marriott. But simply wanting people to come back is no guarantee that good customer service ideas will miraculously appear. The success of our service innovations grows out of two of our most fundamental corporate values: attention to detail and good listening skills. Those cornerstones of our corporate culture—plus millions of paying guests—provide ample inspiration for innovation. The bottom line on partners in success? Never take them for granted. Remember: You exist because of them.

Linguistic Survey of Part 7:

1. Find the suitable English counterparts in the text:

в том же направлении; все заинтересованные; на уровне фирмы; услуги, предоставленные сверх должностных обязанностей; выиграть наугад; приехать в первую очередь ради удовольствия.

2. Make up sentences using gerund after:

to escape, to be worth, to begin, insted of, to have a shot at, to have a knack for, to contribute to, to risk, to require, to avoid, the problem of, to stop, to play a role in, one’s own way of, a gift for, an incentive for, to keep, the practise of.

3. Explain the combinations:

an egalitarian culture (outlook), to crave off-the-charts financial rewards, the fight against “thinking big”, a guide to company acronyms, thanks to the shorthand Marriott-speak, people who epitomise the best aspects, at their home properties, to look for a luxurious weekend getaway.

4. Make up sentences using objects and infinitives after:

to watch, to let, to make, to want, to get, to have, to force.

5. Find the suitable Russian counterparts of:

a big shot, a hotshot,

to go against sb’s grain,

to handle sb with kid gloves,

to hold sb hostage,

to fall prey to sth,

to go the extra mile,

the folks on the front lines,

to be out of the gate,

to keep sb on sb’s toes,