It’s just a couple of days in Torquay, you’ll be fine
This was my attempts to encourage some of my management team before we all headed off to The Grand last Sunday for our annual Departmental and Senior Managers Conference. This is the fourth time we have run this event and since the arrival of our Group HR Manager we General Managers have been taking part rather than leading the groups.
This is a great opportunity for us all to meet up, some of us do get together fairly often but we don’t get to meet up with the guys from our northern hotels that frequently and it is good to keep in touch and to remember we are all part of the same group.
Alan and Jason had some help with this year’s event from some students from South Devon College who were doing their Events Module. They had planned all the activities for us and then facilitated the sessions which were generally much more fun than previous years. The theme for this year was thinking more laterally about solving guests issues and developing our businesses and we certainly had to do that. The one activity that most of us were looking forward to the least was the dance workshop. There are quite a few of us who think we have two left feet and no natural sense of rhythm and we weren’t proved wrong! What we did learn was that with a bit of effort and some good guidance we could do things that we wouldn’t have tried if left to our own devices.
Quite a few photos were taken of the event and they have all been put on our server for general viewing. Andrea did find one picture of me and her Deputy Manager during the blindfolded walk exercise. It looks like we have just been parked in the lobby and left!
As well as all the different exercises we also had a lot of fun, after dinner on the first night a few of us managed to have an impromptu game of pictionary with a flip chart borrowed from the syndicate room next door and some scrap paper. This was fun for us and also for some of the other guests who must have been wondering what an earth we were up to.
The Gala Dinner on the last night was good too, Gareth the new chef did a fantastic job with a confit duck and foie gras terrine to start, a celeriac capuccino to follow and then fillet of lamb which was lovely and pink. To finish us all off we had a hot chocolate fondant - glad we didn’t have to do any more dance classes after all that! Sally, who had run the dance classes, did us a cabaret after dinner with her dance troupe which was a fun way to finish off the conference.
Now we just have to make sure we bring back what we have learnt and put it into practice!
