I went to Jean and asked the same questions.Her vision was to have each guest be completely pleased with the cleanliness of the room and to have the room in perfect shape when guests arrived. I asked how she felt about Maintenance. She said that Marty really didn’t care about her or Housekeeping: from his perspective, they were there  to fix things and she was there to clean up after them. “That really annoys me,” she said, “because we are not here to clean up after Maintenance.We’re here to ensure the comfort of our guests and make sure their rooms are cleaned. The engineers are supposed to clean up after themselves—and they’ve been told that a hundred times. They just don’t care. And they know if they leave a mess, it reflects on Housekeeping, not them.” I then asked her about the scheduling of the rooms for cleaning and the housekeepers.

She provided me with all the details of the tasks.  After my discussions with Marty and Jean, I began to understand that they really had more in common than they thought. So I invited them both back to a meeting. At the meeting I showed and explained to them the Partnership Continuum model and asked if they were interested in working through the model together. They both agreed. So I asked each of them to share their personal vision with the other. After they did so, I asked them to come up with a shared vision they could both agree on. Since they had so much in common, it was easy for them to do. The shared vision they agreed on was this: Each guest would have a clean room in which everything worked properly.

Financial decisions affect everyone. They should not be left entirely to the “experts” in the finance department or among specialist advisers. Financial issues and techniques – such as dynamic cost management, the importance of cash flow and the time value of money – affect all managers with a financial responsibility and are influenced by everyone.

Make financial expertise widely available Every manager in the business should understand the importance of financial management for profitability and success. People need to feel ownership of their part of the process of financial control, to have the information and expertise to make the best financial decisions and to consider all relevant decisions from a financial perspective.