Galactic Group Performance

From 2010–2019 I was the hotel manager at three very different large convention hotels. My journey led me from a resource‑rich convention/resort complex to an under‑nourished downtown convention hotel. Like Goldilocks, I was grateful to find “just right” in the middle of those two experiences. That middle was the Sheraton Dallas, a downtown convention hotel where I spent three years. Those years became a zenith of performance, proven by two of the highest revenue years in the hotel’s history. More importantly, it was a home where silos and politics were not acceptable — a place where collaboration could actually shine.

In today’s post‑COVID world, sufficient staffing is a challenge. In my final hotel, even before COVID, staffing was a challenge. I left Dallas thinking I could simply transplant many of our best practices in group planning and collaboration. Those ambitions withered under the realities of that hotel’s leadership.

I still believe in the Sheraton Dallas galaxy of possibilities — and I deeply relate to leaders whose resources and support are limited. Galaxy, the artwork, reminds me that even when the sky feels dark, small, intentional acts of support can still become stars.

Why This Matters

In a convention hotel, group business is the galaxy everything orbits around. When leaders invest in planning, communication, and shared ownership, even the most complex groups can become sources of joy, loyalty, and long‑term revenue. When they don’t, the same groups can drain energy, erode trust, and leave everyone feeling alone in the dark.

This is a story about how one “dreaded” group became a bright constellation of possibility — and what any leader can borrow from that experience.

Case Study: AnimeFest - From Dreaded to Delighted

I began my journey at the Sheraton Dallas in June 2015. Almost immediately, I started hearing about the annual AnimeFest held in August/September. The universal tone was disdain for this cosplay, high‑density group.

For four nights, hobbits, warriors, Pokémon, and countless other characters transformed the hotel into an other‑worldly space. AnimeFest had been held at the Sheraton Dallas since 2012 and was booked through 2020. Historically, attendees were multiple‑occupancy and budget‑conscious. They might sleep in the lobbies, use skates, or tape signs up on walls and doors.

We began by setting clear guidelines and expectations with the meeting organizer. Boundaries were one coil in the Galaxy; attitude would be another.

My sister has been a “Trekkie” for 50 years and attends “Cons” all over the country. I understood how much time, energy, and enthusiasm these guests invest in costumes and participation. AnimeFest also arrived during a low‑occupancy period and was important to the hotel’s financial health.

So I began a campaign to change our team’s attitude about this event. We were going to share in the unmitigated joy of the attendees. 

• We encouraged our Front Office staff to dress in costume and welcome guests with genuine enthusiasm.

• We set up a special registration area for non‑anime guests, with letters explaining what to expect, and blocked them in a separate area of the hotel.

• We assigned lobby ambassadors — leaders from all hotel areas — to support the lobby during peak arrival.

As hotel manager, I took over 100 photos of staff members from all areas with costumed attendees and emailed them to all associates. These photos were also displayed on lobby monitors to visually reinforce that our associates welcomed these guests. By 2017, the housekeeping department created an incentive for the best selfie taken with a costumed guest. They received over 200 photo submissions.

We played an anime soundtrack in the lobby during the weekend. We placed extra trash bags in each guest room with a note from housekeeping. We added disposable cardboard trash receptacles on each floor to handle the historical overflow. In anticipation, we prepared 100 roll‑aways and extra linen.

Then we did something that turned all of this from “one‑off effort” into a repeatable star map. We documented our plans and results in a single 22‑page plan. That plan became the basis for the next year’s plan, so institutional knowledge would not be lost with leadership changes. It covered:

• Arrival experience

• Trash removal and dumpster pulls

• Housekeeping services

• Parking, security, and police support

• Budget‑friendly dining options (including $5 slices of pizza ordered from Domino’s and served by our staff)

• Past arrival patterns and guest survey comments

• IT coverage

• Manager On Duty notes from prior stays

• Prior and projected business volumes

Once the event was over, operations leaders reviewed their plans, identified areas for improvement, and updated all actual business volumes and timing in the document. Each year, we added another coil of learning.

Leader takeaway: 

If a group is “dreaded,” ask: What would it take to turn this into a source of joy for guests and associates? Then capture what works in a living document so the learning doesn’t vanish with one leader.

Guest Satisfaction: Measuring the Shift

The results spoke clearly:

• Likelihood to recommend:

• 2014: 48.1%

• 2017: 63.4%

Check‑in – Friendly welcome:

• 2014: 40.4%

• 2017: 86.6%

Happy guests create happy associates, and what was once a dreaded weekend became a source of pride. This does not happen without a plan, collaboration, and leadership from the top that communicates and recognizes positive behaviors.

Be ready, and be happy.

Leader takeaway:

Don’t rely on “we survived” as your metric. Choose a few simple measures (like check‑in friendliness) and track them year over year so your team can see how their efforts light up the sky.

A Prime Directive - Improve the Group Experience

Every leader and associate in a convention hotel — especially one with over 1,800 rooms and 230,000 square feet of meeting space — understands how mission‑critical group business is.

Many hotel folks talk about “selling the dream” and “servicing the nightmare.” Sales people sell into the future — sometimes five years out and often for multi‑year repeat business.

To bridge that gap, we focused on a few repeatable practices:

• Detailed, written plans for key groups

• Open communication across departments

• Constant training and refreshers

• Clear expectations about who owns what

• Every associate was reminded that they played a critical role in the sales process.

• Our combined actions today built sales for tomorrow.

Leader takeaway:

Ask yourself: If a key group returned in three years, would our knowledge live in people’s memories — or in a plan anyone could pick up and use?

The "Collabratory" (Collaboration + Experimentation)

One of my most satisfying professional experiences was partnering with the Sheraton Dallas General Manager and Executive Committee to build a true culture of trust, collaboration, innovation, celebration, and consistency.

We called our approach the “collabratory” and had fun exploring new ideas. For me, improving performance by encouraging leaders to take chances — and then proving their voices mattered — sent me to the stars.

Leader takeaway:

Create safe experiments. Name them. Celebrate them. When people see that thoughtful risks are noticed and not punished, they add their own stars to the galaxy.

Associate Engagement: What the Data Said

Associate Engagement Survey Results

We encouraged teams to collaborate across Operations, Six Sigma, IT, Sales, and Event Services to not only mitigate pain points, but more importantly, to create arrival experiences that supported brand ideals such as “GO BEYOND” for meeting planners, guests, and associates. This meant:

• Demonstrating the full continuum of our service commitment and training

• Using data‑driven planning

• Acting in ways that brought other key brand ideals to life: Ambitious Memorable Experiences and our spirit of Heart and Empowerment

Leader takeaway:

When you connect daily actions to clear ideals — and show people the data — they can see how their work contributes to something bigger than a single shift.

Knowing What is on the Horizon

Have you ever lamented, “If I had only known…”?

For example: learning about a sold‑out, city‑wide, 11‑day, quad‑occupancy girls’ volleyball tournament — with rolling waves of arrivals and departures — two days before arrival? True story, experienced 20 days after I began my final hotel manager position. Ah… but that is another yarn.

At the Sheraton Dallas, we wanted fewer “if only we’d known” moments. To prepare for foreseeable contingencies, we instituted the 90‑Day Outlook Meeting.

This monthly leadership meeting was seen as a valuable investment of time and energy by the general manager and hotel manager. Without that support from the top, the meeting could easily have dissolved into “just another calendar review.”

Every month, about 25 leaders — from parking, Six Sigma, culinary, banquets, restaurants, front office, housekeeping, engineering, club lounge, sales, and more — gathered to plan for success.

Leaders identified:

• Special group needs and expectations

• Historical operations and guest data

• Pain points (such as heavy arrivals after sold-out nights)

• Arrival and departure patterns

• Other special considerations

The meeting provided a rolling 30‑, 60‑, and 90‑day calendar and emphasized collaboration and information sharing. It created trust, opened communication, and became the foundation for successful action plans. It was our version of a crystal ball.

Leader takeaway:

You don’t need a perfect forecast. You need a regular, cross‑functional conversation where people can say, “Here’s what’s coming, and here’s what we’ll need.”

Turning Knowledge into a Plan

These planning tools — and the efforts of top‑performing event and operations teams — helped propel the 2017 event satisfaction survey results to score above brand in 26 categories.

Our rhythms looked like this:

• Two weeks before each month, a calendar was distributed noting group arrivals and departures and highlighting sold‑out days.

• Every week, an 11‑day forecast was distributed by Revenue Management.

• Every week, Event Management distributed the Weekly Resume Review Report, noting event covers by date, with group names and event manager names.

The Sheraton Dallas event, banquet, and group housing teams were top‑notch professionals. One memorable group generated:

• 17 full ballroom turns in four days (across four ballrooms)

• 30,494 meal covers served

• 1,130 event orders produced, with 98 pages of change‑log items (an average of 14 changes per page, totaling 1,372 changes)

• 8 different room blocks, followed by 101 emails with 46 email changes, totaling 4,646 reservation changes

Our Front Office team was just as focused on delivering a great experience. Every group was assigned a leader and supervisor who created a mini‑plan. Major groups were assigned one month ahead.

This helped identify and complete:

• Organized tasks to prepare for arrival and departure

• Delegated tasks to other leaders

• Innovative and creative solutions to ensure the group arrival would GO BEYOND expectations — and be enjoyable for guests and associates

Nothing speaks louder to meeting planners, guests, and associates than chaos at the front desk. To prevent that, the pre‑arrival plan and group information were placed in a pamphlet‑style document and distributed to team members for easy reference and shift‑meeting discussion. Once the template was developed, the group owner simply filled in the details.

After each group departed, we added graphs showing arrivals and departures by time. Those visuals became another star in our planning galaxy when groups returned.

Leader takeaway: 

Templates and written plans are not bureaucracy ; they are memory. Build simple, reusable formats so your best thinking doesn’t disappear when people move on.

A Texas Welcome

One of the most creative and fun arrival experiences designed by the Front Office team was A Texas Welcome. It included:

• Country music playing during arrival

• Front Office staff wearing flannel shirts under their uniform jackets, with cowboy hats and bandannas

• Red, white, and blue lights behind the desk

• A lobby ambassador in an inflatable bull‑riding costume welcoming guests

• A large‑screen TV near the arrival queue playing black‑and‑white cowboy films (volume off)

Guests rated the check‑in experience for A Texas Welcome 10 points above the brand average and helped propel the Sheraton Dallas’ rating 2 points above brand average that year.

Leader takeaway:

Once the basics are solid, give your teams permission to add a little theater. A well‑planned “extra” can turn a routine arrival into a story guests tell for years.

Bringing It Back to Galaxy

Galactic Group Performance reminds me that great group experiences don’t happen by accident. They are co‑created by leaders who share information freely, honor every role, and plan in enough detail that joy has room to appear. When we lead this way, we don’t just manage events — we build a galaxy of gratitude that guests and associates can feel.

Galaxy, the artwork, was born from many small coils of attention and care. In the same way, these practices — one meeting, one template, one joyful experiment at a time — become the stars that help our teams navigate complexity with courage, creativity, and heart.