Southern Sun Offshore MD Richard Weilers explains why testing potential employees’ emotional intelligence is crucial to building a strong and successful business.
One would expect the managing director of Southern Sun Offshore — a man responsible for nine hotels in the Middle East and Africa and actively seeking new properties via a very strategic route — to be squirrelled away in an office guarded by an eager secretary.
But breaking the norm, Richard Weiler’s ‘office’ — a table, complete with laptop and blackberry — is located in a corner of Mokarama Café at Al Manzil hotel in Dubai.
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Weilers apparently has a rather swish office on Sheikh Zayed Road, but he chooses to run Southern Sun’s offshore business from inside Al Manzil, one of the group’s two four-star deluxe properties in Downtown Dubai.
This is not because he is addicted to Mokarama’s fabulous cakes, or out of an urge to spy on his team, but because Weilers says that he finds he works best when he is surrounded by the very carefully selected Southern Sun team.
“One of the reasons I actually operate my office out of one of the hotels — you saw my desk — is because I am so stimulated by the staff that are here,” says Weilers.
“One of the things we measure is people’s happiness and optimism. And when you’re in a tourism related product those are two very important products and hence the reason why I feel I actually perform my job better surrounded by people who are optimistic and happy.”
These positive personality attributes are ensured by a rigorous recruitment process that Weilers spearheaded with Southern Sun’s offshore properties. It is this, he says, that has enabled the success of the Dubai hotels — Qamardeen and the aforementioned Al Manzil, currently ranked five out of 391 hotels in Dubai and Dubai’s number one hotel for business on TripAdvisor.
“I always say it is not by accident but by design,” says Weilers. “We work very hard at that.
“When we viewed [Qamardeen and Al Manzil] as they were being built, we knew that they would not be iconic but that they would be very, very good hotels. But our philosophy is based around people, So we adopted a specific strategy in these two hotels that we operate of how we recruit and select our people.
The first thing is we don’t allow any nationality to dominate another nationality. Otherwise you’re fighting the dominant numbers in terms of culture etc, and it’s hard to change that,” explains Weilers.
“The second thing we do with anybody who joins us — we are obsessed with them meeting what I call our attitudinal barometer. So everyone gets tested for the EQI, the Emotional Quotient Inventory. So it’s a formal exam, they have to do about 131 questions. We send it off to a laboratory, it’s all done online and then all comes back to us before anybody joins us.
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