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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.

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.

“Before we look at experience we want to make sure that you are emotionally aligned with us. When I say it is not by accident but by design, I have never worked with better people in my career than I have in Dubai,” says Weilers.

This is a different approach to the company’s traditional recruitment in its home country South Africa, where Weilers began his career with Southern Sun 34 years ago and where the majority of staff are nationals. But following the success of recruitment in Dubai, the EQI is being rolled out across the hotels, which Weilers explains will benefit new markets such as Saudi Arabia.

“I am also building a hotel in Saudi Arabia in Jeddah and I know that the Saudisation programme means that I’ve got to employ lots of Saudi nationals and I have absolutely no problem with that,” says Weilers, whether the target for nationalisation is “25% or 100%”.

“I believe every nation has emotionally attuned people, you’ve just got to find them and bring them into your business model. We’ve just opened a hotel in Nigeria and it is now regarded as the best hotel in Lagos for 2009 [by the Nigerian Hospitality Excellence Awards]. We did the same process there using the EQI and evaluating of people and we’ve got great people working with us,” asserts Weilers.

Expanding on the growth plans of the offshore business — which Weilers set up five years after heading up Southern Sun’s operations in South Africa, where there are 80 hotels — he reveals that this too follows a very strategic approach.
“Our strategy is to work within regions where we can get some critical mass, so we’re not looking at going into regions where we can’t grow our hotels by more than one because we also have a very branded strategy as a group.

“That way, you create relevance in a market and you have the right infrastructure. At the end of the day, management contracts are about logistics, and the further apart and the more you stretch your logistics, the less of service one can be to the product and to your management that are in there. We are very clear that when we go into a region we create relevance within that region and we are highly competitive in the region we go into,” explains Weilers.

Currently, there are nine Southern Sun hotels operating in Africa and the Middle East — two in the Seychelles, two in Dubai, and one each in Nigeria, Kenya, Mozambique and Tanzania. Upcoming properties include a 350-room hotel in Abu Dhabi, owned by United Group, scheduled to open end 2012/early 2013, and a 390-room and serviced apartments in Jeddah.

“We are busy at quite advanced stages looking at two opportunities in Oman. We are looking at Doha, and looking at King Abdullah City, which is 100km outside of Jeddah. We’ve signed a second management contract in Nigeria in Lagos,” says Weilers.

“Our first growth strategies are in those areas and we’re at very advanced discussions in Tripoli in Libya. I must say that I was extremely impressed with Tripoli — it’s the most fascinating city and it is going through quite a big transformation. It’s one the cleanest cities I’ve seen in Africa for a long time, it’s really incredible, there are very friendly people there, and they’re aligning themselves now to a new growth phase.

It’s one of the richest countries per capita in Africa, so they have very good natural resources that are actually part of the economy and they’re going to spend it wisely into infrastructure and to sustain business and tourism in the future,” he adds.

In addition to seeking out new contracts in these markets, Southern Sun has signed a master agreement with Emaar — owner of the two Dubai hotels — to manage future Emaar four-star deluxe properties following the performance of the flagships.

So, as Southern Sun in South Africa enjoys one of its most “incredible months” following the World Cup, Southern Sun Offshore looks set to continue its own strategic success story, helped along by possibly the happiest staff in the sector.