Horseshoe Bay Resort

Mike McKeown

Through this article, Mike McKeown outlines Horseshoe Bay Resort's Manager In Training (MIT) program, launched to address high turnover and management gaps in hospitality. McKeown details the program’s mentorship, business training, event participation, and project assignments, illustrating its role in developing strong leaders and fostering a culture aligned with the resort’s unique needs and values.

Turnover in the Hospitality industry is typically high. The pandemic and the Great Resignation upended organizations’ teams and decimated the management ranks. The resort where I have worked for the past 19 years has numerous unfilled openings at the line level of management, from Food & Beverage to room operations.

In 2020, our independent, unbranded resort launched our Manager In Training program (MIT) to build strength and retain our high-potential employees. We looked at models throughout the industry and finally concluded that we would need to create our own.

First, we defined the roles that would support the program, which included the Program Sponsor (the executive champion), a Program Manager, an Interview Panel, a Steering Committee and Mentors. We ended up with a program that lasts for a year and pays a $1.00/hour premium to the associates admitted to the program. During the program year, participants are exposed to numerous forms of development.

Mentorship – Each participant is paired with a senior manager willing to serve as a mentor. Throughout the program year, the mentor provides guidance, advice, and leadership knowledge and helps the participant stay on track through the program. Feedback from participants has shown that this is one of the most valuable components of the program. Graduates often maintain this relationship in the future.

Business Classes – Each month, the class meets with the program sponsor and program manager and provides training on an aspect of the resort’s operations. They hear from subject matter experts in Sales & Marketing, Revenue Management, Accounting, Food & Beverage, and Event Management. They also receive training in Project Management, Scheduling, Interpersonal Effectiveness, Discipline & Counseling, Conducting On-the-Job Training and Performance Management.

Event Participation – Class participants must work at significant resort events, including festivals, concerts, and hiring fairs. This exposes them to the expectation that managers step in when considerable events call for many hands. It also increases their visibility to other managers throughout the property, who get to work with them and see their skills and abilities in action.

Resort Projects – The class is assigned 2-3 projects yearly. Project teams have planned all-employee rallies, surveyed the local community on the resort’s position as an employer of choice, planned and executed a fundraising golf tournament for the Associate Relief Fund, and put on a Health and Wellness fair in conjunction with benefits annual open enrollment. These projects require the participants to seek resources, build relationships, research to get the data to back up their proposals, and learn how to work as a functional team.

"The Manager In Training program has built a strong core of future leaders who live and breathe our unique culture, positioning them to drive our resort’s success—whether here or in the broader hospitality industry."

Along the way, the participants learn the critical management skill of providing performance feedback. After receiving training in effective feedback delivery, they get opportunities to evaluate each other throughout the class year, culminating with a final feedback exercise. This evaluation not only gives them practice in sharing positive feedback and opportunities for improvement but also assigns a weighted grade, which is calculated along with their achievement of the other performance metrics: attendance and completion of class projects and assignments. This ensures the program is robust and not every associate reaches the standard to graduate at the end of the year.

Our program has evolved since its inception based on participant feedback, changing business conditions and our learning about how to make it as effective as possible. From the original graduating class of 8 associates in 2020, the program has graduated 21 associates. We saw a substantial increase in enrollment for the 2024 class and are on track to graduate 17 this year.

The most accurate measure of the program’s success is the advancement of the participants. Almost every graduate has been promoted to supervisor or management positions or transferred to roles in different resort operations as they expand their broader knowledge, serving their goals of reaching the department head or general manager someday. Some associates are promoted while they are still in the program. Inevitably, we will lose some graduates to other properties, where the learning and experience they gained in the program will make them desirable candidates. Of course, we want to keep all these high-performing, high-potential associates here, but losing them to promising career opportunities elsewhere is a small price for the benefits we gain.

Now that the program is about to enter its fifth year, we see the benefits. We have a group of line managers who live and breathe our unique culture, understand the complexities of our full-service private member/destination hybrid resort, and have built strong working relationships with each other and other managers and key players throughout the organization. The 2025 class application period has begun, and the initial interest indicates the most significant class size yet!