Part 51: Too many bosses spoil the tourism business

Foreign tourists eat ice-cream as they look around Myeongdong in Seoul on May 15. Yonhap

By Jacco Zwetsloot

If it was difficult working for three companies at once, it was downright confusing and stressful to have three direct bosses every day, often singing from different hymn sheets, and sometimes working at odds with each other. It could have been worse, I suppose.

Thankfully Mr. Paek, the boss of Seobu Rental Cars rarely came to Dragon Hill Lodge, and Amanda, the on-site duty manager, rarely gave me any grief. Institutionally, therefore, I was only dealing with the Hotel and Galaxyjean. In practice, however, things were different.

My direct supervisor at Galaxyjean was Mr. Cortez, a retired U.S. army man about eight years my senior. He had spent 18 years in Korea on and off and had seen a lot of the country. However, he spoke no functional Korean and had not really worked in tourism except that tours to the DMZ and JSA were approved by him in his former job in the military.

In fact it was his years of experience there that helped him transition into the Korean tourism industry in the first place: Cortez still had contacts within the UNC. This meant that whenever an extra tour slot for a JSA tour became available, he would become aware of it, and Galaxyjean Tours would be able to snag it for its own customers.

As I explained in a previous blog post, the overhead on these tours was basically just the cost of the fuel, the bus driver and the tour guide, so the margin was very high. Cortez was an energetic and charismatic man, and most of the time we got on well.

Ms Jang, the de facto CEO of Galaxyjean, had directly recruited Cortez to work for her. Her command of English was not great ― as a former English teacher I would class it as intermediate, at best ― so between her broken English and Cortez' almost non-existent Korean, they were unable to really discuss any topic in depth.

This was exacerbated by a secondary problem. To my mind, language speakers are divided into two types: those who are worried about the possibility of misunderstanding and being misunderstood, and those who are not. The former always check and confirm and try to add or ask for further explanations, while the latter, lacking any doubts, plough on regardless, imagining that they have understood perfectly and been understood perfectly. Jang and Cortez fitted into the latter camp.

The direct and deleterious effect of this was that when a message was relayed from Jang to me via Cortez ― whether details about a new marketing campaign, instructions related to reporting, or even a direct order to do something ― inevitably something got lost in translation and transmission. This effect was worsened by Cortez occasionally siding with his team while at other times merely relaying whatever Jang said; sometimes both things happened on the same day.

To make matters worse, Mark Kim, one of the hotel executives with oversight of the Discover Seoul Desk, also had his own opinions and instructions to offer. While technically not my boss, he had got me the job, our desk was in his hotel, and our company was beholden to him for continuance of its concession license.

A Korean-American, Kim spoke Korean but not at native level, so imperfect and imprecise communication was the output of most conversations with Jang. When they discussed among themselves, for example, which tours would be discounted for the following month, or whether children under a certain age would be allowed free tours when accompanied by parents, Kim would relay one message to me, while later I would hear something different from Jang.

Naturally the fact that they had interests that were somewhat in conflict with each other factored in: Jang wanted to maximize her business's profitability, while Kim wanted to maximize hotel guests' satisfaction and return visits first ― increasing revenue from our desk was a distant second.

Moreover, I detected friction between Kim and Cortez. Although both military men, Kim had been an officer and had served less than a decade in the army, while Cortez had been enlisted and had stayed in for more than two decades, seeing active service in several countries.

I doubt they ever had a pleasant encounter with one another, and during my time at the hotel their skepticism of each other grew, to the extent that they would barely speak to each other, choosing to communicate largely through me, thereby compounding the madness.

Confusion reigned with such predictable regularity that they would have been comic if it were not so maddeningly frustrating for me and the Discover Seoul Desk team. It got to the point where I would want to get all three bosses in a room together to try to sort out the truth on a particular matter, but sadly such an opportunity never arose. It troubled me that none of them seemed to notice this communication breakdown, or if they did that they were not troubled by it.

Minutes were rarely taken at meetings between any two of the bosses, and instructions were often given to us at the Discover Seoul Desk in an ad hoc, on-the-fly manner, and tasks and customers kept coming thick and fast, so there was not the scope for confirming and committing to writing all that was said.

Some mornings I would return to work from a day off to find that in my absence that which I had been working on just two days earlier was either scrapped or changed beyond recognition. (Lesson one in business or any kind of collaboration between groups of people: take meticulous minutes.)

The longer I stayed at the hotel, the higher my stress levels grew and the more I wanted to leave. But none of my bosses were prepared to accept that. Cortez in particular felt that I was necessary for the good order of the team, and he used every persuasive tactic he could to convince me to stay. Luckily, I found the perfect excuse.