ATLANTA — The most effective coaches are the ones who learned their game inside and out as players.
That’s the path Leslie Hale has taken to her position as president and CEO of RLJ Lodging Trust. And like any standout athlete in her field, she’s fought for playing time, overcome obstacles and focused on fundamentals along the way.
“I had every single opportunity to be a statistic, whether it was to be a high-school dropout, have a teen pregnancy, get into drugs,” she said, of her upbringing in Los Angeles’ South Central neighborhood. “So I looked for things that had structure or order.”
Hale is not one who often shares her personal story from the stage, but she spoke about her career path, inspiration and leadership traits this year for the Bharat Shah Leadership Speaker Series at the Hunter Hotel Investment Conference.
Structure and Order
Hale found that structure and order first in her family, where she credits her parents as her role models. Her father was in the insurance industry and her mother worked in healthcare and started her own daycare business, which fostered in Hale “an incredible work ethic,” she said. Sports, school and community programs also contributed to the order and structure she craved.
“I had a great family and great faith, but the environment was tough,” she said of the neighborhood. “Many people watched 'Boyz n the Hood'; I lived it. I knew I had to escape it.”
Hale was the first in her family to go to a four-year college, and after visiting several historically black colleges and universities with her dad, she found the place for her — Howard University.
'Succeed In An Extraordinary Way'
“That began a journey for me to find a place and space in my life not where I could succeed, but where I could succeed in an extraordinary way,” she said.
At Howard, Hale found her first love.
“It was finance,” Hale said. “I fell in love with the concept of being able to take a dollar and turn it into two.”
The university also gave Hale the foundation to see herself as a future leader.
“What Howard did for me was give me confidence, and it gave me self-esteem,” she said. “I had never seen that much talent in people of color. Howard changed the way I viewed the world, but more importantly, the way I viewed myself in the world.”
And she also knew that she wasn’t on this path only for herself.
“I wasn’t doing this just for me; I was doing it for my family,” she said. “These places and spaces where I was going were places and spaces they had never been and could never imagine.”
Joining the Team
Hale's first professional role after graduating was at GE, a move she called “one of the best decisions I ever made,” because it gave her foundations in finance and real estate, and also leadership. From there, Hale went back to school — this time to Harvard University’s MBA program.
“For the first full year, I had impostor syndrome,” she said of Harvard. But her successes there led to Goldman Sachs and Toigo fellowships.
Hale's first post-MBA position in Goldman Sachs’ M&A group taught her a critical lesson: “I realized that in investment banking you’re a coach, not really a player. You didn’t live and die with the decisions you made,” she said. “I realized I was too young to be a coach; I wanted to go back and be a player. I wanted to live and die with the decisions that I made.”
So Hale took her game back to GE, this time to the real estate side of the business, an area she missed.
And then she met Tom Baltimore, Jr.
More Playing Time
“I knew within the first five minutes of meeting Tom that I wanted to work for him,” she said.
Now CEO, president and chair of Park Hotels & Resorts, Baltimore was then the co-founder, president and CEO of RLJ Development, the company that would become real estate investment trust RLJ Lodging Trust.
“I lived in New York and RLJ was in Washington, D.C., so I would drive down every Sunday because I knew Tom worked in the office on Sundays,” Hale said. “And I would call him and say, 'Hey, I’m here, let’s talk.'”
And that confidence kicked in: “For me it was a two-way interview,” she said. “If I was going to give up GE, a great organization, I had to do it for something that was amazing. And after working for 11 years at GE, I had a list of things that were important to me, which is why when I met Tom, I knew he was the right person.”
At the top on Hale’s must-have list wasn’t a specific skill or job responsibility. It was people.
“I had realized by then that if you love the job but don’t like the people, you’ll never survive. But if you like the people and the job’s OK, you will survive,” she said.
At this point in the game, Hale’s thoughts turned to strategy. She joined RLJ as director of real estate and finance, a role Baltimore advised her could lead to the chief financial officer position one day.
“I said absolutely not, I have no interest in being a CFO, because in the world that I came from, CFO was more of a back-office role,” she said. “Tom was so disturbed by that, and the next day he came into the office and gave me a list of CEOs who used to be CFOs. So I said OK, let’s have a conversation.”
Taking the Lead
Hale moved through leadership positions at RLJ, to CFO, senior vice president and executive vice president. When Baltimore left in 2016 to join real estate investment trust Park Hotels & Resorts as CEO, an opening appeared at the top at RLJ.
It was an opening at the top that Hale didn’t get, at first.
“I never wanted to be a CEO,” she said. “I would have worked with Tom for as long as he would have me, but he left and he created an opportunity — and I didn’t get the job first. Ross Bierkan did. But I couldn’t let that derail me.”
Instead, she observed and participated.
“It was the best thing that happened because I was able to watch from a front-row seat to see somebody take on a role and teach myself what I would do if I got the opportunity. And when the opportunity came, I was a far better executive because I went through that,” she said.
When Hale took on the president and CEO role in 2018, she assumed that mantle of leadership responsibility that sets great coaches apart.
“The thing that kept me going, even though sometimes I wasn’t sure whether I could do it, was a sense of responsibility,” she said. “If not me, then who? A lot of people of color who attend HBCUs self-select out. Whether it’s women or minorities, the further you go up, there are fewer of us. So I always felt that when an opportunity presented itself, I needed to do it so we could demonstrate we were capable of doing it and can open up doors for more of us.”
As of 2023, the Bethesda, Maryland-based RLJ owned 96 hotels with approximately 21,200 rooms. In 2023, the company notched total revenue of $1.3 billion.
Now Hale opens doors for people in the industry the way she always has for people around her.
“I have never left a conference without looking at giving somebody an internship, or opportunity or access to something because I’m always trying to think about how to bring more with me, the same way I always brought my family with me,” she said. “It’s about opening doors when they appear closed. It’s about advocating for people when they don’t even know that you’re advocating for them. That’s what this has given me the opportunity to do.”
Hale acknowledges the “firsts” that her role involves — first Black woman to lead a REIT is one notable accomplishment — but she’s always said the most important thing is that she’s not the “only” in those roles.
What's equally important to Hale is that her job is not an “only” as well. She’s a wife, a mother of four children and a sister to four siblings. Her sister’s death from lupus spurred her family’s work with the Lupus Foundation of America, an activity she said helps lend purpose.
“People ask me how I spend my time when I’m not working, and the thing that gives me joy is when my family is happy,” she said. “To take the opportunity, time and resources that [my husband and I] have to make sure other people have an amazing life is something we’ve tried to do with our family.”
She also recognizes the “particularly unique journey as a female executive” she carries out. She shared a story of a proud moment when her daughter brought home a school exercise that asked the students to identify who demonstrates leadership in the household.
“She had one word there: Mom,” Hale said. “And I realized I was doing something right.”
That family responsibility runs deep in Hale.
“I am the granddaughter of a sharecropper, and he wanted a better life for his family,” she said. “The irony is that at that time in society, he couldn’t have stayed in a hotel. And so for me to be here today is very humbling.”