ORLANDO, Florida — When Lori Kiel was early in her career in hotel revenue management, she would use her lack of an Ivy League education and the fact she started at a community college as a reason to look down on herself.
Now the chief commercial officer for the Kessler Collection, Kiel realizes that her background is a strength, not a weakness.
"I was always ashamed of my education," she said while speaking on the "View from the Top" panel at HSMAI's 2022 Revenue Optimization Conference Americas. "I always doubted that it wasn't as good as the person sitting next to me that went to Cornell, or the person that went to FSU or UCF. I just felt less than, and it was only as I got into my 30s and really started to hear my own voice that I realized that my education served me better than theirs did because I didn't pay as much but I could absolutely hold my own in those boardrooms."
Kiel added that her experience ties back to one of the biggest mistakes she sees among young professions in the industry, which boils down to "not owning it."
"You have to own that you are the expert, you were hired for a reason," she said. "So you should have a voice, and you should speak what you know and be silent when you don't."
On her team at Kessler, Kiel expects everyone to be "the CEOs of their discipline," and this is especially important for decision-making related to specific hotels or regions.
"If you're the area director of revenue management, you know [your area] better than I do," Kiel said.
That confidence can be a two-way street, though, and Kiel said the pandemic has taught her to have more faith in her team and to "allow them to fail" because of that added level of trust.
"I've learned that I couldn't have gotten here if I constantly had people getting in front of me to expel their wisdom on me," she said. "It was through my trial and error that I was able to have those fail fast moments."
In addition to building that sense of confidence and belief, Aimbridge's Executive Vice President of Commercial and Revenue Strategy Andrew Rubinacci stressed the need for young hotel industry leaders to learn how to be flexible in their thinking.
"Earlier in my career, I used to come up with a way forward and say, 'OK, this is the right way to do it,'" he said. "To this date, I think some of the things we've tried to do are still the right way, but if the industry goes in a different direction — Anyone who works for me has heard the saying 'You're all alone in Rightsville.' So, you can be right, but if you're standing there all by yourself, it doesn't do you any good. You've got to move on; you've got to let go."
Dawn Gallagher, chief commercial officer of Crescent Hotels and Resorts, said the best thing for people early in their careers to do is seek out and work for great leaders they can emulate as they look to move into leadership roles themselves.
Gallagher added one of the biggest mistakes she often sees young hoteliers making is jumping ship from a work situation that is helping them to develop for a better title or salary but may be a worse work environment.
"The company you work for is really important — the values the company brings are really important," she said. "And when you're good, the money will come."
Rubinacci said one of the biggest mistakes he sees among people looking to climb the corporate ladder is them feeling the need to develop a wider array of skills "to make them more valuable."
"But as you go further and further in an organization, it really becomes about leadership and vision and working through people and getting everyone on the same page, which is not the same thing as saying 'Hey, I know how to do this thing more,'" he said.
During the panel, all the participants wore clothes focused on empowering women, and Gallagher said it's past due time for women in the hotel industry to get a better shot at leadership and growth in the hotel industry because there are many women who have already earned that consideration.
"So shame on the companies that haven't invested in women because they're losing out and they're not as good as the companies that figured that out," she said.