Being The "Chief Recruiting Officer" - Sloan Dean, Remington Hospitality

Your ability to provide hospitality to others really depends on the people you have within your organization, and this becomes especially important as you lead a large organization. Today, you're going to learn from Remington Hospitality CEO, Sloan Dean, about how he thinks about recruiting and empowering leaders within his organization. You told Dana at Hotel News Now, a few months ago, recruiting is your number one. I think you're bringing it to the table being a chief recruiting officer, so to speak, and I was talking to Rich, running Food and Beverage for you, and he said one of the most attractive things and why he took the job was the culture that he sensed in talking with you, and so I guess my question for you is how do you think about recruiting, especially on the executive level?

Yeah, what I look for is someone that, just how I'm talking about how passionate and emotional I am about the storytelling of where passionate people thrive is someone, whatever their leadership position, is that they're going to do the same thing for their department. So if you talk to Raul Moronta, who's our Chief Commercial Officer, who's been with us for a couple of years, he has the same mentality around everything commercial. The same with Richard Garcia, who's the head of beverage and food we call it now B&F, not F&B and the same with Chris Green, who joined us, who's the CEO of Chesapeake, now our president. You see it in the storytelling and what has happened. Rich is a great example that when in 2018, food and Beverage was our biggest weakness, fast forward to today. We win so many management deals because of Rich and his team and what he's done. And you go and get a best in class talent person, but they have to be that unique culture identifier and that's where what I talked about in the prior article of being a Chief Recruiting Officer you recruit that person that Richard Garcia or that Raul Maranta, or that Chris Green or Amanda Kennedy that they will be the CEO of that department and, frankly, I just have to get out of their way. I mean, I just continue to advocate for them in the budget process for resources, come in and advocate for them in certain scenarios, but they are many CEOs and you just get out of their way and they're better at their business than I am. I will never be a Food and Beverage leader like Rich. That's why I hired Rich and you let them become basically many CEOs. Now what I have found is that the reason people micro manage is they think they can do everything better than the people below them, and it's part ego. But in some cases they're right, because the reason they got promoted the reason the GM is the VP of operations is because they were a better GM than all the GMs that report to them. But unfortunately you can't do the job of 10 or 12 GMs and so you get to this point where you want to micro manage because you did the job better, but you can't let go. What's? Why can't you not let go? Because it's self identity, it's ego, and so you almost have to take this. Hey, let me just share my wealth of knowledge type perspective. And we look for that in recruiting. It's almost like in a rich scenario when I'm interviewing it is. You know, tell me a success you had with the company and how you got that? By leading a team, not individual projects or individual results. You know I almost never asked for individual results. I'm always interviewing for project work, how you work with teams and you know when you get those people. You see it. I mean you've talked to Rich. I mean he's an inspiring guy. You just get out of his way and he'll do it all.

Well, he told me that he said the reason he joined Remington was that he didn't feel smothered and he felt like that was something that he had felt in other places he had worked, and so, it seems, by operating this way, you're able to attract this top tier of talent that probably wouldn't work somewhere else.