What I Learned Leading Innovation at Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts - Christopher Hunsberger, Appellation

Josiah: Today, Christopher Hunsberger is the co-founder and chief operating officer at Appellation, but earlier in his career, he led product and service innovation at Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts as part of the company's executive leadership team. In this episode, he shares how stepping into this role pushed him beyond his comfort zone, how he built a culture of agility and risk-taking and the key lessons he learned about collaboration across all levels of the organization. From navigating failure to building a stronger culture of innovation, Christopher's insights in this episode offer a powerful roadmap for anyone looking to lead their team into the future. 

[intro]

Christopher: We'd just gone through a CEO transition. Izzy Sharp was the CEO for years, and one of the first people he picked to sort of step in, even though he remained on as the chairman of the board, was a woman by the name of Katie Taylor. And Katie asked a couple of us to step into new roles. At the time, I'm thinking, I'm not sure about this, but I'm trusting those people again, lesson learned earlier, that they are thinking about my best interests. So, I took on the role of overseeing product and innovation in the company. It was a time when Four Seasons, which is about 30-plus years into the history of Four Seasons, was reflecting on, you know, what the next decade or two would look like. And Katie asked me, with her, to lead that challenge, that opportunity within the organization. And it forced me to do many things outside my comfort zone. I always thought of myself as an innovator. I was a very team-oriented innovator, and I had a lot of people I surrounded myself with. Those people enjoyed that journey, although it was sometimes uncomfortable for them because as you're innovating, sometimes you have to learn to fail to get to a better place. But this was a broader role because I was working with many disciplines across the corporate team in Four Seasons, in addition to working with many of the associates that I'd grown up with in the field, out at the properties. This was a two- or three-year initiative that we undertook. But it challenged me because I worked up and down the organization at all different levels. We were really trying to push all the way down to the grassroots at the property level and bring a lot of younger junior associates on. At the same time, I was trying to make sure the rest of the corporate senior leadership team was sort of buying into where Katie and I were going with this. It was a fabulous learning experience. We worked with some great consultants at the time who really opened up our eyes to create a stronger culture of innovation, which I think Four Seasons was always known for and continues to be known for to this day. And it was really rewarding for me to see the people that really bought into it, that understood it, and understood the power of embracing innovation and a culture of innovation. There are a couple of sorts of behaviors that are really important to get the team to embrace. One is the idea of being very nimble. You have to be fluid as you're innovating and you're trying to focus on creating something new and different. And so being very nimble, another word that comes to mind for me that we really try to get people to embrace and understand was being very agile. So nimble and agility go hand in hand, but a little bit different from each other. The risk-taking part is, you know, with measured risk, of course, but being, you know, having the willingness to fail. If you're trying to create something new and different, you rarely get it right the first time out as an innovator. And so there's an evolution that goes along with it. And sometimes, you're trying to kick off this new idea in those first couple of initiatives. Things fall flat on their face, but it's great to step back then and learn from that experience. What could be some of the outcomes of this if we took a new approach or a fresh approach? And then collaboration is really important. I've never thought of myself as the smartest person. I like to think of myself as a contributor, and I love to think of myself as a person who loves to get people together to think about an idea, a challenge, an opportunity, and how we collectively take that on as an opportunity to innovate.