Lessons from Running Hotels.com

From your time running Hotels.com, what does leadership mean to you?

That’s a good question. I think, from my perspective, I would answer that in a multi-faceted way. One is, leadership starts with providing the direction for a company and getting people to align to that direction. In my past, what I’ve always tried to do is, try to understand what our opportunities are, as a leader. Doing a little bit of research strategy session, to figure that out and then getting people aligned or having that good debate or discussion, with diversity on that leadership team, to then say, here’s where we’re going to go, from an overall direction perspective.

Then once you have the direction and alignment, as a leadership team, then it’s cascading that down to the rest of the organization. Heavy communication, that comes in the form of, how do you get things done. I’m a big believer in having very strong core values that people can adhere to, in how they go about doing stuff. If you have the right strategy, right direction, with good core values, then it becomes how you execute. From an execution perspective, I love OKRs, objectives and key results, especially in an internet and technology space. Things change so fast that it’s hard to say, here’s what our objectives are for the entire year. It’s more like, what’s most important for us to get done this quarter. Establishing that direction and measuring yourself, at the end of the quarter and then looking at what the next quarter looks like.

I’m a big believer in servant leadership, which is, I’m going to be right there, with the team, doing everything I can, remove obstacles, because I’m part of making this happen. I don’t believe in somebody sitting in an ivory tower and dictating down. I love having good teams that have good direction, good alignment, good communication. I think those are all very important and that’s what I try to do, as an overall leader.

How did you communicate with such a global employee base, at Hotels.com?

That’s one of the biggest challenges but, as we’ve learned with Coronavirus, we were very early adopters of Zoom technology and video teleconferencing was a big part of what we did. I would send out regular communication to the team, in the form of emails. We would do, at least monthly, all hands meetings, through VTC, where we had every office join us. Then I’d have a senior leadership team meeting every couple of weeks, to keep people aligned and be able to cascade down the messaging. Then on a quarterly basis, I would bring in all my leaders, from around the world, at the very top level, the GMs of LATAM, Asia, US, together, to think about the strategy, think about the OKRs for the next quarter and get aligned and get it ready to go and get the teams going.

Those are the main mechanisms for keeping things moving in the right direction and communications out to the field happening.

How would you sum up what you’ve learned about leadership, from your time running Hotels.com? is there anything that would tell young leaders today to really focus on?