LOS ANGELES — How a hotel company’s leaders act and elevate their employees are key factors in the battle for talent, executives said.
Speaking during a leadership and empowerment panel at the 2026 Americas Lodging Investment Summit, executives at hotel brand, ownership and management companies shared their perspectives on how they help their team members grow in their respective roles.
Hospitality is a team sport, and everybody is working in service to the business and its mission, Rockbridge CEO Jimmy Merkel said. As a company scales, it needs strong leaders who are empowered, but that requires clarity on their role and responsibilities.
“Our purpose as a business is to cultivate value and enrich lives,” he said. “So every decision that we make is around: Are we cultivating value? That's not just about outcomes in the properties. Are we cultivating value in our team members? Are we cultivating value in teams? Are we re-enriching lives of our team members and of our guests?”
As the world changes, leaders have to synthesize that information and create a strategy and provide clarity, Merkel said. People want clarity, to believe in the mission. Providing that will help attract the best talent. Building that culture and living it every day is what will hold on to that talent.
“Empowerment is when it's in the fourth quarter and the quarterback sees a different play because of the defense, and they audible and have good judgment,” he said. “That doesn't just happen. That comes from hours and hours and hours of preparation.”
When people understand the mission and are prepared, management needs to trust and empower them to use their best judgment in the moment, he said.
HEI Hotels & Resorts Managing Partner and CEO Anthony Rutledge said he agreed with Merkel about the need to enrich lives. Executives can sit on panels and talk about return on investment, yields and real revenue per available room versus nominal, but they’re also cognizant about why their employees, at all levels, are doing what they do.
“They’re not doing it because of owners,” he said. “They’re not doing it because of Marriott and all these sexy brands. They’re doing it on behalf of their families, on behalf of their loved ones. We’re trying, to the best of our ability, to make them more valuable — forever — so they can earn more.”
The biggest challenge in the labor market isn’t international J-1, H-1B and H-2B visa employees, Rutledge said. Instead, it’s keeping employees and developing them along a career, paying them more and giving them a sense of purpose while accepting that as CEOs, it’s lonely at the top.
“It should be lonely at the top,” he said. “You should be celebrating everybody and keep them for the long haul.”
Attracting people to a company is “pretty easy,” said Greg Juceam, president and CEO of Extended Stay America. Sometimes it’s because a person knows the brand, other times it’s because they have a friend who already works there. It can be any number of reasons. When times are tough, and the economy is in a difficult part of the cycle, that’s when relationships matter.
“I think really the test of a good leader is not bringing people to the company,” he said. “It's when the chips are down, and you need people to stay and perform — that's where all the relationship-building really matters. When you've recruited them to the company, and you learn what matters to them because they took that job for their own reasons, not for yours.”
When leaders have that moment when they can reward their employees to help them in their career paths or get them to the next level, that’s crucial, Juceam said.
When it comes to employee empowerment, Stonebridge Companies President and CEO Rob Smith said he’s not a fan of guardrails because otherwise it’s not really empowerment. In the past, he’s been in situations in which a hotel’s general manager is told they’re empowered and can offer certain things to guests.
“That's not empowerment, in my opinion,” he said. “A true manager fully empowers the associate, and then has a Monday morning quarterback [session] where they come back and say, ‘Did you have to comp the whole banquet because there was a piece of moldy bread in the buffet?’ It's a learning environment.”
As long as the staff remains stable and there isn’t a lot of turnover, a culture of empowerment eventually evolves, Smith said. The problem comes from having too much turnover, which prevents the culture from being established. That situation may call for guardrails, but he said he tries to avoid that.
“When I was in the Caribbean as a [general manager] and we rolled out empowerment, the managers were very upset,” he said. ‘They were like, ‘Oh, we don't want empowerment.’ Well, why? ‘Well, pretty soon the employees are going to be acting like managers.’ Well, that's what we want, right? Empowerment really, really turns upside down the hierarchy, but I think it's the ultimate goal.”
When there are more layers in management, the hotel guests are more worldly and the employees are largely college educated, companies can empower the employees a lot, Juceam said. Management can tell the front-desk employees what the end goal is and provide some guardrails, and the employees can figure it out. If there’s a mistake, the layers of management can correct the course.
“Nothing we’re doing at hotels is brain surgery,” he said. “There’s no permanent damage.”
The bigger hotels can do this, but the chain scale matters here, he said. When there aren’t layers of management, when there’s only a few people at the property and the standard operating procedures and expectations aren’t clear, that’s when things can break down. If the general managers and front-desk associates are doing whatever they like, they’ll lose the brand consistency.
“It doesn't mean we don't empower,” Juceam said. “It just means that the band that we can provide is narrower and that the [standard operating procedures] need to be more clear for everybody.”
Standard operating procedures are absolutely necessary for all hotels, from economy through luxury, said Gilda Perez-Alvarado, chief strategy officer and CEO of Orient Express at Accor. The best guardrail for people is answering the question of "why."
“People need to know why we’re doing something,” she said. “Any situation can come and be present in front of you. If you know exactly why you’re doing it, again going back to the mission, then you will know how to act. That’s the best, I would say, guardrail we have.”
The hotel industry needs to change and evolve the way it looks at structures and corporations, Perez-Alvarado said. Companies need to hire for skill, and they need to continue to improve their employees skills.
“We cannot hire for a specific function,” she said. “It’s a skill set. The environment is very uncertain. We need to evolve. The pandemic gave us an opportunity to rethink our operating structure, business model. We’ll have more and more disruptors coming in. There are better ways of doing things.”