Heather Balsley, Chief Commercial & Marketing Officer, IHG Hotels & Resorts, intvwd by Lan Elliott

Thanks, Lan. Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, definitely. Look, like many people, I did not start my career in hospitality, but once I joined IHG I fell in love with this business, our culture, the impact that we have in the communities in which we operate, honestly the complexity of this business. And that's actually where I've been so fortunate to have had the opportunity to move across a number of different areas within IHG and just learn so much in doing it. So for me, if I reflect on my career, those inflection points were moments of significant change. Coming out of undergrad, I worked for a boutique management consultancy, and it was a phenomenal training ground. I thought that's what I would do for my career. Then after business school, IHG was my first client. And I had this moment in my career—it was very personally important—where one of my leaders really pushed me to ask someone at IHG for a job. I had never really put myself out on a limb like that. It was one of those moments of fear but then phenomenal reward from taking a risk, and that was a really important moment for me that I reflect on a lot when I'm thinking about, should I say this or should I ask for this. That was really an important milestone for me. A few of the others: one was my very first brand role at IHG. I joined IHG in corporate strategy, always loved brands and marketing and the experiences we create through those functions. A mentor offered me a role leading the Holiday Inn brand family in the Americas region. It was the first job I had that I had not previously done the job of my team, if you know what I mean. There were people on my team who knew much more about hotels and marketing and branding, and it taught me how to lead in a very different way—how do you respect and enable the unique skills and competencies of your team but add value in a different way, bring your strengths to the table and really collaborate and lead through other leaders versus directing. So that was a really big milestone for me. And then the last one was my last role—another one of those take-a-leap moments where Keith Barr, the previous CEO of IHG, asked me to consider taking on responsibility for loyalty and partnerships. It wasn't something I saw in my career path, it wasn't something I had really considered. It was an inflection point because it taught me a whole different side of this business. I've learned so much about everything from the financial complexities of running a loyalty program and a co-brand business all the way through to the technology systems that enable execution of our programs, and just built a very different and new network within IHG. It's something that has really pushed me to think about leadership and talent development more broadly because I learned so much—I just didn't know what I didn't know. I kind of wish somebody had pushed me out of the nest a little sooner into a different function. So those are probably the three big inflection points. Your second question was around factors that contributed to that journey. Honestly, one of them is definitely some amazing mentors—leaders who believed in me before I really believed in myself and who encouraged me to take some of those leaps. For me, those mentors have always been people who I actually was working very closely with at the time and who helped me think about what that next step should be. So that was a really important factor. And then for me personally, I'm just a really intellectually curious person. I don't stay in my swim lanes and I do my best to share views and opinions without stepping on toes. But I actually think that the reason I've worked in different areas of the business and moved around a decent amount is because I'm always asking questions outside of my core function and trying to connect those dots. That's something I strive to do, that I encourage in my team, and that I think has really helped drive my career. And I guess the last thing, because I'm a pretty driven person—I work hard, I really love to have a big impact on the business—you have to take breaks. I'm pretty disciplined about after a big deliverable or a big meeting, take a day or two and just take a breath. I'm pretty relentless about certain times of day or times of the week that I need to be with my family. And I did actually take time out from working for a bit of time when my daughters were young. I'm really grateful that I took that time to recharge and reflect because I think that's what's kept me engaged and motivated through that 17-year career at IHG.

Yes, definitely. Well, one—I kind of mentioned this—but I've learned so much when I did get that push to take a risk, move into a different function, do something different. I wish I had taken a bit more self-motivation to jump into new roles, push myself out of that comfort zone. It was really striking for me this most recent shift when I moved out of a brand role into loyalty. It's not something I was going after necessarily, and it was my favorite job by far of any job I've had at IHG. It was a really important reflection for me: the minute you're comfortable, it's time to start thinking about doing something different. It doesn't have to be bigger, it can be a lateral move—just continuing to take those risks. That's definitely a big one. Along the lines of what it takes to be successful when you're jumping into something new: I've learned to listen more than I talk. And I still talk a lot—I tell my team I'll come in hot—but that doesn't mean I don't want to debate and discuss. I just can't help myself. But I've learned to truly listen, invest in really listening to understand and reflect. That's something I think would have served me better early in my career and is helping me learn more quickly now. And that's probably connected to just more patience. I can be a bit of an impatient person, and so my former boss really was an excellent coach on: slow down, pick your battles, be patient. You don't have to win this argument in this moment. There will be another conversation. That's something I probably could have used a bit more of earlier in my career.

Yeah. I have a lot of energy and a lot of drive. And what I've learned—whether it's reading a room or just the feedback you get when someone's a little bit more vulnerable and tells you how they actually feel—I've learned that something that for me feels like positive energy, for someone else can feel intimidating or threatening. Just making sure you're always reading the room.

Well, some of it starts with my training as a management consultant, which means you always start with: what are the facts, what's the problem? Any big performance issue or broader issue in the business—I do think it's really important to take the time to build the fact base, think through a problem and approach it from multiple perspectives. Especially in hospitality where any issue is multifaceted with many different layers, you have different stakeholders, different perspectives—internal, external, owners, operators, investors. Taking the time to ask those questions, listen to understand. And then for me personally, while I love to collaborate and brainstorm, I always find for a big complex issue I just need time to think. I'm a morning person, so I'll block Monday morning, Wednesday morning, Friday morning just to go heads down and think. What I try to tackle with my team are a few principles. One is: big complex issues typically don't get tackled because teams get overwhelmed by how much has to get done, or we get bored because sometimes it takes ten years. Crowne Plaza—work that we started together probably ten years ago—is only really just in the last handful of years starting to come through in consistency, performance, signings, all of the metrics that make a brand. What I've found works time and time again is focus on the 80/20—what are the three to four things that are going to make the biggest difference, and go big and hard against those things. Don't get distracted by all of the other little ideas. And what works really well because everybody in the business will have all of their little pet ideas is make sure that the company understands it's a multi-year roadmap. It's not going to get done next year, it's not going to get done in five years. Build the roadmap because that builds patience but it also allows you to prioritize and say, yes, we're going to work on this stuff now because it's the biggest bang for the buck. I hear you on this issue, we'll tackle that next year or the year after. That's how we tackled the loyalty relaunch at IHG, and it's really what helped us make progress. We're still working on things that we identified three and a half years ago that should be on our roadmap but weren't the highest most important thing. And then the last big piece—and I've learned how to do this over time—is building followership. No one's an island, no one can drive change on their own. I work really hard on how we build collaboration and alignment with our partners within IHG. Any big initiative at IHG, we stand up an owner advisory board and really lean into our hotel owners to help support us and frankly tell us what's never going to work. It's best to hear it from them in a small group versus launching something and learning it that way. That helps build advocates across the business when you do want to do something big and market-moving, that you have a coalition behind you supporting the work. So those are probably the big tools that I've used with some of the big transformation efforts I've led over the years.

Exactly. And sometimes I can reflect on having made some of those tradeoffs and said, I hear you, we'll tackle that next or we'll tackle that next year—and then in retrospect it's like, you were right, we probably should have tackled that sooner. But even acknowledging mistakes like that, or, oh, I probably should have listened and moved that up—I think that also brings people to a place of believing they're a part of the solution and trusting that you are listening and that you are committed to working together.

Definitely.

Yeah, well, look—I think one of the biggest challenges, and I get this question a lot, in particular how do you go about finding them. I've never successfully found a mentor or a champion who I wasn't working directly with or hadn't worked directly with. It's not to say that they can't exist, but at least for me, there is a big personal investment in mentorship. I've always found it hard to connect and actually even hard to really find the time personally for others, if I'm honest, but also get the time from others to mentor and coach me if it's not just a part of our everyday. So I have found that seeking out that mentorship within your more everyday network, and then as you move on staying connected to those you built—that's how I've built my network. And it's been essential for my career really for two reasons. One is what I said earlier: you just don't know what you don't know. The minute you think you're good, you're delivering, you're driving—it's like, oh, somebody shares a perspective and it's like, you're right. I'm not in that room, I don't have that perspective, I haven't had that experience, because none of us are perfect. It's been invaluable to me to have leaders share feedback and advice from their experiences that have helped me grow. The other is just about staying sane, honestly—having someone who I trust that I can vent to. For me, I've worked mostly for male leaders. My former boss Claire Bennett was the first female IHG leader that I worked directly for, and that was very different in a very positive way because she mentored me not only as a female business leader but also as a whole person—someone who I can bounce ideas off of: how do I manage this challenge personally with my family, professionally, how do you manage the perception of women in this particular environment. That was really valuable to me. So it's a bit of a cliché—and I was skeptical honestly that I needed a female mentor—but she really was the first that I had and it was very different for me having her friendship and mentorship than it was with male mentors, who are fabulous also and I'm deeply grateful for. It's just a different perspective.

Definitely. And look, think about friends as mentors, family as mentors. Mentorship is not just about the professional—it's about your whole life. And ultimately it's about seeking out people who have different experiences and perspectives to help you grow.

Definitely. And just knowing who are the people who are in that room for that role that you want—who's going to be in that room.

Yeah, well, yes. So I do not struggle with assertiveness for whatever reason. I've struggled over my career with the implications of that—of being perceived as aggressive, sharp elbows, pushing too hard, being overly challenging. I'll admit that sometimes it feels like there's a pendulum swing of, soften those elbows but keep pushing, and you get kind of mixed feedback. There's a few things I've learned. One: don't lose who I am. Not staying true to your strengths and your views. And actually when I first started working for Elie Maalouf, IHG's current CEO, when he was the CEO of the Americas, I shared with him my development plan and that I've heard this feedback that I have sharp elbows. And he was like, no, he said, I want you on my leadership team because you have a point of view and you'll drive for results. And that really stuck with me because it was the first time actually in my career where the feedback wasn't soften those elbows—it was keep pushing, keep driving. But at the same time, other mentors have helped me with some of the themes I've mentioned earlier around listening and patience, and that's kind of helped me learn when to push, how to read a room, and how to moderate my actions based on the audience and the situation. And it's interesting—I'm sure you feel this as well, Lan—that we're all very good at it when you're speaking with an owner or you're in a more challenging external conversation, because the stakes are high and you need to strike that balance between pushing but respecting the audience. I struggled with it more internally when I actually had the relationships and knew the people, and I learned that that was undermining my effectiveness by not treating those internal conversations with the same level of respect as some of those external conversations. It does come down to for me not losing my voice but having more patience, investing in relationships, because I've found that the stronger your relationships, the more welcome a hefty push is if you disagree. That's very important to me. But then I've also coached and mentored a lot of women who have the opposite problem, and that's probably one of my most difficult leadership challenges—mentoring and coaching someone who actually is having more challenges finding their voice and is more in that nice collaborative camp but needs to be pushed to find what one of the women on my team calls her challenger voice. How do I challenge and assert myself without losing who I am as a person? That's really important to learn: the goal is not to be liked by everyone, it's to be respected. And sometimes that means having a difficult conversation in a way that is true to who you are as a person. So it's definitely a double bind. It's something that I didn't appreciate early in my career but I've definitely seen later in my career, especially for women in senior leadership positions.

So for whatever reason I do not get nervous. I probably should, but I don't. I'm not sure why that muscle is not inside of me, but I tend to be relaxed in front of an audience. I think that's because of preparation. There's a few things that I've been trained to do but also that are important to me. Whether you're standing in front of six thousand people or presenting to a group of ten with a very high-stakes decision, it all comes down to impact and influence and respecting your audience. When you really focus on who's your audience, what do you want them to take away, and what is important to them, you start to get really disciplined about what you're going to talk about. By starting with the audience and respect for their time, their energy, everything else that's happening in their lives—I always always always begin with an outline, not a bunch of slides or starting to write a speech—to really hone in on my messaging, the positioning. Even the same topic, you could hear me present on that topic to five different groups and hear five very different positioning of the same theme and the same message, because your objectives are different, the audience is different. Being careful not to tell them everything that you know, but tell them what they need to hear and what they need to understand—that helps simplify a message. Stories help too to bring things to life. I do try to use stories to reinforce a message or simplify a message.

Yeah, well, you have to get people's attention, especially when you're presenting in front of four or five thousand people. You're sitting there seeing rotating heads up on a stage. You have to get their attention with something fun and interesting, using simple imagery and graphics to reinforce a message. In general, I hate being scripted, so I do tend to hold the pen for myself on a presentation because if I do that, I know what I want to say and I can say it more naturally and authentically. But in those moments like the owners conference, we have to be scripted because there are external implications if you say something you're not supposed to say. So I do practice a lot for those. Best tool ever is the teleprompter app on my iPad, which people don't know about, but it's amazing—it's voice activated and so it works as a teleprompter. Just repeat, repeat, repeat, so that by the time you're on that stage, you know your stuff and you feel natural and you're not nervous. There's that nervous energy the moment you go out there, but I do find that preparation takes a lot of that nervousness away. And just have fun—I think that's also part of it. If you're so scripted and serious about your topic, you're going to be boring. Having a little bit of fun out there, telling a personal story, trying to connect the dots in a relevant way is really important. Public speaking and more broadly the ability to have impact and influence with a group—how you communicate—it's a huge part of being successful as a business leader. There's nothing that frustrates me more when I hear people bemoan all of the admin of having to write a slide deck. What you're trying to do is drive for a productive conversation and an important business decision. What's the best way of doing that? Tell a simple story, have your facts, put it in a simple narrative that people are going to understand. So I do think it's really important.

Well, I think one is knowing your strengths and trying to crystallize what you're passionate about—and don't limit that to I love marketing or I love brands. Think about what do you really love to do. For me, it's I love to solve big complex problems that are going to have a big impact on our business, on people, on our hotels, on our customer experiences. And by defining that a little bit more broadly, I haven't been pigeonholed into a certain function and frankly it's just created opportunity. That has kept me motivated and engaged every day. So knowing your strengths and finding your passion points, I think, is really important. Really cultivating mentors and a network—it's something actually that I regret in my career, that I wish I had built sooner and invested in longer, because those perspectives and that support network I think really is such an asset for any individual to continue to grow but to also have a sounding board as you hit inevitable bumps in the road. And I guess the last thing is taking time for yourself. I talked about it earlier—we all need that time to reflect, recharge. You can't be always on. You're going to hit moments in your life that it's going to make sense to slow down, and that's okay. You'll get back into it, you'll find the next opportunity. And I'm really actually grateful that I did take time out for a bit when my kids were young. It taught me that I did not want to stay at home full-time with them, but I learned that for myself versus second-guessing. What I did do instead when I went back into the workforce was work on a four-day-a-week model—I got a bit of a reduced schedule in a functional area that I probably stayed in a little bit longer than I otherwise would have, but I did because I had more control. And maybe it slowed me down for that one next role, but not after that. So having that trust and confidence in yourself to take that time for yourself when you need it.

Nice to see you too.