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“Character is what you do.”

That’s a fundamental leadership principle for George Limbert, president of Red Roof.  This is our second visit with George since he began his leadership journey as a first-time corporate president last summer.  Red Roof has prospered under his guidance, proving the value of his philosophies.  Character sits at their core.

A focus on character led to many innovations at Red Roof, including their Women’s Center for Excellence and Women in Leadership programs to help level the gender playing field, particularly in the lodging industry.

To keep character objectively defined, and his actions with character exemplary for his team, George looks at himself and his team through the lens of judicial temperament.  It’s a non-biased way of looking at a situation from all sides to determine its core truth; it comes naturally to George, whose legal background goes beyond law school with deep roots in family: his father is a judge, and a brother and sister are also attorneys.

George shares the many ways any good leader can display character, calmly analyze corporate storms, and deal with other real life ups and downs of leadership with host Maureen Metcalf.  Join us for this episode filled with practical examples from Red Roof.

Other episodes you’ll enjoy:

Guest(s):

Guest(s) Bio:

George Limbert is the President of Red Roof, a leader in the lodging industry. He initially joined as Red Roof’s inhouse General Counsel, and today leads an organization with over 660 properties serving millions of guests each year in the United States, Brazil, and Japan. George led a strategic transformation of the business and is working to manage interdepartmental challenges as well as demand to create operational efficiencies. He is a member of the board of directors of the American Hotel and Lodging Association, the voice representing every segment of the lodging industry in the United States.

Transcript
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Maureen 0:09
Hi, welcome to Innovating Leadership, co-creating our future. I’m your host, Maureen Metcalf, the CEO and founder of the Innovative Leadership Institute. I am delighted to be joined by George Limbert, the president of Red Roof. Today we’re going to be talking about the importance of strong character, also called virtuous character. George is going to talk about how he’s applied character within Red Roof, who he is as a person of high character as a leader, and also how that permeates through his organization and the franchise organization to impact all of his stakeholders, for many people character means different things, and that’s really what I want to start with. George talking about judgment versus being judgmental, occasionally I’ll hear people say, like, I don’t do that, and yet having discernment and judgment is the foundation of what a CEO does,

Speaker 1 1:04
absolutely. And thank you again, Maureen, for having me. It’s a real honor to be talking to you again about these interesting topics. And yeah, I mean, let’s talk about judgment, and it’s not judging. I sometimes refer to it as judicial temperament, and as a JK, a judge’s kid growing up having a father who was a judge, and still is a judge, judicial temperament was all around, and so I had the opportunity to view that, and now I think about how I apply that in my life, but also towards the success of the organization.

Maureen 1:34
What does judicial temperament mean for all of our listeners who aren’t judges’ kids?

Speaker 1 1:39
It’s the balance between all of the factors and all of the stakeholders, it’s not getting too excited about certain aspects of the business, but also understanding holistically how it all works and applying that sort of evenly throughout.

Maureen 1:51
You grew up in a judicial family. Tell us a little bit about what life was like and how you came to build this kind of nuanced thinking into your life, like sitting around the dining room table. Did you talk about cases? How do you help people build this temperament, starting with how you built

Speaker 1 2:13
it? I always joke with people about Thanksgiving. So, I come from a family, my father is a lawyer slash judge, my mother was an English teacher. My oldest sister is a very successful school law attorney. My older brother is a very successful in-house attorney. And then my black sheep sister is a very successful vice president of customer experience for Capital One. So she was the smartest one. The rest of us had no talent, which is why we had to go to law school. I always joked that around the Thanksgiving table, it was very boring conversation, because we would debate many different aspects of the law. We would also apply it to history and those kind of things. It was an interesting thing to grow up as a fly in the wall to a courtroom as a child. One of the observations I made very early on in my life was that understanding sort of the full side of the argument, understanding every aspect of what’s going on, is of the utmost importance, and in fact, that’s the role of the judge. You said it earlier, it’s not about judgment, it’s about ensuring a fair process, so that everything is put out there. I started my career at Red Roof as an attorney, the attorney for Red Roof, and eventually became their president. Early on, my career as the attorney for Red Roof, I found myself in many, many conversations that weren’t legal in nature, and the reason I was part of those conversations was because I could draw out, mediate, exercise judicial temperament, and really try to bring a solution out from those stakeholders in the room,

Maureen 3:40
so we just came out of a leadership team meeting, and your leadership team meetings are different than some. How does your judicial temperament inform how the leaders interact?

Speaker 1 3:52
Part of having that judicial temperament is providing a platform for those who might not necessarily feel comfortable speaking up. You have to recognize that and draw those individuals out and basically point to them and say, what do you think, is this working for you? You have to read the room, that’s one of my strengths as a leader, that’s what’s helped our success.

Maureen 4:14
Well, and I hope, because I saw it today, you have those difficult conversations that people are having outside of the room, you had it in the room. Sometimes those are really uncomfortable, but watching the tenor of the conversation, no one checked out. They’re hard, and hopefully participants, some can voice, some feel heard, some feel accepted, some are uncomfortable, but they’re going to show up tomorrow because they had an opportunity to speak and participate in creating a solution that moves the business forward as it changes.

Speaker 1 4:49
It’s a funny thing because it’s hard for me to separate what we do into an aspect or an element to draw that out to decide what makes us successful because to me it seems like it. Seems like the right thing to do is to allow everybody to be heard, to be as transparent as you absolutely can be, and to really foster an environment for ideas. It just seems like the right thing to do, and I don’t think about it a lot, unless we’re talking about it like we are now. To me, it’s the fundamental element of leadership.

Maureen 5:18
It’s interesting, because this does come naturally to you, and yet, as we prepared for today, there were things on the agenda and things not on the agenda because of time, and this idea of helping the leadership team align, because it was a new team when you took over, so we don’t walk in necessarily trusting one another, and that’s something you’ve worked very hard to create and continue to work hard on

Speaker 1 5:43
going back to judicial temperament for a second. When you’re first put into a leadership position, you have to invoke that and really try to connect and understand where each and every one of your leaders are at, and then you have to evolve that and figure out how to align that, but the thing that I’m learning, and I learned today is that alignment is a constant work in progress. You can’t just say we’re aligned, let’s move to the next thing. You have to continually take the temperature of your team, continually understand whether there’s alignment, and figure out what’s out of alignment, and really try to bring the team together to really fix those issues.

Maureen 6:20
As you say, that the image that comes to mind is driving a little too fast. Occasionally, I’ll hit a pothole, and I drive a car that’s low to the ground, and I flatten tires that way. Similarly, with a leadership team, occasionally somebody’s driving a little too fast, maybe not checking all the mirrors, or there’s black ice or whatever, and just stuff happens. We hit a pothole, you spin out or you flatten a tire. How does the team come back together to realign? Just like I, you know, skid into whatever national tire and battery, or whoever tows me away and fixes my tire and physically recalibrates my alignment. This is similar. We’re recalibrating based on no ill will, but just somebody had a patch of black ice. It’s

Speaker 1 7:08
exactly right. I mean, as you are with your car, you’re always trying to make sure it’s going in the right direction, it’s going straight, it’s not wobbling, you don’t have a flat tire, those kind of things. It’s a great analogy, because you have to constantly understand where your team is, it could be a project, it could be a personnel decision, it could be a directive from the board, or an opinion from the board that could pull things out of alignment, and you have to be cognizant of that. The

Maureen 7:34
other thing that’s interesting is you’ve been in the role for about a year, and as time progresses, alignment looks different. Your role with the board is different. Your role with the team is different. The team’s roles have changed. So, back to the car analogy, the dynamic steering, as I’m looking down at my GPS and looking at my vision, where am I going? Roads are under construction. We live in Ohio. We’re surrounded by orange barrels. There’s always something that comes up that I’m navigating around, and so again, if we think about the character model and the nuance of doing the right thing, and in reality, I think everyone on your team is trying to do the right thing, but not everyone indexes equally, so the team is also calibrating what’s right today, given what’s going on.

Speaker 1 8:24
Yeah, and I think it’s up to the leader of the organization to ensure that there’s that balance that goes hand in hand with listening. We just came off of an all team member meeting, and we brought everybody who could make it in. We had, I think, it was like 90% of our team members were there, and we listened. We answered questions. We showed everybody our vision. We showed everybody our roadmap for the organization. I’m so happy to say that we walked out of that meeting as an organization better aligned than we were before we came in. It’s a never-ending cycle, but you have to continue to listen and continue to take the temperature of your team members to make sure that this organization that you’re putting together it maintains its alignment.

Maureen 9:09
Last time we talked, you had just done a look and listen tour with your franchisees.

Speaker 1 9:14
Yes, so this

Maureen 9:14
is comparable to the leadership team look and listen, not just leadership team, but all employees as stakeholders of the business.

Speaker 1 9:23
Yeah, in fact, I just announced that I’m invoking a look and listen tour. Well, first of all, let’s talk about the look and listen tour, right? I made a proclamation very early on in my presidency that I’m going to go to every single Red River hotel in the lower 48 states. I’m not going to go to the two in Brazil or Japan just yet, but maybe one day. And for me, that’s because I want to hear what’s going on with our franchisees, I want to look, see what’s happening at the properties, and listen to our franchisees. I’m going to do the same thing with every single employee in the corporate organization. I’m going to experiment first, try it with groups of four or five, virtually, and ask them what’s going on. How do you feel? Do you like the direction of the organization? What ideas. Do you have to make it better? It’s going to enlighten me a lot, and it will also help direct our organization.

Maureen 10:06
You’re making changes on a regular basis based on your look and listen to her, and frankly, based on the meeting that just ended yesterday. Yeah,

Speaker 1 10:13
as we talked about in the last podcast, we didn’t have much direction when I took over the organization. We didn’t have a vision, and so we reset that, we reset the vision, we enhance the vision, and it’s to provide the best experience and value in the lodging industry for our guests, for our owners, for our team members, partners, and our communities. And we went to the entire corporate organization over the last two days, and we said, “Here’s our vision, you guys know it, it’s been around for the last year, how are you bringing it to life? What are your ideas to better enhance it? How can we better enhance the experience for our guests? How can we better enhance the experience for our franchisees? How can we better enhance the experience for you, the team member? And we had great ideas fostered through facilitated conversations, breakout groups, all these great things happen, and today we brought the leadership team together, the senior leadership team together, and some of those ideas were brought forward, and we said, “Let’s do it, let’s change it. What’s the hold up? What’s the issue? Check the box, it’s a simple thing to change. Let’s go after the low hanging fruit, and then let’s talk about some of the greater changes that were brought up, and how we can implement those. It just seems natural to me that your customer effectively, or many different things, right? It’s your guest, it’s your owner, it’s your team member, it’s your partners, it’s your community. I look at his service perspective. Why wouldn’t you ask your customer what they want? You can’t always deliver, but you sure could figure out good ways to try to move closer to that.

Maureen 11:38
We’ve talked about understanding the guest experience, so as a hotel enterprise, you care about everything from I decide to go on vacation to I go to the Red Roof site or I go to a different site, and then I show up. What’s check-in? What’s my lodging experience? What’s my payment experience? Similarly, with the employee experience, there are key stakeholders to be successful. This meeting seemed like one step of many, helping improve the employee experience.

Speaker 1 12:08
Oh, no doubt. I’m sure you’ve talked about it with every single guest you’ve had for the last two years, right? COVID brought about the great resignation. We had a labor shortage pre-COVID. It just amplified it. The world has changed. How you treat your employees matters, because they have options. How you treat your team members makes all the difference in the world. And so, understanding and helping them on their journey, and understanding their journey as an employee from start to finish, is so important. We’re availing leadership development to levels in our organization that never had it before. We’re investing in the employee, but also in exchange, we’re saying to the employee, hey, not only is this leadership development course that you’re taking that we’re giving to you going to help you become a better person and a leader and help our organization. If you want to apply that course towards course credit towards an MBA, you can. How do we provide the best experience and value to our team members? This is one avenue to help do that.

Maureen 13:11
I want to say that’s risky, and interestingly, because as you elevate the caliber of your next level leaders, they have bigger expectations of you,

Speaker 1 13:21
they do, and they also have a risk of leaving, but I don’t care. I don’t care. One, they should have bigger expectations of me, because that’ll challenge me, and that’ll push me further. So, I’ll take that all day, any day. But if we help develop somebody, and they come to me and say, George, I got my MBA, I got this great leadership training, I’m ready for a different path. I’m going to go over here. I’m going to take that as a point of pride. I’m going to wear that as a badge of honor. You know, because I think that is the utmost aspect of providing the best experience and value to our team members, is to help them develop to a point that they may opt to go somewhere else.

Maureen 14:00
I’ve loved being able to lead those sessions. One, people feel very grateful that you are making an investment in them. For some of them, the first time in their career that they’ve had this kind of investment, the openness of conversation across the group gives feedback, then to the leadership team as well. Where are the concerns again? Back to the recalibration, and we hit speed bumps, and stuff happens. They have now an appropriate forum, and the idea that if someone thinks about leaving the conversation is really, yeah, you could go someplace else. Safety comes from people being educated, from the transparency from the relationships they have with each other, you know, those are conversations that the team is rising to every day.

Speaker 1 14:50
It’s an interesting thing, and again, I mean, analyzing this is a bit awkward for me, because it’s just the right thing to do. You’re a team for a reason. If somebody’s having an issue, a family issue, and they need a little bit of leeway and help, you help them, it’s just the right thing to do. But to your point about the unique nature in providing an environment that you can do that, a few weeks ago Red Roof had our Women and Entrepreneurs in Leadership Forum, and we were one of the first in the industry to bring this to fruition, and I was fortunate enough to speak at the event, I had to do it via video because I had injured my arm and wasn’t able to travel, but one of the questions that was asked was, What advice do you give to women who are trying to move up in an organization and fit into an organization, and all these kind of things, and my advice is the same for women and men, it’s you be you your life experience and what you’ve done and what you’ve seen and all the diversity of the background that which you live I need you to bring that to the table because that style that presence that experience that life experience is who you are and it’s different from the guy next to you or the gal next to you, and it’s important that you be who you are. For women, don’t try to be like men. To me, when I sit around the boardroom, that’s not a value to me. What a value is to me is to say, hey, I came from this place, this is what I saw, here’s how we handled that issue, and here’s how I think we ought to do it for your organization, so UBU, I think, is of the utmost importance, and think we’ve fostered that environment here.

Maureen 16:26
One of the things I’ll say, as a coach who often works with women, UBU, and understand executive presence, understand your gaps, because if I am me and I’m an introvert, which I am, I’ve really had to work hard to not be invisible,

Speaker 1 16:43
absolutely. But as a woman trying to be part of the board team, don’t feel the need to be overly aggressive, don’t feel the need to stand up and shout, or be a yeller, or emulate traits of some of the other people within the organization that are men. I just don’t think that’s necessary. Don’t think it’s necessary.

Maureen 17:03
I’m old enough that I grew up in the era where women dressed like men. Early on, someone asked me if I was a burn victim, and they asked me that because I never exposed my neck, that I always wore, you know, high collar or little bow ties. Now I wouldn’t imagine wearing a bow tie, but we were expected to all be homogenous, and I love living in a world where the experience I’ve had living in a female body is different than the one you’ve had in a male body, most likely, and that both of those are valuable, that our innate traits are different. When we were building one of our leadership frameworks. We had hours of discussions about, is there women’s leadership, is there men’s leadership? You know, we do this developmental maturity, and to my knowledge, there’s not a woman’s mature and a men’s mature in the leadership realm. There are traits that are more traditional for women, there are traits that are more traditional for men, and we live in an era where we have the opportunity and the expectation that you are empathetic and I’m assertive that we both have to master both sides of those, they’re energetic, not connected to my reproductive organs,

Speaker 1 18:17
leadership doesn’t care, right, they don’t care what your makeup is, because the traits are the same. The traits of good leadership are scientific. If you’re good at math, that’s a skill that you build up. It doesn’t matter if you’re a woman or man, you’re good at math. If you’re good at leadership, that is a skill that you build up, and you’re good at leadership, it’s the same. It’s the same. Yeah, so one

Maureen 18:38
thing I do want to point out, in addition to the women’s conference, you’re also creating a center of excellence for female franchise owners. Yes,

Speaker 1 18:47
yeah, it’s.. it’s an interesting journey. So, the Women’s Center for Excellence has really been spearheaded by our Chief Development Officer, Matt Ostetter. Marina McDonald has been instrumental, our Chief Marketing Officer, when it comes to the women in leadership and fostering that environment. First of all, our goal is 40% of our system. Our total franchisees are either majority owned or partially owned by a woman. Now, the statistic we heard a few weeks ago, we’re at 31% today.

Maureen 19:17
Congratulations, that’s a big jump.

Speaker 1 19:19
It’s a big jump. It’s pretty impressive. The seeds have already been planted, and the question is, How do we take it to the next level? And this Women’s Center for Excellence is going to do that, but it’s interesting how it all came about for me. These seeds were in Matt’s head and Marina’s head, and they had already planted them well before I became the president of the organization. But for me, what was interesting is I was at a conference, and I met a female franchisee. She pointed her finger at me and said, ‘You’re the president of Red Roof. You in the entire industry needs to get better and facilitate better the process of obtaining and buying a hotel and franchising a home.’ Tell I said to her, it was funny. Is this the first impression you really want to have with me? She said, I don’t care. It’s so important. It’s so important, and it really resonated with me. And so Matt really took the lead, put pen to paper, came up with a great process, supported completely by Marina and her initiatives, and all that kind of stuff. And it’s really been very successful so far. And we’re looking forward to how it will be moving forward

Maureen 20:22
and closing that gap. If you’re already at 31%

Speaker 1 20:26
maybe we needed to go 50 or 60% I don’t know.

Maureen 20:28
You, we’ve talked about, grew up with judicial temperament, and yet it’s not enough that you’re a person of high character if you’re surrounded by people who aren’t. How do you hire for it and build it into because you came into at least half of the team was in place before

Speaker 1 20:47
character is what you do is what you actually do. How do you build that? I think you set the tone by being consistent with your team. I think you set the tone by showing, just like we were talking about, we fostered an open dialog amongst the entire senior team. It was a place where people felt safe enough to say, hey, this is what I don’t like, or this is what I think we can do better on. And showing that environment, you show your character. It’s amazing to me, because as an attorney for an organization, you are the person that people really don’t want to talk to, unless something’s really gone wrong, you know, and I used to joke, it’s like, man, nobody wants to come and talk to me about something fun that’s happening, they just want to come talk to me about problems, so people would, in some sense, avoid you, so you had the opportunity to really be an observer and see how people interact and react, as the president and leader of the organization, people are watching you all the time, and even when you don’t think they should be watching you, you know they are, but if you can appreciate that and understand that, you can really utilize that to set the tone from a character perspective, because then you could show people that you are of high character, that you are someone that’s approachable, that you are someone that’s willing to listen, that you are someone that’s willing to make positive change, and so that’s part of what has set the tone for the organization.

Maureen 22:10
We’ve talked about it conceptually. My belief is sometimes it’s hard, sometimes it’s hard to act with integrity, because it means you let someone go who’s delivering results, but doing so in a shady way, or treating other people badly, or whatever the situation is. Is there an example of something you’ve done that was risky for you, but the right thing to do?

Speaker 1 22:36
It happens all the time. I mean, I think sometimes you were asked to do things that may not be in the best interest of organization, you know, that’s the nice thing about being an attorney. As an attorney growing up, coming from a place where sometimes attorneys were sanctioned or disciplined, you had a heightened sense of ethics, and in law school it was one of my focuses, and so having a heightened sense of ethics helps you sort of weigh the right from wrong. As a leader of an organization, you could be put in a situation where people ask you to do something that’s not right. You have to have the fortitude to do the right thing, irrespective of what consequence it may mean to you. You know, and this is easier said than done. You know, in my career, when you stopped caring about whether you had continued employment or not, you started actually making strides and decisions. So I became the leader of the organization a year before Covid. I stopped caring whether what I said or did would have affected my employment.

Maureen 23:38
You still cared about doing what was right and about the company.

Speaker 1 23:41
Absolutely, my conviction was I’m going to do what’s right. I’m going to do what’s best for this organization. If that’s what gets me exited, so be

Maureen 23:49
it. I met with someone a couple days ago, and she was saying she left a job because she cared in a way that was causing her to be ill. Different situation, she didn’t get promoted to president, she wasn’t able to move the needle, and it was going to impact people’s careers, and in a hospital, so it could also impact health. And she said, after five months, I left because I couldn’t maintain my integrity and care for the role I was filling and deliver, so I had to go. So another example of someone committed to doing the right thing, and really struggling internally with I’ve never quit a job, and I’ve never failed, but I’m put in a situation where I can’t succeed, and it was in that case structural people were pulled in too many different directions, and you know, when you’re working 80 hours a week and you still can’t get it done, what do you not do? Yeah,

Speaker 1 24:40
I’m curious, though. In that case, because sometimes what I see is people don’t succeed in a situation because they’re focused on the rules, not the right thing to do, but what the rules say, and the rules say I should do this, and they’re not letting me do this, or they’re asking me to go beyond the rules

Maureen 24:59
again in that. Situation, everyone well intended, but the situation was structural, and I think she said there were like 16 people in this job in a few years. So, when do you step back and say we didn’t hire 16 losers? There’s a problem with the way the infrastructure is set that is clearly driving challenges, and I’m imagining some of our listeners are thinking about, oh yeah, even if you put someone of the highest character into a role, there were times that person is going to work as hard as they can and really suffer because the system is structured in a way you can’t succeed.

Speaker 1 25:37
It’s a very challenging thing when you’re trying your hardest to do the right thing, it’s like when the waves are really bad, and you’re in the ocean, and you’re trying to walk across the waves, and they keep pushing you back. That’s how it feels, and it’s a difficult thing to overcome, but you have to maintain the conviction, you have to maintain the judicial temperance, because there will be an opportunity for you to show the organization, the board, the senior team, whatever it is, your boss, what the right path is, and to your point, if you consistently believe that you’re trying to take the organization down the right path, but you’re meeting resistance after resistance, then maybe it is time for something different.

Maureen 26:18
I want to go back to the shift that happened when you were more focused on doing the right thing than promotion, you know, we’re both at a point in our lives where we have that luxury, you’re not entry level trying to buy food,

Speaker 1 26:33
it’s an evolution as a person. My first job out of law school was with a law firm, right? I didn’t walk into the law firm and start telling the partners what to do, or telling the partners what I thought was right or wrong. Certain jobs, it will never come up. You may be in a position where it doesn’t matter, but if you are in that position where you want to do the right thing, you have to live with yourself. So, you have to do what you can to help you sleep at night. If it’s unbearable, if it’s between keeping my mouth shut and feeding my family, or speaking up and not being able to feed my family well, you can make the argument the right thing to do is keep your mouth shut, but when you get to a point where you can effectuate change within an organization and you are a leader, then you better do what’s right.

Maureen 27:15
As a less experienced person, often we can look at leaders, and I think of a bunch of times I did this in my own life, like, what the heck are they doing? They don’t know what they’re doing. Well, you know what, they were put in those roles because they did know what they were doing, and I was the junior person who had all kinds of opinions, but many of them ill-informed. So, there are also opportunities when we question the leaders with whom we work to not just question internally and talk to my friends, but ask the leader. And there was a time, relatively early in my career, we were doing layoffs. I was pretty junior, and my boss came to me, called me in his office, and said, “Hey, I heard you’re talking about this or that. Ooh, busted, and he said, “Didn’t you trust me enough to come in and ask me that question? Because I’ll give you the answer, and I’ll be honest with you. It didn’t occur to me that I had that choice. I was just not yet mature enough to even know I had that option.

Speaker 1 28:15
It’s a difficult thing from a leadership position to foster an environment where junior employees, associates, team members feel comfortable enough with you as a leader to talk to you like they would talk to their coworker. What I do, how I approach it is I try to be very disarming to people. I mean, I say this all the time, I’m just a kid from Youngstown, Ohio, you know, I’m just an average guy. I go through the same things that everybody else goes through, and so I try to make sure people know that about me. And in some ways, it disarms them and builds trust and builds credibility and builds an environment in which people are willing to come to you and say, hey, you know what, I don’t like this policy, and George, I’m feel comfortable enough to come to the president of the organization and say, I’d like to see this changed, or I really like this. That’s still good feedback, too. It’s hard to do in a huge organization, I get it, but I think it’s true of any level of leadership that you need to lead in such a way that people are willing to show candor and be forthright with you. You don’t want a bunch of yes men or women telling you everything’s great, and then all of a sudden you crash and burn. You need to understand what’s going on.

Maureen 29:28
That’s one of the biggest challenges many leaders face, is the isolation at a certain level that people around you will tell you what they think, and I know your leadership team, so I know you get some pretty candid feedback. Often kind of, the conventional wisdom is you talk to your boss first, which is not a bad idea in many cases, skipping three levels not always helpful, because your boss might actually know something that would inform what’s going on, so it’s a delicate balance, this creating the. Environment where people can come talk to you, and they also should talk to their boss in many cases. My

Speaker 1 30:05
father, before becoming a judge, was a corporate attorney in Youngstown, Ohio. He represented many steel mills and many factories, and Youngstown was a very industrial area at the time he began his practice, and he said to me, says, “If you’re going to be a corporate attorney for a company, you need to go to their factory, you need to see how they make those parts, you need to see how the steel’s made, because if you’re at their factory, you will know their business, you will be a better attorney. And so I’ve applied that to my leadership role at Red Roof. That’s why I’m doing the look and listen to her, and so my advice for those leaders that are having trouble understanding what is happening at the line level, what is happening with the housekeepers, what is happening with the GSRs, go out and clean a room, and then you’ll figure it out.

Maureen 30:55
You did something else beyond that that I thought was really interesting, so you did the look and listen to her, and you saw their personal spaces, not just the corporate space. So, you didn’t just do a walk through the rooms, you got to know the franchisees.

Speaker 1 31:10
Yes. How do you relate with someone within an hour that you’ve never met before? And one of the things I realized, I mean, 90% of Red Ribbon franchisees are Indian Americans. Many Indian Americans have shrines in their hotels, for me it’s fascinating to see them, and so mostly out of curiosity, I would ask them, Would you mind showing me your shrine? I’d like to see it, and it sort of shocked them, you know. Oh my gosh, this president, the company wants to see my personal area where I pray, but yeah, I do, because you know, how do you relate to people as you figure out what you may have in common, and culturally coming from a Greek Orthodox Christian background, many Greek Orthodox Christians have icons of various saints all up in their homes. We have similar type shrines. It’s very important to us in our culture, and it’s of course very important to our franchisees, and it’s really a way to get to know them very quickly, and it’s just part of understanding who they are.

Maureen 32:05
Often, religion and politics are off limits.

Speaker 1 32:07
Yeah,

Maureen 32:08
combative discussions about religion certainly off limits, but understanding the human being, understanding their faith tradition, and also, at least for me, I work with, like, you, Hindu, Muslim, Christian atheists, understanding where they come from one helps me not say something just ridiculous, and it, it shows that they are able to be authentic, especially after 911 and we go through the discriminatory views for my clients to know that whatever their tradition is, I respect that’s foundational to building more than a surface relationship.

Speaker 1 32:49
Frankly, politics and religion to me are never off limits. Yeah, you don’t want to sit there and have a conversation about what people think about abortion or the Second Amendment, that doesn’t matter to me. But what I want to know is who you are as a person, and part of who you are as a person is where you worship, right, on Sundays or Saturdays, and part of who you are as a person is who you vote for in the voting box. Go back to judgment, judicial temperance, it doesn’t matter to me what you do. I love it. I don’t care which party you vote for, as long as you’re active and you understand your vote. I don’t judge anybody in that sense, and to me it’s so important to understand who I’ve got in front of me and understand those pieces and puzzles, because as we talk about a good leader understands who their followers are, understands who their team members are, and that’s the pieces and puzzles that make you up, just like we talked about earlier about UBU, the diversity of who we are as individuals. If you can harness that and you can pull that out and bring that together and use that, that will propel your organization. The

Maureen 33:55
term diversity, as we’re working in an environment where organizations are working to promote an environment where diversity is welcome, and yet we often make it a checkbox exercise by looking at color or gender or orientation or pick your slice of the world, and yet you point to diversity of thinking and politics and faith traditions, which drive us in some cases to make different kinds of decisions. Someone who’s strongly Christian may use their faith as a guide for decisions where someone who is of a different faith may come to a different and equally appropriate decision, and the opportunity for the organization is to respect and find a way to synthesize the best thinking, because that really does create an organization that can withstand the challenges.

Speaker 1 34:48
Absolutely, and we would be fools not to foster environment where everything that you’ve done up until the point that you’re sitting around the boardroom table, everything you’ve done matters. Us and we want to know about it, and we want you to bring that experience forward, irrespective of the backgrounds or anything else. Again, I mean, this is part of our DNA as individuals, and it may drive our decisions. The end result, or byproduct, I should say, of that is a positive organization moving in a good direction, and frankly, if you do foster that environment, you’ll find out very quickly if your organization’s not moving in the right direction. One

Maureen 35:27
of the things you’ve talked about is putting in place a program to recruit refugees as employees. I realize that’s an incredibly complicated process with the State Department and the government, but what it speaks to me is back to character. We’ve had people who were supporting the US and the Afghan war, and how do we create opportunities for them? We’ve got people, I’m assuming, in the Ukraine who will emigrate. How do we create opportunities for human beings who are of high character? And it speaks to the organization and your values that you are welcoming a diverse population as long as they’re willing to work hard and be true to the values of the organization.

Speaker 1 36:12
That’s where having an openness with your leaders, with your team members, matters. We have a problem in the hospitality industry. It is a labor shortage, fostering an environment where you can bring all ideas to the table. One of them is helping refugees. You feel good, because remember, we said we want to provide the best experience and value to our communities, so this helps our communities, but also helps our labor shortage. It’s a creative idea, it’s an avenue to help further your business, but it also promotes the idea of community, the idea of diversity. I mean, so it’s all symbiotic, and you can all have it connect together. You don’t have to sacrifice the greater good for the organization. It’s all intertwined.

Maureen 36:55
That’s a crucial point, is the intertwined, because we’ve talked about the employee experience, we’ve talked about the guest experience. You also attend to communities. I know of a few examples where, during Covid, you housed infrastructure workers, physicians, you house people with Covid. Last week, when we had all our power outages, you were housing a lot of the power line workers who were here restoring our electricity. Can you say more about the community aspect?

Speaker 1 37:25
Economy lodging is an interesting thing. We’re not the Ritz-Carlton, we’re also not the Budget Motel, or whatever. We’re in a unique space, in the sense that we’re value, we’re affordable, and we have some unique properties that meet the needs of FEMA, meet the needs of these power crews. For us, that’s the service, you know. Hotels have always been integral to their communities, they’ve always been positive businesses. Now, oftentimes politicians think, oh, it’s somebody from out of town staying here, so I can tax the hotel and all that kind of stuff, but that’s not the case. Hotels provide services to their community, and also our franchisees. They’ve given back so much to their communities. They do all these initiatives. They do drives at Christmas. One of our general managers looks like Santa Claus, and he brings children to the hotel and gives out gifts and all that kind of stuff through charities. We are ingrained in our community, and all we thought we needed to do was just call that out, that’s why we added that to our vision.

Maureen 38:23
How do you inspire franchisees, team members, other employees to contribute to the community as you do

Speaker 1 38:33
from an organizational perspective? Service has always been part of the DNA of Red Roof, and our leading ESG initiative at Red Roof is our Room in Your Heart campaign, and it’s where we have a special rate that you can book. Percentage of that rate goes towards a specific charity, and most recently we worked with United Way and their efforts in Ukraine. In fact, it was our most successful Room in Your Heart campaign. It usually lasts for about a month. You can book the rate, and for a month that we take that percentage, and sometimes we match the funds, and you know, within the organization, all that kind of stuff. So it’s a very exciting thing, it’s very important thing. We also implement days of service. We work with an organization called Flying Horse Farms. Flying Horse Farms provides a summer camp experience for those children who are unable to go to a normal summer camp because of a disability or a medical condition, and so we actually donate sheets and towels for every summer to the camp here in Ohio. We also send our team there once a year to help get the camp ready, and that day of service is so impactful again, like we were talking about how all of this diversity, all of this point of view and opinion and life experience intertwines to build a great organization, so does service. Service is just another element of that, it’s just another piece of this puzzle, this amazing puzzle of trying to lead a great organization. If I were to give a piece of advice to a kind of an emerging CEO or. Leader, I would say really try to understand from the line level all the way to the top what motivates your team and what drives them and what gets them out of bed in the morning, and it’s not always about bottom line results and top line results, there’s so many more elements to that and to being a well-rounded organization, and service is such an important component of that, and community as well. We were talking about this, some this meeting that we just had with the entire total company, and somebody pulled me aside and said, “Hey, you know, pre-COVID, we had a Pelotonia group, which is a bike ride – I don’t know if it’s national or not – it’s a bike ride for cancer, and why can’t we start that again. It’s like absolutely people are thirsty for service, and that’s just another component of a very successful organization.

Maureen 40:47
Are you going to ride in Pelotonia?

Speaker 1 40:49
No, I’ll be on the sidelines, I’ll give people water, I guess, and wave banners, but that’s about

Maureen 40:57
it. One of my clients, that I guess they now have virtual riders, so you can be a non-bicycle virtual. I still

Speaker 1 41:04
think you have to ride like on a stationary bike, maybe knowing this person, she

Maureen 41:08
wasn’t riding on a stationary bike. I think this was the spiritual support of riders without the sore muscles.

Speaker 1 41:17
So, Maureen, we’ve talked quite a bit about doing the right thing, and we talked a little bit about ethics, and we talked about how by doing the right thing is not always about following the rules, it’s not always about breaking the rules, as we know, and I know you and I shared one interesting commonality, which is you are the daughter of a military intelligence agent, and I am the grandson of a CIC agent from World War Two, which was the precursor to the CIA. So we had spies in our family. So my question to you, I mean, as I sit there and study leadership and think about ethics, and I think about applying ethics, and I think about the rules and applying the rules as we talked about compliance as a, is an issue, right? And we have to be mindful of that. How has that shaped your leadership journey?

Maureen 42:08
I had an incident when I was in high school, I did something wrong and got arrested, and my dad came to pick me up. At that moment, military family, I was thinking I might be better off in jail than going home, because I was afraid of not following, kid, you know, you’re taught to, you don’t get arrested, that’s kind of way outside of the rules, and I was a really good kid, so I did something just really stupid, let me say it, I dated an undercover police officer, so I get arrested. My dad comes to bail me out, and my dad was a pretty strict guy, so I’m thinking jail may be better alternative. My dad was amazing in teaching the lesson at that moment. What did you do wrong? What was your intention in the process? He did something he shouldn’t have done, which was have something in his briefcase, and he left the briefcase in the attorney’s office. So we staked out the attorney’s office until we could get her to come back, so that no one came in and took the briefcase. We would have been there all night in the car. This was my first and only stakeout, but learning do the right thing, in that case, there was a right thing to do, and there was absolutely zero exception. There was okay, you did this dumb thing, everyone does stupid things, that’s fine. Over here, there is a hard and fast rule that you don’t break, no matter what, and so even as a high schooler, I learned pretty early that there were things compliance, you don’t hurt people, but there were also national security issues that were of higher importance than, like, you know, speeding,

Speaker 1 43:57
yeah, right. So here you are, fresh out of jail

Maureen 44:00
at 16, and I’m wearing a lace blouse, a pleated skirt, stockings, and high heel shoes. That was what I was hauled off to jail in, in a drug roundup.

Speaker 1 44:12
Oh, wow.

Maureen 44:13
My boyfriend from Germany had just flown in, he’d been there for 10 minutes, and I get hauled off to jail in this little proper outfit, and I’m surrounded by actual drug dealers who I had never met, like I didn’t hang out with. I was a high school kid

Speaker 1 44:28
in an exceptionally profound juxtaposition to now have what you thought was the end of your life, right? Your dad was going to come kill you,

Maureen 44:37
yes, and you would

Speaker 1 44:38
have rather stayed in jail, and now you’re put in a position where your dad’s saying, you know what, don’t worry about that, we got bigger problems, let’s set our sights on what’s right, what we need to do, which is figure out how to get this case back.

Maureen 44:52
That one incident informed my entire life. That’s

Speaker 1 44:57
amazing. I think it would as well. Well, for me, I don’t know. I can suppose if I found myself in jail in a pleated skirt, it would be double, double, double informative, but, but, wow, so, yeah, so the idea that ethics are a little bit different than what’s in the rule book, but having the conviction of really trying to sort out the most important right thing,

Maureen 45:22
so take it from national security to a simple question. The meeting we were having today, I got an email that this person then reached out to you and said, I have a family thing, can I leave early, and my response was family first, always. And this is a really important meeting. How do we want to balance the two?

Speaker 1 45:42
Right,

Maureen 45:42
there’s always a balance, and we just need to be thoughtful.

Speaker 1 45:46
You just need to approach it in a way to accomplish those goals, but that also gives you the conviction to prioritize, which, as you know, we’ve seen many leaders failure to prioritize effectively be their downfall. They’re so focused on micromanaging, they’re so focused on details, they’re so focused on items that aren’t that important, so they miss the mark on the greater, the greater responsibility.

Maureen 46:16
There’s so often a third way, there’s the rules, there’s the ridiculous, but how do we meet the goals of our stakeholders in a way that can be creative, and I watched that in the leadership team meeting today in several ways that we talk about, we’re in an era where we’re solving for things we never had to solve for before, so there isn’t a rule, but we have the principles that inform each of us, so we value our employees, but we’re also balancing revenue. We can’t just not have people come to work and keep paying them or something ridiculous. We value a brilliant customer experience, but you can’t burn out your employees. So, what’s that ongoing realignment, recalibration to ensure that everyone’s experience is productive? Yeah,

Speaker 1 47:09
it’s, I mean, and of course, COVID really shine the light on that, right? I mean, there was no book that we could have looked at that said, how do you, how do you navigate an organization successfully through the biggest pandemic in our history, and you just have to continue to think you have to be willing to make mistakes, you have to continue to do what’s what you think is right.

Maureen 47:31
I love that comment. So, George, where would people learn more about you and Red Roof?

Speaker 1 47:37
Well, there’s several places to go, of course. If you want to book a hotel room, you can go to Red roof.com If you want to own a franchise, you can go to Red Roof franchising.com If you want to see what’s going on in my world, feel free to follow me on LinkedIn, and obviously Red Roof, you can follow on all the social media channels.

Maureen 47:58
So, if you are interested in the Red roof women’s center of excellence. Please also reach out on LinkedIn

Speaker 1 48:08
or go to Red Roof franchising.com for more information.

Maureen 48:11
So, George, thank you. It is always a pleasure to have the opportunity to share the person you are, and we so often look at leaders in these roles, and we think of them as the stereotype of whatever view we have of leader or president, and I love that people get to hear who you are and how you think about things, and for our listeners who aspire to be in these roles and some who aspire not to be in these roles because they think that the people who get to those jobs have sold out. You’re a brilliant example of someone who has maintained and strengthened the virtuous character as you’ve gone through the process, and because of that, you’re able to permeate the entire organization with that sense of high moral character, irrespective of religion or anything like that, just highly principled, and that inspires the loyalty of your team, and hopefully the customers, and community, and owners, and everyone else that you would call stakeholders, so I appreciate the opportunity to have the conversation and share your story.

Speaker 1 49:26
Thank you so much. Thanks again for having me

Maureen 49:28
to our listeners. Thank you for joining the conversation. Please like us, share us, and continue to listen and continue to make an impact. If you take anything away from this conversation about how can you be even more ethical in your judgment and the behaviors you demonstrate in a time in history where we so need your leadership, please look to George as a role model for how you might up your game in your own leadership roles, do.

Speaker 2 50:17
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