Responsibility 1: Setting the Direction – The North Star
Everything starts with the guest. As CEO, your most fundamental responsibility is to set the company’s direction by clearly defining who your target guest is and how you will win their loyalty.
This is how you answer the two most critical strategic questions. Where are we going? You are leading your teams to deliver a consistently superior guest experience. How will we win? You will win by mastering the five timeless stages of the hotel guest journey: Attract, Capture, Prepare, Deliver, and Review. Your company’s strategy is its plan to excel at every single stage. More on the guest journey here:
The Multi-Hotel Challenge
In a company with 30 hotels and a siloed headquarters, this guest journey shatters at the hand-offs. Your Marketing department (focused on Attract) runs a brilliant campaign promising personalized luxury. However, your IT and Revenue Management teams (focused on Capture) use a booking engine that is efficient but generic, failing to gather the guest preferences needed for the Front Office (focused on Prepare) to personalize the arrival. The on-property team (focused on Deliver) is then forced to greet a high-value guest like a stranger, breaking the brand promise before they even get to their room.
As CEO, you must personally drive these three actions:
- Mandate a single “Guest Profile.” You must lead the executive team in defining and obsessing over your ideal guest. This single profile becomes the non-negotiable filter for all decisions. If a new IT project, marketing campaign, or F&B menu doesn’t serve this guest, you don’t do it.
- Forge cross-functional “Guest Journey Teams.” Bring your siloed leaders into one room and map out every touchpoint across the five stages. You must create permanent teams (e.g., Marketing, IT, and Ops) responsible for the guest’s seamless transition from Capture to Prepare to Deliver.
- Fund the “Moments that Matter.” A strategy-first budget asks, “What technology do we need to perfect the Capture stage? What training and staffing are required for an exceptional Deliver stage?” You must shift resources away from departmental wish lists and boldly fund the key touchpoints that truly define your brand.
The Reward: Clarity
When you successfully set the direction, the result is crystal clear: your guests feel it. You stop getting “good” reviews and start getting 10/10 reviews that tell a story. The ultimate reward is watching your hotels consistently achieve higher guest satisfaction scores than any of your competitors.
Responsibility 2: Aligning the Organization – The Blueprint
A brilliant strategy is useless if your organization cannot execute it. Aligning the organization means shaping your culture, talent, and information systems to work in perfect harmony. You must transform your company from a collection of functional departments into a unified team, all pulling in the same direction—toward the guest journey you defined.
The Multi-Hotel Challenge
Siloed headquarters wage a civil war of conflicting priorities, and your General Managers are the battlefield. Your Operations team demands strict labor cost controls, while your Marketing team simultaneously launches a new campaign that requires additional amenities. Finance denies a capital request for a lobby refresh that HR deems essential for the Deliver stage. Your GMs are caught in an impossible crossfire, and a fragmented culture develops where teams feel loyal to their property first and the company second.
As CEO, you must drive these three actions to create true alignment:
- Champion a “Single Source of Truth.” This is the oil in the machinery. You must personally mandate and invest in a unified hotel business intelligence (BI) solution. This platform brings all critical data—guest reviews from the Review stage, booking pace from Capture, and operational costs from Deliver—into one accessible dashboard. Alignment is impossible when your leaders are arguing about whose spreadsheet is correct.
- Install shared, cross-departmental KPIs. Now that everyone sees the same data, you must make them accountable for the same outcomes. Using your BI platform, you must ensure the heads of Finance, Marketing, and Operations are measured on Guest Satisfaction (NPS), GOP%, and Marginal Flow-Through. This forces them to find solutions together rather than just optimizing their own reports.
- Personally ignite a “One Company” culture. Data and KPIs only work in a culture of trust. You must relentlessly communicate and champion a “One-Company” culture that values collaboration. You must publicly celebrate and reward teams that use the shared BI data to break silos and solve a guest’s problem. Make collaborative behavior the fastest path to a promotion.
The Reward: Consistency
The reward for alignment is consistency. When your organization is aligned, a guest receives the same outstanding brand experience whether they are staying in your downtown property or your flagship resort. You create a seamless culture where a front desk agent and a finance analyst both feel empowered by, and responsible for, delivering on the exact same guest promise.
Responsibility 3: Mobilizing Through Leaders – The Force Multipliers
You cannot run 30 hotels by yourself. Your most leveraged role as CEO is to mobilize your leaders. You must transform your HQ executives and your hotel General Managers from individual managers into a single, high-performing leadership team that collectively owns the guest journey.
The Multi-Hotel Challenge
In a siloed company, the executive “team” isn’t a team at all. It’s a group of functional chiefs who meet to protect their turf and report on their own results, not to solve enterprise-level problems. Your General Managers feel the downstream effect: they are isolated, receiving conflicting orders from different HQ bosses. They have no forum to challenge corporate or share the brilliant innovations they are developing at their own properties.
As CEO, you must drive these three actions to mobilize your leaders:
- Re-charter your executive meeting. Ban departmental reports from your top team meeting (send those in a memo). The only agenda for your executive team must be solving the company’s biggest cross-functional problems. Use this time to ask, “What is currently breaking our Prepare stage, and how can we as a group fix it?”
- Launch a General Manager’s Council that you personally chair. Use this forum not for you to talk, but for your GMs to solve. Make it a peer-to-peer powerhouse where your best GMs can showcase how they improved the Deliver stage, help other GMs adopt their ideas, and give you unfiltered feedback on what HQ needs to fix.
- Make “silo-busting” a non-negotiable leadership competency. You must tie executive and GM bonuses directly to the shared KPIs you created in Part 2 and to their demonstrated collaboration. When your leaders see you promoting the people who help other departments succeed, the silos will crumble.
The Reward: Speed & Innovation
The reward for mobilizing your leaders is speed and innovation. Problems get solved in days, not months, because your GMs and executives collaborate directly, not escalate issues up and down siloed chains of command. You unleash a wave of innovation from your properties instead of just pushing memos down from HQ.
Responsibility 4: Engaging the Board – The Strategic Partners
Your board of directors should be a strategic asset, not just a group of supervisors. Engaging the board means proactively managing this relationship. Your job is to elevate their focus from simply reviewing last quarter’s numbers to actively helping you look around corners, challenge your assumptions, and champion your long-term vision.
The Multi-Hotel Challenge
Siloed leadership teams give disjointed and confusing board presentations. Your CFO presents a complex financial-only story, and your Operations head discusses staffing models. The board is left trying to piece together a puzzle with no picture on the box. They never see the single strategic narrative. This forces them to obsess over small financial details because they can’t see the big picture.
As CEO, you must drive these three actions to engage your board:
- Present one unified strategic narrative. You must own the entire board presentation. Every departmental update must be framed in the context of your five-stage guest journey. Show the board how a capital investment in the Capture stage (a new booking engine) will directly drive the financial results they see.
- Use site visits to make the strategy tangible. Don’t just meet in a boardroom. Take your board members to your hotels. But don’t just have the GM present; have them present jointly with an HQ executive. Let the board see your Head of IT and a Front Office Manager demonstrate together how a new tool is improving the Prepare stage.
- Assign board members as mentors to strategic initiatives. Instead of asking a director to “advise the finance department,” ask them to mentor the cross-functional team you created to improve the Prepare stage. This gets them involved in your strategic projects, leverages their expertise, and turns them into passionate advocates for your “One Company” culture.
The Reward: Confidence & Conviction
The reward is confidence and conviction. A fully engaged board doesn’t just approve your strategy; they champion it. They have the confidence to support you through a down quarter because they understand and believe in the long-term vision. They become your most powerful allies, helping you secure the resources you need to win.
Responsibility 5: Connecting with Stakeholders – The Voice of Trust
As CEO, you are the public face of your company. You are responsible for building trust with every stakeholder, from guests and investors to partners and the local communities where your hotels operate. Connecting with stakeholders means defining and living your company’s purpose and ensuring that the promises you make in public are the promises your teams deliver on property.
The Multi-Hotel Challenge
Silos are the single greatest threat to stakeholder trust. Your Marketing team (Attract) tells investors a story of seamless service. But your guests experience a clunky booking engine from IT (Capture), and investors grow frustrated when your financial reports seem disconnected from your brand story. In a crisis—like a poor health inspection at one hotel—a siloed response can destroy your reputation in hours.
As CEO, you must drive these three actions to build unified stakeholder trust:
- Act as the company’s “Storyteller-in-Chief.” You must personally craft and repeat one single, consistent story for all stakeholders. That story, rooted in your five-stage guest journey, must connect your brand promise to your financial performance. Investors and guests should hear the same core message.
- Build a direct feedback loop from stakeholders to your silos. You must be the conduit for the stakeholder’s voice. Bring raw guest feedback from the Review stage—not a sanitized report—directly to your executive team. Force your department heads to hear, firsthand, the external impact of their internal silos.
- Develop and drill a unified crisis communication plan. Do not wait for a crisis. You must lead your executive team (Legal, PR, Ops, HR) to create a pre-vetted playbook for every likely scenario. Who speaks for the company? What is the first message? A unified plan ensures you speak with one voice when it matters most.
The Reward: Trust & Resilience
The reward for connecting with stakeholders is trust and resilience. When your story is consistent, investors gain confidence, guests become loyal advocates, and partners want to grow with you. When a crisis inevitably hits one of your properties, the deep trust you’ve built gives you the benefit of the doubt, allowing you to manage the situation and recover quickly.
Responsibility 6: Managing Personal Effectiveness – The Fulcrum
The final responsibility is perhaps the most personal: leading yourself. You are the company’s ultimate resource. How you manage your time, energy, and focus determines your effectiveness. You must remain above the daily fray, conserving your energy for the enterprise-level problems that only you can solve.
The Multi-Hotel Challenge
The CEO role constantly tries to pull you into the weeds. With 30+ hotels, your day can be consumed by reactive firefighting. Your “home” discipline (be it finance or ops) will act like a magnet, pulling you into problems your executive team should be solving. You risk becoming the company’s chief bottleneck, losing the enterprise-wide perspective you need to lead.
As CEO, you must drive these three actions to protect your effectiveness:
- Audit your calendar with religious discipline. You must ruthlessly protect your time. A quarterly review will reveal if you are truly working on your key priorities. Ask: “How much of my time was spent on cross-functional, strategic issues versus siloed problems?” If you are not spending the majority of your time on the future, you are failing at your job.
- Schedule “reality checks” by walking your properties. You must get unfiltered information. Schedule regular, unstructured visits to your hotels with the sole purpose of listening to frontline staff and guests. Use this time to ask, “What is the dumbest thing we at HQ make you do?” You will get the ground truth on your guest journey and see which silos are causing the most friction.
- Build a strong CEO office to act as your integrator. You cannot be the integrator alone. Appoint a chief of staff or build a small, agile CEO office. Their job is not to be a gatekeeper, but to be your cross-silo project manager, ensuring the strategic initiatives you launched in Parts 1-5 are actually moving forward and filtering information so you can stay focused.
The Reward: Clarity & Longevity
The reward is clarity and longevity. By managing yourself effectively, you gain the clarity to see the real problems, not just the loudest ones. You avoid burnout and lead with a sustainable, positive energy that inspires your entire organization. You become a force for strategic progress, not a bottleneck for daily operations.
Conclusion: From Silos to Synergy
The role of a modern hospitality CEO is one of integration. Your company’s success is not defined by the individual excellence of your departments, but by your ability to weave them together into a single organization that flawlessly serves the guest.
You cannot be the head of Marketing, Operations, and Finance. You must be the conductor.
Using this framework, you can lead your company’s transformation. You can break down the walls between your HQ departments. You can empower your General Managers to innovate. You can turn a collection of 30 individual hotels into one powerful, consistent, and beloved brand.
So, look at your calendar for next week. Are you a chief firefighter, or are you the chief conductor? Your answer will define your company’s future.
