If there’s a hat in the lodging industry, Jim Abrahamson has probably worn it.
He’s filled hourly positions and general manager roles at individual properties and provided executive leadership in operations, finance and development, and franchising across portfolios at several major brands. While Abrahamson’s breadth of experience helps him make sense of the many issues impacting the industry around the world, it also connects him to the thousands of people working across so many facets of lodging, from frontline employees to investors and developers. It also helps that he’s the CEO of the industry’s largest third-party management company, which oversees a portfolio of 450 hotels, 45 brands, and 30,000 employees around the world. His responsibilities at Virginia-based Interstate Hotels & Resorts put him at the pinnacle of leadership in the lodging industry. But like many in the hotel industry, he grew from much humbler beginnings.
“I started as a desk clerk, but I also had to work my way through college,” Abrahamson says. “It was not only a great training ground, it helped me pay my rent and tuition.” By the time he was 26 years old, Abrahamson had worked in the kitchens of restaurants, hospitals, and, of course, a hotel. At the Registry Hotel in Bloomington, Minn., he got valuable cross-training in all its departments, not just operations but also management and finance.
Abrahamson’s route to the top mirrors the emerging model of 21st-century chief executives. Increasingly, the people moving into CEO roles have experience across a wide range of disciplines. “They spend time in operations, finance, then they go into marketing, and they spend time in strategy,” says Robert Rosen, Ph.D., psychologist, and CEO of Healthy Companies International. Over the past 25 years, Rosen’s consulting firm has worked with more than 500 CEOs in 50-some countries, many of them in the lodging industry. He’s used this experience to write six books on leadership, including his most recent, Grounded: How Leaders Stay Rooted in an Uncertain World.
Rosen has observed across all industries that the most successful CEOs today share a common core set of traits and career paths that are markedly different from those of CEOs a generation ago. “In the traditional line of progression, most CEOs came from finance or marketing,” Rosen says. “But the path to the CEO’s office has really broadened in the last several years.”
Today, you have CEOs who come from operations jobs, and lawyers from the outside coming into the general counsel office, as well as people from finance and sales and marketing, heads of strategy, and, increasingly, heads of human resources. “When they get to the top, they look across geographies and across lines of business,” he says. “They’ve got an enterprise mind-set—they understand the pieces for all the stakeholders.” The way Rosen sees it, when people work their way to the top of their chosen field, cross-training the entire way, there’s no need for them to worry about having the kind of passion that mobilizes the hearts and minds of those around them. It’s been there all along.
This multi-discipline trajectory has served Abrahamson well throughout his career. He cites his 12 years with Hilton as a good example of accumulative experience. “I worked my way through the operational side but finished as senior vice president of franchising,” he says. This experience helped Abrahamson later when he headed up development in the Americas for Hyatt at a time when the company was creating a select-service division. And he drew on his deep understanding of operations, franchising, and development as he transitioned to president of the Americas for InterContinental Hotels Group, when IHG was re-launching the Holiday Inn brand and expanding its reach. It was his last stop before coming to Interstate. “Being in the industry 35 years allows me to now lead the largest independent hotel company in the world at a time when we’ve more than doubled in size from 200 hotels to 450 hotels with 30,000 associates.”
Despite Abrahamson’s fast track up the corporate ladder, he would never refer to his achievements in terms of targeted advancement. Instead he describes his career as a linear progression of accumulated experience. “You’re always in a learning mode, and you’re always in a growth mode.” Dieter Huckestein remembers working with Abrahamson when he joined Hilton’s corporate office. Huckestein, who would go on to serve as president of Hilton Global Alliance and then as chairman and CEO of Conrad Hotels, recalls Abrahamson’s attention to detail and his endless energy. “He was the real deal,” says Huckestein, who served as AH&LA board chair in 2004. “With Jim, you get an authenticity that is visible, out on the table. He has clear vision and a keen focus on doing the job with integrity.”
Abrahamson’s new role as AH&LA chair will seriously test the many skills and relationships he has acquired over his three and a half decades in the business. In leading the organization representing the interests of the entire $163 billion lodging industry, he will work on a stage far larger than the individual companies he has led. Fortunately, he sees a clear path forward through the unique and diverse challenges ahead.
Expanding the Stage
As AH&LA chair for the next two years, Abrahamson’s looking to find new ways to strengthen and protect the lodging industry. Being based near Washington, D.C., allows him to be a difference maker, addressing issues that help create a rising tide that benefits all hotel companies. “My job as CEO of Interstate is to improve our revenues, provide returns to owners, manage expenses, and have the world’s best management company,” he says. “That’s my goal, and involvement in AH&LA allows me to do that, meaning I can have a direct impact on the challenges facing us.”
He has a history of this kind of industry involvement, most recently as 2014 National Chairman of the U.S. Travel Association and as a member of the AH&LA Governmental Affairs Committee and of the advisory board of the Pillsbury Institute for Hospitality Entrepreneurship before that. For the AH&LA, he entered the executive volunteer ranks in 2013 as secretary, then treasurer, and now chair for 2015 and 2016. “This is why you get involved,” he says. “Creating a strong association means getting everyone’s engagement as well as their commitment to building a strong PAC.” The side benefit of enlisting people in the industry to think of these issues as part of their day jobs is that it broadens their focus to a bigger cause.
This approach goes to the heart of Rosen’s most significant observation of successful leaders. “In interviewing people from Toyota to Pepsico to Ford, the best CEOs drive their companies with their values and higher purposes for the company,” Rosen says, adding that the one area that predicts people’s leadership performance better than any other is a sense of belonging to something bigger than they are. “Those leaders who exhibit this broader connection are rated by bosses, peers, and subordinates as being better leaders.”
Interstate President and COO Ted Knighton points to his boss’s ability to connect to something larger as what won him over when Abrahamson joined the company in 2011. “Jim is a consensus builder and strategic thinker,” Knighton says. “Above all, he strongly believes in building relationships—whether with our own colleagues, our owners, the brands, or the industry leaders we work with.”
In working with AH&LA over the next two years to confront a raft of new and ongoing issues, Abrahamson will marshal his wealth of strong industry relationships and strategic vision to move forward an ambitious to-do list. “Number one on our list for 2015 is advancing the causes of our industry in Congress and at the White House,” he says. “We want to ensure the industry is well represented and well known as being an economic benefactor—that the U.S. economy benefits from this industry, that it’s all about job creation and career development that’s vitally important to everyone.”
Number two on Abrahamson’s list is dealing with rising threats to the hotel industry: drastic minimum wage hikes, changes to the industry’s traditional franchise model by the National Labor Relations Board, fast-moving developments in distribution and technology, and the shared-economy companies like Airbnb, which many hoteliers see as skirting the law and using deceptive practices.
Then, there are ongoing issues such as terrorism risk insurance, the health care rollout, immigration reform, and online travel companies, among others. With those, Abrahamson says, we play offense. “We’re looking to increase our occupancies, and we want to ensure through our advocacy efforts that these revenue lines can benefit—whether from ensuring passage of TRIA to making sure we do as much as possible to strength travel and tourism promotion. So, 2015 will be a matter of ensuring we’ve got a consistent message, play offense, and play defense.”
Abrahamson will be working closely with Katherine Lugar, who took over for long-time AH&LA President and CEO Joe McInerney following his retirement just over a year ago. Lugar came to the association after highly regarded government affairs roles with Travelers Insurance and Retail Industry Leaders Association. She sees a common thread running through AH&LA’s long line of chairs: strong relationships throughout the industry combined with broad leadership abilities and a strong capacity for strategic guidance.
“Jim possesses those qualities,” Lugar says. “Not to mention his own personal story, rising from a front desk clerk to CEO. There is no question that Jim will be instrumental in taking us to the next level.” Lugar acknowledges the hard work that went into the association’s pivotal year in 2014. “But we’re not letting up,” she says. “With Jim’s leadership, we hope to continue that growth and further expand engagement.”
Taking the Baton
“We often talk about our industry as one that helps people achieve the American Dream, and that is so true,” Abrahamson says. “I am living my American Dream.” Looking back to that pivotal moment when he landed his first hotel job at 26, Abrahamson says he had no idea of how far he would go. “I worked hard and had the good fortune to move around and up.”
Providing a wide array of avenues for career advancement is something that distinguishes lodging from other industries, particularly for those who enter at the line level. “It’s clear that the industry is a launching pad for everyone,” he says. “I know many executives in this industry who started out at the line level.” What’s impressive is how much their skill sets and leadership aptitudes anticipated years in advance the big tent approach to industry advocacy that so many hotel companies have adopted.
In taking over the reins from 2014 AH&LA Chair John Fitzpatrick of the Fitzpatrick Hotel Group, Abrahamson will work with a fully revamped membership structure and executive leadership. Years of research and planning went into creating a wider, more industry-representative model. Membership constituencies now include brands, owners, management companies, independent hotels, partner state associations, and allied vendors and suppliers. “We chose advocacy to be the signature component of what we stand for,” Abrahamson says. “We sharpened our focus, and we’ve created a three-year strategic plan that focuses on the elements of our organization and the needs of our members.”
Thanks to Fitzpatrick, AH&LA can charge into 2015 unencumbered by organizational restructuring and leadership transition. Abrahamson knows the transition couldn’t have been done without his predecessor’s work. “John’s advice to me is to just run with it. Take it forward from here. He said that we have a great team and terrific voluntary leadership, the new model is in place, and the wind is at our backs. So take it and run with it.”
