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Marriott: Where Everyone Belongs

IT’S A RED CARPET NIGHT IN A huge hotel ballroom for the world’s largest hospitality company, Marriott International. The ceremony on this particular night is for the J. Willard Marriott Award of Excellence, honoring company associates who exemplify Marriott’s core values.

The house lights come down, the screens go up. On video, images of Marriott employees doing their daily jobs scroll past as the voiceover is heard: “I grew up in poverty. We had nothing. Marriott gave me a chance to lift myself out of it. This job changed my life and the lives of my children. Whole generations in my family will never be the same.”

Since the company’s beginnings in 1927, long before inclusive leadership was a thing, Marriott’s number one priority has been putting people first. From the outset, they understood that every human being wants an opportunity to build a rewarding and meaningful life, to be respected and valued. Take care of the associates, they will take care of the customers, and the customers will return, as the founder for whom the award is named would say.

That bass line of reciprocity—associates being taken care of and they, in turn, taking care of guests—is the foundation of Marriott’s inclusive culture and the driving force behind its extraordinary growth into a company valued in excess of $20 billion.

Like musicians laying down different musical tracks on top of the bass line, Marriott has laid down various culture-shaping tracks over their people-first value to make the associate and guest experiences deeper, richer, and more meaningful. One of those culture-shaping tracks is based on commonalities, another on differences.

The commonality track focuses on the core longings that people have, despite their differences. “At Marriott, we want everyone to feel that they belong, that they are family,” says Executive Vice President and Global Chief Human Resources Officer David Rodriguez. “It’s about a sense of unity that better enables us to love the unique qualities that make each of us special.”

In the differences track, Marriott has zeroed in on celebrating those unique qualities of its employees and guests. Exemplified by its groundbreaking #LoveTravels campaign, Marriott strives to inspire those who share its commitment to and support of acceptance and inclusion of all.

INCLUSION BY SURFACING COMMONALITIES

David Rodriguez is also a PhD in industrial/organizational psychology. From his informed perspective, the key to inclusion is a culture of shared values. Much of his leadership energy is rooted in the enabling traits of our Inclusive Leader model. For him, the outcome-based five disciplines are the natural outgrowth of being grounded in the more values-based traits.

“A sound corporate culture is vital to business success,” he says. “But it can’t be imposed on a company or defined retroactively. Debating the kind of culture you should have is likely the wrong discussion. The real discussion should be about how you champion your core values. The culture will follow.” Rodriguez develops strategies based on his and the company’s belief that “everyone wants community, purpose, and opportunity.” Here’s how.

COMMUNITY

Rodriguez points to research indicating two keys to happiness: personal relationships and social networks. “Since we spend so much of our waking hours at work, the ability to build meaningful relationships on the job is vital to our well-being,” he explains. “This in turn will strengthen organizations as workforces channel their increased commitment and enthusiasm to tackling the many challenges businesses invariably face.”

The holistic well-being program TakeCare, launched in 2010, is one way in which Marriott fosters community among its more than 730,000 people worldwide who wear a Marriott badge of some kind. It offers a spectrum of enrichment programs worldwide, including programs focused on stress management, exercise and fitness, nutrition and weight management, financial well-being, career advancement, engagement, team building, and inclusion. In 2019, Marriott “gamified” the program with TakeCare Level30, an app-based well-being challenge available for associates and guests. Players can partner up and compete to help build positive, rewarding behaviors like meditation, reading, and movement into a daily routine. Marriott also established a Healthy Hotel Certification program to publicly recognize hotels for creating a healthy work environment for their associates.

PURPOSE

Marriott celebrates associates who go above and beyond to meet the needs of their guests and to serve the communities in which they operate. To provide access to opportunities to serve, Serve 360 was rolled out as a social impact platform addressing some of the world’s most pressing social, environmental, and economic issues. For example, Marriott International trained more than six hundred thousand hotel workers in human trafficking awareness and is on the forefront of multiple sustainability initiatives.

OPPORTUNITY

While we usually see the opposite in our own Korn Ferry D&I diagnostics database, Rodriguez reports that Marriott’s workforce data doesn’t show significant differences in job satisfaction based on race, ethnicity, age, or gender. This is in many ways a reflection of how Marriott is able to offer tens of thousands of opportunities, many with low barriers to entry, which can transform the trajectory of an individual’s life and their ability to provide for their families—as in the case of the employees featured on the ballroom screen in the opening story.

The Emerging Leader Program, a signature inclusive leadership development program, identifies high-performing associates at varying career points and puts them through a yearlong development and sponsorship program. More than 1,500 associates have completed or are enrolled in the program; more than half of the participants are women, and more than a third are racial/ethnic minorities. Nearly 100% of participants have been promoted or selected for strategic developmental roles after going through the program.

The Women’s Leadership Development Initiative, launched more than twenty years ago, seeks to develop a strong pipeline of women leaders and provides networking and mentoring. Today, 92% of women at Marriott feel they are treated fairly, regardless of their gender, and 82% say everyone has the opportunity to get special recognition—roughly the same percentage as men—according to the latest Great Places to Work survey.¹

Today, more than 40% of the top one thousand Marriott leaders are women—and that includes the C-suite, at 44%. Marriott has established a goal to achieve parity in gender representation for global leadership by 2025, and the proportion of people of color among their senior leadership is 78% higher than the average for hotel companies that are Great Place to Work–certified.

With a multitude of high-impact approaches based on commonality, however, there are still differences that make a difference. How do Marriott’s inclusive leaders address this reality?

INCLUSION BY SURFACING DIFFERENCES

One of the most explicit ways in which Marriott surfaced the beauty and power of differences was through its recognition of the breadth of its guests’ diversity.

Since 2014, #LoveTravels—the cornerstone of Marriott’s purpose-driven marketing program—has represented the celebration and support of inclusion, equality, human rights, and peace. #LoveTravels launched with a message of acceptance through the telling of stories from diverse travelers.

Marriott says of the campaign, “When #LoveTravels, the world is a more inclusive and peaceful place.” This sentiment informs the work the company does, because as a hospitality company, it views providing a safe and comfortable environment for guests and associates—regardless of age, race, gender, sexual orientation, or ability—as a core responsibility. It also illustrates that love is a universal language, and when it travels, it has the power to bridge cultures and inspire discovery around the world.

The campaign broke more barriers than many realized at first glance. Marriott’s #LoveTravels outreach revealed a sophisticated and nuanced understanding of diversity, particularly with regard to intersectionality. For example, it showcased the full spectrum of the LGBTQ+ community: a couple getting married on one of Marriott’s properties, a Gen X lesbian couple, LGBTQ+ couples with and without kids, single gays and lesbians, older gay Baby Boomers, and so on.

Understanding of diversity within the traditional diversity labels also was apparent. There were stories of Blacks and Latinos and Latinas in different stages of life looking for a range of experiences—everything from adventure to glamour and from sports to pampering. In some instances, Latinos were English dominant, while others were Spanish dominant or even Spanglish dominant. Marriott also zeroed in on long-standing and popular traditions in various demographics, including large family reunions and multigenerational travel.

This cultural sensibility continues to be reflected in a multitude of ways. For instance, Marriott has become known in certain regions, such as the Washington, DC–Baltimore area, for example, as a go-to place for Indian weddings.²

When it came to structural inclusion, in 2013 Marriott debuted brands with particular Millennial appeal (AC Hotels and Moxy), and in 2015 Marriott opened a new hotel in Indiana called Courtyard Muncie. The hotel is the first teaching hotel in the United States for people with disabilities; 20% of its 219 staffers have intellectual and/or developmental disabilities.³

BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER

Let’s look at Marriott’s D&I outcomes through the lens of the five disciplines. CEO Sorenson’s approachability and continual efforts to visit and engage with associates at properties around the world, whether it’s a morning run or via a provocative video or thoughtful post, have gone a long way in perpetuating the Marriott family feel that generates a great deal of interpersonal trust.

Marriott’s original international growth strategy was to provide US businessmen with a feeling of home when they traveled abroad; however, it has since evolved its US-centric focus. Sorenson gave significantly more autonomy to the leaders in other parts of the world by creating four regions and empowering them to make their own growth decisions, anchored in meeting guests’ expectations.

“I can’t make all those decisions,” Sorensen sagely said as he integrated diverse perspectives, balanced stakeholders through decentralization, and found a very effective way to manage the inevitable conflict that diversity brings.⁴

Marriott has consistently earned best-in-class category engagement scores for two decades, showing up on best employer lists time and again. And visitors to their more than 7,300 properties around the world consistently experience staff who are welcoming, helpful, and attentive as a result of strong training and feeling valued by their employer. This is the epitome of optimizing talent by driving engagement, developing talent, and encouraging collaboration.

Moreover, Marriott’s #LoveTravels campaign was the result of an adaptive mindset that cultivated innovation and was situationally adaptive.

Marriott’s financial success and status as an employer of choice is proof it knows how to leverage diversity and inclusion to achieve transformation by driving results.

Marriott, like the other exemplars here, celebrates its accomplishments; however, it realizes it still has a long way to go. Inclusive leadership is needed to further the advancement of people of color, of women, of people with disabilities, of veterans, and of younger generations. And while there has been skillful situational adaptability to manage conflict, overall, the company has a conflict-averse culture that has at times led to unintended consequences, such as team members not always being sure of how well they are performing.

END SCENE

After a day of juggling budget meetings, strategic sessions, and vendor selection, Rodriguez and Maruiel Perkins-Chavis, Vice President of Workforce Engagement and Global Diversity and Inclusion, are at the modernized Marriott cafeteria during a Chinese New Year dragon dance. The cafeteria is packed and the mood is celebratory. As the dragon slithers throughout the audience, I (Andrés) think back to something I heard Rodriguez say in one of our many conversations over the years: “Diversity and inclusion has been the number one factor of success in our ninety years.”

The dragon bobs his enormous head up and down. The musicians bang their cymbals. The dancers leap.

It’s taken generations of inclusive leadership at Marriott to create a culture of family and belonging, where all are treated with dignity and respect.

It’s what happens when leaders and organizations put people first.

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