SHA Leadership Summit: Workshops for Women. Discussion for All.

By Joel Brown

Leora Lanz has a story to explain why it was so important that the BU School of Hospitality Administration hold the SHA Leadership Summit for young women entering the industry.

“For the last 20 years, I’ve been attending a major hotel investment conference in New York City,  and it’s been a sea of suits, with over a thousand attendees and nearly 90 percent of them men,” says Lanz, a SHA lecturer and co-chair of the Summit. “Several years ago, the conference actually presented an opening general session with female leaders in lodging. I was thrilled to attend. And do you know what happened? The men started to walk out of the ballroom and head to the public areas so they could network and make their deals. They didn’t stay to listen.”

That lack of respect for women leaders in the industry “made me crazy,” Lanz says, as did the session’s focus on how those women balanced work and family – a question never put to the men.

Nearly 80 percent of SHA’s students are female. Lanz and Summit co-chairs Taylor Peyton, a SHA assistant professor, and Jamie Mangiameli, a theology graduate student and SHA staff assistant, wanted to inspire those young women by powering up the Summit with female role models representing diverse backgrounds, experiences and industry positions.

At the event on March 22-23, roughly 100 student attendees and volunteers , both undergraduates and graduates, came together with two dozen professionals, to learn, discuss, and network. The co-chairs and an all-female student organizing committee recruited top executives from Hilton Hotels & Resorts, RLJ Lodging Trust, the Envoy Hotel Boston, hospitality consultancy HVS, Marcus Hotels and Resorts, The Langham Hotels and Resorts and more to share their experiences and advice.

Keynote speakers were Vera Manoukian, senior vice president and global brand head for Hilton, and Leslie Hale, CEO of RLJ Lodging Trust. Other guests included Anthony Melchiorri, an industry veteran who is the creator and host of Travel Channel’s “Hotel Impossible” and “Extreme Hotels,” as well as the only male on the bill; Tzurit Or, founder of Boston’s popular Tatte Bakery and Café; and Crystal Williams, BU’s associate provost for diversity and inclusion.

“It is almost unconscionable that even in 2019 women face discrimination in many spheres of our society,” said Arun Upneja, SHA dean and professor. “As an academic institution, we are not able to directly impact working conditions in the broader society, however we can provide our female students with the tools and confidence to succeed in a society that sometimes stacks the decks against them.”

Speakers and workshop leaders alike focused on practical responses to both the innate difficulties of today’s lightning-fast work environment and the extra challenges many women face. “It’s good to learn about life and how you’re going to deal with that once you are out of here,” Manoukian said Friday, in an account of her own rise from modest beginnings in Lebanon to the executive suite at Hilton.

“I am confident that in this room there are plenty of talented women who could ascend to the level where I am,  if given the opportunity,” Hale told students attending her Saturday-morning keynote. “My role is that we push to make sure women have a seat at the table. Your role is to be prepared.”

Women-only workshops on Communication, Managing Up/Managing Down, and Negotiation Skills used candid discussion and role-playing to offer concrete advice and build the confidence for students that Upneja described. “The Summit engages the tension of a male-dominated industry by equipping students with tools for success in personal and professional development,” said Mangiameli.

But the Summit was not exclusively for SHA’s female students. “We deliberately did not call this a ‘Women’s’ leadership event, but simply a ‘Leadership Summit,” as we felt it was as important for our male students to be as inspired by these phenomenal female leaders in hospitality,” Lanz said.

The men who attended received special attention during a personal and conversational session with Melchiorri. “There are many men making rules in human resources about how we treat each other, and in an office environment they will treat a woman with respect, and then as soon as that person leaves the room, they may make an inappropriate comment, and that disgusts me,” he said. “I just don’t think there’s any room anywhere in a business environment to do that.”

Behind the scenes, the conference also gave student organizers an experiential learning opportunity – a SHA hallmark – as they introduced panelists, wrangled schedules and mastered gift-bag etiquette. Sophomore Eden McColl found herself rethinking how she approaches and solves problems. “I learned how to recognize and hone my strengths and use them to challenge myself by taking on responsibilities that pushed me out  of my comfort zone, such as speaking in front of a large crowd full of my classmates and prominent industry leaders.” Those are lessons she can use not only as a student but in her future career, she says.

“When we support the professional development of our next generation of women leaders like this, it benefits society as a whole, not just the early-career students attending this Summit,” said Peyton. The evidence speaks for itself, she says, as businesses and organizations that embrace diverse talent tend to be higher-performing, while others hold onto deeply-rooted stereotypes, insufficient policies, or other barriers that prevent the advancement of women.

“We need to approach these issues with greater awareness,” Peyton says, “and that’s part of what this weekend is all about.”

Joel Brown is a staff writer at BU Today and Bostonia magazine. He’s had 794 bylines in the Boston Globe, writing about everything from the hiring of Boston’s new arts czar to what it’s like to climb on top of a wind turbine (surprisingly peaceful). He previously worked for the Boston Herald and the Greenfield Recorder, among others. He graduated from the University of New Hampshire, where he majored in pinball and the student newspaper. He is a Massachusetts native, a lifelong Red Sox fan and a North Shore resident.