Brian Barker, Executive Director, Alliance for Hospitality Equity and Diversity (AHEAD), interviewed by Lan Elliott

Brian shares advice on finding mentors, cultivating champions, and what it takes to nurture those relationships.  He explains how leading with kindness is a key factor in his success and how it can help young people distinguish themselves.  Brian also shares what he wishes he had learned earlier, and the advice he would give his younger self.

Transcript

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Lan Elliott 0:02

Hello and welcome to DEI Advisors. My name is Lan Elliott on behalf of DEI Advisors, and today I am pleased to have a gentleman that I have admired for a number of years on with me, Brian Barker, who is the Executive Director for the Alliance for Hospitality Equity and Diversity, also known as AHEAD. And Brian, I am so happy to finally have you on. Welcome.

Brian Barker 0:30

Lan, it is such a joy and an honor to be with you today. And absolutely, we've been seeing each other now for a couple of years at conferences and I always enjoy when I see your face, it feels you know what, this is a warm place and it's great to be with you here. I know that DEA advisors, you all have had some iconic speakers. And so it's I'm truly humbled and honored to now be a part of this podcast.

Lan Elliott 0:56

Thank you. Thank you so much for being on. Brian, one of the things that both of us share is we wear a number of different hats. But, and I want you to get into that, but I also wanted you to share your career journey, some of the inflection points that you've had along the way, and maybe if you could share what you think are some of the success factors that have led you to where you are today.

Brian Barker 1:21

Absolutely. I know I really appreciate that question. And for me I have to go back. I have to go back to my college years. I matriculated at a historical black college called but doing Cookman in Daytona Beach, Florida, a historical black college. And early on, NSMH National Society of minorities and hospitality. And I was very fortunate to be able to serve. And as a sophomore, in college, we were running a nationwide conference managing collectively a quarter million dollar budget, which was pretty substantial at that time and also networking with industry professionals from Hilton, Hyatt, Marriott, Four Seasons and many of the other management companies and restaurant groups. And so that really. Propelled my career at a very early age. I then immediately went to work as an assistant manager with Four Seasons. Many of my peers were, taking a management and trainee opportunity, which is great, and those opportunities still exist today. But it was based upon my leadership within NSMH and my ability to, to network and facilitate meetings that would allow me to start as an assistant manager. Jumping right into four seasons that in Philadelphia in the operations track we had some great successes. I quickly became known as a good leader of people. And that created opportunities for me to transfer and get promoted. Ultimately I, I landed at the four seasons in Miami. Within about six months of being at that property, I was promoted to front office manager and then eventually I did decide to leave industry, but there was one theme, when you talk about inflection points it's just being good. A good servant of people, right? I think that's extremely been an important sort of characteristic and thread throughout my career. Now that I'm a faculty member, we have to all be student centric, making sure that we're prioritizing students needs regardless of the phase of their journey. Right ahead is really focused on earlier aspect of getting high school and young people excited about hospitality. But what's important, right? Whether you be an industry executive leader or operational leader or a faculty member or now executive director of a nonprofit, as you have to be kind and I'll think take with people, you know that you are serving and who are part of your community, because, That will carry you, right? And I think many of the iconic leaders that I've heard speak on this platform, they talk about being really, people first. And, it's not a cliche. It truly does resonate and has been, one of the sticking points of my success. Even as we have, and I know later we'll probably talk a little bit more about transition, but even as I've navigated some difficult paths through transition, Folks have, gone to bat for me in rooms that I weren't in because they knew that, Brian is a kind person. He's, he works hard and he's willing to go to bat, for the cause. And so I think that truly has been, a staple of my career. And, we all have heard about, elevator pitches and building your brand. I think my brand is pretty synonymous with, being kind and being authentic. And putting people 1st.

Lan Elliott 4:33

Absolutely. And I love the theme. You had mentioned about being a good leader and that was recognized really early on in your career. And that is part of what propelled you to your 1st role coming out of college. And I have to be honest. It's not something that really. You can learn in school. It's almost one of those things you have to learn along the way.

Brian Barker 4:55

Absolutely. No you're absolutely right. It's putting yourself in position to be around people, to network, to engage, to be a part of organizations and associations. It's what you do while you're in college that makes the difference, right? Students often to this day hate group work and most professors, particularly if they have industry experience, they're going to lean on some sort of group assignment because it's so important for young people to understand how to work together. Particularly coming out of the pandemic, we're seeing a lot of young people, challenged and struggling, to, to and, they are strapped with social anxiety, and so we have to support them obviously, but, build them up and set them up for success of the real world, which is working with people. So absolutely. Thank you for that.

Lan Elliott 5:39

Yeah. And definitely, it's very hard to get away from working in groups when you're in, when you're in industry working.

Brian Barker 5:46

Absolutely. Yeah, this is a group business, right? We're all about people.

Lan Elliott 5:50

Absolutely. Let's talk a little bit more about. Learning new things, and we've heard a lot of leaders say that continuous growth is a big part of their path and always developing new skills as you go along in your career and you find you need to learn different things at different points in your career. Is there a leadership skill you wish you had learned earlier? And if so, how did you develop it?

Brian Barker 6:18

Yeah, really great question. The one skill that I'm still developing today, really, honestly, to be very transparent is finance. We're building an organization from the ground up. In, it takes that ability to be able to project, what our revenues or income inflows are going to be for the organization. And as we, began to start to onboard FTS into our organization, that's a major responsibility. And it's incumbent upon me to be able to project and forecast, that we are able to meet the needs of our operation and that we can meet the needs of the great, young folks who are going to be, working for this. This organization. So it truly is a skill that I wish I had developed a little bit earlier on. I learned a little bit about it. You get into, managing, labor and expenses and the operation. But, there's a different sort of level of finance and projecting that is a skill that I wish I had learned in just a little bit earlier. I've always somewhat been good with people. And people is an important piece, but it's the finance that's going to make really the operation, ensure that you have success. So that would, and to your point, being a lifelong learner is truly important.

Lan Elliott 7:26

Absolutely. And I think it's one of the things that makes it fun that you're always have new things that you can learn along the way. If you learned everything that you needed to know in the first 25 years of your life, like what fun would that be?

Brian Barker 7:39

Absolutely. Yeah. We should all be lifelong learners, right? A new skill that I'm learning is how do I manage, extreme excitement rate. To get to a destination when people have different visions and strategies about how we might get there. So find finding the ability to corral that and make sure that we get to our destination. It's a skill that I'm learning, right? This is a new environment for me, and I'm thrilled to be learning it. But again, that authenticity. Being kind to people that networking, having those sort of closed door conversations and making sure that we're all unified is truly what I believe is going to get us to that destination.

Lan Elliott 8:19

So true. And I wanted to go a little bit deeper into AHEAD, because when we met, you were the endowed chair for DEI at FIU. True. And you were in the process of forming a head. Could you share where the idea of a head came from and what you hope to achieve?

Brian Barker 8:40

Absolutely, Nolan. I really appreciate that question. So where did the idea come from? I think if you asked five people, you might get five different answers. And truly that's a testament to almost the organic nature of how a head really was formed. Any It was simply because there was an inflection point, right? Ahead truly was born out of the George Floyd moment in time. The organization Southern Glacial Wine and Spirits, iconic beverage wine and spirits distributor, private company. They did something called an idea distillery, right? Beverage company, distillery, spirits. They have about 20, 000 employees within their organizational structure and their strategy team, truly did a crowd sourcing opportunity in a competition. And there were about five winners. And one of those ideas was that, There needed to be. And again, I should probably back up just a little bit just to provide a little bit more context. So Southern Glacier Hawaiian Experience, again, private, privately owned company. The CEO is Wayne Chaplin. FIU is the Chaplin School of Hospitality. And so that is the namesake of that institution. So there's a great working relationship and the culture between FIU and Southern Glaciers is really well integrated. And so one of the ideas was, oftentimes there's a lot of folks go awry because they're just not really educated on issues related to diversity, equity and inclusion. And so one of the ideas was we should perhaps maybe offer a course within a chaplain school to integrate DEI into both The young people, but also that course would also be made available to our industry professionals. And that being spun into well, if we're going to have a course, then we should have an expert who understands the topic. And perhaps what we need is more than a course, we probably need to. Bring together a community of industry professionals who are going to support diversity, equity, inclusion and support young people getting into hospitality and learning about diversity, equity, inclusion. Fast forward that then turned into a seed fund from Wayne Chaplin and Southern Glaciers to endow a professorship. There was a nationwide search, and I was, very fortunate to land that opportunity, and part of what was incumbent upon me was to create an alliance. And again, there were other folks who were talking about the need to have a diversity, equity, inclusion alliance, right? You and I both are ahead, and you and I both. And so there's a need for us to have deep organizations that collaborate around, centralized issues. And so we started at FIU. It was an initiative at FIU. And we focused on. So we formed a council, a very diverse council, senior leaders from Hilton, Hyatt, Marriott, Southern Glaciers Bacardi some Convention and Visitors Bureau representation, particularly the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau. So we brought together a really dynamic team. Also educational leaders. We had UNLV at the time, the professor who is now at UNSF. University of North Carolina Central. She was with a different institution, right? We had a professor who was with NYU on the council. So we wanted to make sure that we had industry associations and academics all represented. So that we could come together to figure out what the blueprint was to create more diversity in our industry and really recognizing that higher education was going to be quintessential in that process. We developed additional friends and partners. I cannot take the credit of I created this alliance. No, the Alliance was created very organically. I just was selected to be the person to corral the group, which is truly one of my skills of bringing people together. And so now there are many thoughts and ideas and we're streamlining them into two initiatives. One is our campus takeover. Which we have done a great successful one up at Delaware State where, if you survey and we got some data, from one of the major brands in the industry, one of the larger brands, less than 12 percent of their corporate employees have a hospitality background. And we know if you look at the C suite, very few, CEOs and C suite leaders actually have hospitality backgrounds. But then we also are confronted with the talent drain and a labor shortage in our industry. And so one of the initiatives for ahead is, if we recognize that 88 percent of the corporate structure and senior leaders of our organization come from outside of hospitality, then perhaps maybe we should start talking about hospitality more broadly. Earlier in people's college careers, right? And maybe some of them might decide to major or minor in hospitality. But then we also encapsulate this engagement with the career fair and it's a fun career for something unlike anyone has ever really seen, right? It's a carnival style career fair. But it's also a series of educational seminars. All taking place on one college campus and we bring all of our partners from all of the brands and this is an open invitation to any partners and brands who doesn't know anything about our campus takeovers. We're in the final stages of making a selection for our upcoming fall campus takeover. And we're pretty far along having some great conversations for our spring. And so initially there are going to be two, one in the fall, one in the spring or at least over the next year or two that might grow, depending on the size and scope of ahead. And then our second initiative is early high school recruitment. into four year programs. And so we are really close to finalizing a position description and hiring our own recruiter who will work for ahead and be the anchor for us to begin to launch a recruitment initiative that we hope within two to three years will scale across the country. We're going to start in the test market, most likely The Northeast. But we're still trying to finalize what that test market will be. We have surveyed and interviewed 30 academic institutions and made sure that we understand what it means to actually recruit. So we're really committed really to offsetting the labor challenges that's confronted with our industry with diverse talent. We're also recognize that we need to educate more people who are currently in college about what hospitality is. Because we need to sure up the pipeline. If the objective is to create more diverse talent in our industry, so I couldn't be more excited about the work that I'm doing with ahead.

Lan Elliott 15:21

It's certainly exciting all the things that you're working on. And I love the passion that you bring to what you do. I wanted to talk a little bit about getting advice from others, so mentors and champions, and I was wondering if you could share a little bit about mentors and champions. How is how important is it to find them? And how do you go about doing that?

Brian Barker 15:46

Yeah, no, great question. First, Let me just say you're spot on, right? And I think DEI advisors, I know that's a key component of what you all believe in is that you need to have mentors and champions. It's critical, right? I mentioned the organization NSMH, right? One of the pioneering founders of NSMH is Evan Frazier, right? Evan Frazier, a Cornell alum, NSMH was founded at Cornell's campus. I've been, an active member of NSMH and supporter really since the early 2000s. And I've known Evan, pretty much ever since. And so Evan has also created something called the NSMH Legacy Advisory Fund to create long term support for NSMH. And I'm the secretary for that organization. So I mentioned that because Evan truly is a mentor and a champion for me. But one of my first mentors was Dr. Ernie Bogert. Now recently retired, but still very active. Quite a few folks know him. He was my first academic chair. And during my undergraduate years, and when I got the opportunity to teach, he was the first person that I called. I said, Dr. B, I've never really taught before, but I'm honored to have this opportunity. What should I do? And he said, first thing you need to do is go to the HLAA educational, foundation and get your CHE, Certified Hospitality Educator. Educator certificate and do this and do this, right? So it to your point, mentors and champions are paramount in your career. How do you find them? The second part of your question that can be challenging, right? If they're a young, if there is a young person listening to this, right? And I tell my students this all the time on day one. I introduced them to my board, not in person, but I give them the bios of my board and I say this is my board. They are my bosses, but they're also my friends and are also my, my mentors and champions. And guess what? They also are now that for you. And so it's really important that young people, students, that form these relationships with your professors, many of them, particularly if they have industry background, they have a plethora of contacts and resources, right? They may not have the bandwidth to be your mentor, not all of the students, but they can certainly put you in touch with people who are. I, I was at a. At the recently at the NYU investment conference, and I met some of the great student students at the Sorenson Center of Excellence at Howard University. And I met this young lady and quite a few that I met. And she told me she lived in New York that she was working on her masters while living in New York. And then a couple of weeks later, I got a phone call. I was asked to support an organization and they were going to ring the bill during a stock exchange. And I was going to be in California and said, you know what? I can't do it, but guess what? I know a young student who can represent and I introduced that young lady and she, was now on Times Square. Ringing the bell to New York Stock Exchange, right? So take advantage of every opportunity to attend conferences, to meet your professors, to network. And then you really have to drive those relationships, right? If you're looking for a mentor, you can't expect your mentor to call you up, right? Oftentimes I think young people or any young professional, you have this perception that your mentor is going to constantly call you and you have to drive that relationship. There's a young man who built the website for a Hebb's web web, a Hebb's webpage. I met him at a conference. He's also one of the students at the Howard Center. And, I met him and we stayed in contact. I would just get, holiday text messages from him. He started to refer to me as which is short for uncle which is like a familiar, I don't want to say like it's an African American thing, but it, it's just sort of part of like urban culture, to call someone like uncle and we're not related, but he's a really sharp young man. And I took a liking to him because he kept following up and now I'll do anything that I can to support him. We pay for that website to be built. And so that was a contract for him as a college student, to earn an opportunity. And I'm constantly advocating for him every opportunity that I can. So you have to drive those relationships. I'm sorry. That's a long winded answer. But I know how important that is. And I also know how, Oftentimes, young people can, there's a disconnect between, you meet someone who might be successful and you think that because you exchange contact information with them and maybe that first email exchange is very pleasant, right? But if you're a mentee, You have to drive that relationship. You have to get time on that person's calendar and over time as they get to know you and as they get to know the skills that you have, they then can become a champion, right? Because it took me time to get to know this young man and to know, right? He was telling me he was a, he was an IT major at Howard in the hospitality center. I'm like, this is great. This is phenomenal, right? But I didn't quite know at the moment of meeting him how I might be able to leverage his skills and to leverage his talent to give him an opportunity to do something great. And so you have to nurture those relationships. And so that's what I would like to leave with the any aspiring young person looking for a mentor or champion that you have to drive those relationships.

Lan Elliott 20:48

I love that. And I also liked that you distinguished between. The mentor piece, right? You can provide people advice, but it really wasn't until you got to know this young man and had a chance to work with him that you then became his champion to be able to use your political capital and your relationships to help support him. And that's a different kind of relationship, and it's something that has to be earned over time. But I love that you distinguished between that. I wanted to stay with the theme of younger people, because I think something that has changed during the pandemic is we're all figuring out what's the best way to show up. And I would say pre pandemic, you knew there was an office. You went to the office, you were a hard worker. You. Did your job. You did all the things you needed to do, worked hard, built relationships. And then in the pandemic, everyone stayed home. And now people are tiptoeing back to the office a little more than they were. I'm curious in this day and age, what is the best way for a young person to distinguish themselves?

Brian Barker 21:59

Yeah, no, that's a great question. There's a lot more social anxiety in people as a result of the pandemic. And yeah, how do you show up, right? I think at the end of the day, it's similar to what I shared with you, earlier on, is you, we have to be kind. We have to recognize that we're in the people business and that we, we have to. Take an interest in getting to know people as individuals, right? I'll never forget the time, when I was working in Philadelphia and this is Sarah. here just a little bit, to 2003, and it was perhaps one of the worst storms, in, in, in history at the time. And so I remember being a housekeeping assistant manager, and now I'm calling young people to, or calling people to see if they could come in to work, right? Because there's no mess, there's no storm, airports closed. Guess what? Those stay overs still need service. This is four seasons. This is the luxury environment. We can say, it's seven feet of snow outside. I'm sorry. We can't clean your room. That's just unfortunately not the four seasons standard. I'd have to, take this jacket off and go roll up my sleeves and make those beds before we did something like that. And so I will never forget a time, when multiple, housekeepers said, Brian, I'm coming in because it's you. If anybody else had picked up this phone and called me I would have told them no, but because it's you, I'm coming in. Maybe they wanted to shrug my ego. I don't know. Maybe I'm a good looking guy. I don't know. But but nonetheless they came in and they showed up and it's because I made an effort to really treat people like individuals and to listen to them. If I was inspecting rooms, before I pulled out my clipboard and jotted down, what was missing and what was wrong, I wanted to get to know them. You find out so much about people. I learned, one of my housemen, was a scientist from seven to three and was a houseman from four to 11 and nobody in the entire hotel knew that, you just assume, certain things about people and that his father, was a diplomat in a foreign country. And there was a traumatic story associated with that. And so it's so important that we get to know our people who were working with Dan and they out. Regardless of the sector, regardless of the industry, and I know it sounds very like cliche, but we have to understand the people who we're working with. And when we're showing up, we have to show up with that intentionality of really getting to know the people who we're going to work with. So that would be my advice is, regardless of what the culture is we have to make sure that we're effectively getting through to understand the people who we're working with. for

Lan Elliott 24:31

that advice. Thank you for that. As I suspected, because I always enjoy my time talking with you, Brian, we're running short on time. So I have two quick fire questions to close out our interview today. Yes. The first one is, what advice would you give to 22 year old Brian?

Brian Barker 24:50

Wow. What advice is really just be patient with yourself. Often, I think we're seeing it now in Generation Alpha, and we've talked a lot about Gen Xs and Gen Zs, right? Oftentimes we felt like they want to move so fast. I do too, right? I envision, I remember someone who is a friend now when I was 19 years old, I'm like, Yeah, I'm gonna be a journal manager by the time I'm 30. All right. And they just looked at me and, honestly, now our industry has changed and evolved. That's probably not a terrible timeline, particularly if we're talking select serve limited service hotel, right? It's been possible. Our industry is moving at such a dynamic pace. But just to really be patient with yourselves. I have, I'm a dad now. I have young kids and it's funny because I'm laughing now hearing my five of my seven year old talk about, what they want to be when they grow up and I, whatever they say you want to be, I'm supporting it, right? Absolutely. Let's do it. Don't limit your options, right? You still got time. It's okay if you want to change your mind, right? But just to be patient with myself, I You know, a head's mission really is we're trying to serve, a diverse population and generally, those folks who come from, less than great means. And that truly is my story, and from the South side of Chicago and I was not happy, with my surroundings and I truly aspired to build a better life for myself and, I wanted to do it at warp speed. And just to be patient with yourself, right? And that patience, I'm now teaching my kids and teaching students, who I work with is that, things don't happen overnight, right? Like we have to be patient. You have to be diligent. You have to work very hard, but you also need to have patience with yourself and patience with the environment.

Lan Elliott 26:31

Wonderful advice. Brian, you have shared a lot today in our discussion, keeping in mind the mission of DEI advisors is around empowering personal success. Do you have one final nugget of advice for our audience who are looking to advance their careers?

Brian Barker 26:52

Yes, stay positive. I think, right now we're particularly those, anyone tuning in to DEI advisors, I would imagine is either an advocate or a young person who's aspiring to be better, particularly in, in a industry or particularly the hospitality industry. And I'm confident that, when it comes to data and research, as we say, things typically regress toward the means, right? And we're seeing an inflection, but I think things will stable. Stabilize And I think that's going to be driven simply based upon data, right? Like we're seeing the decline in in, in population. And as a result, there's something called the enrollment cliff, particularly in higher education, where we're going to see, fewer numbers of young people entering into college. And what I'm confident is that colleges and universities are now going to. To try to find ways to close that gap, and one of the ways that any smart organization, whether it be a higher education or for profit institution, is that you're going to have to diversify your talent pool, right? And despite the climate, despite the noise, right? Be confident in who you are, stay the course because I'm confident we're going to get through, this perspective and this anti DEI climate that we're in. And state of course remain positive because I'm confident that together we are going to all be stronger. And organizations who see that now are going to be thriving, over the next few years. So that would be my final piece of advice.

Lan Elliott 28:30

I love it. It's optimistic and kind as well. So that encapsulates how I think about you, Brian. So thank you. Thank you for that final piece of advice and thank you so much for being on and sharing your perspective and your journey. I so appreciate you and all that you're doing for industry and for the next generation. So thank you, Brian.

Brian Barker 28:51

Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

Lan Elliott 28:53

Absolutely. And for our audience, if you would like to see other great interviews with hospitality industry leaders, I hope you'll go to our website, DEIadvisors. org, where you can find many more interviews. Thank you.