Don't Overcrowd Your Sheet With Too Many Goals, Focus on the Key Ones: Rajeev Menon

By Bikramjit Ray HOW DOES a young man with ambitions of becoming an Air Force Pilot, become the COO in charge of Asia Pacific of one of the world’s best hotel brands? This is precisely how I began my chat with Rajeev Menon, the Chief Operating Officer, Chief Operating Officer - Asia Pacific (Excluding Greater China) at Marriott International, during his recent visit to inaugurate Marriott’s 29^th property in India. ’Basically, my first ambition, while I was growing up, studying at the Navy Public School, Chanakyapuri, was to become an Indian Air Force pilot. Unfortunately, my eyesight wasn’t good enough, so I had to look for my next best option. As I had a couple of relatives already in the business, I was lured in during those early days by the ’glamour’ of the business. I jumped right in,’ Menon told me at our tete-a-tete. Menon went on to complete his hotel management from IHM Pusa in 1988-89 and joined ITC as a management trainee. He was one of the group of trainees who were involved in running the Searock in Mumbai. Menon wanted to see the world and when the opportunity came in 1992 to move to Australia, he jumped and shifted base to Sydney, without a job in hand. ’I moved to Sydney when Australia was going through one of its worst recessions and being a young boy from India with no Australian experience, I must have given 25 interviews and got rejected on the proviso that I had no Australian experience. That is when I decided I was going to start from scratch. I applied to a reasonably new hotel, a Radisson property in Sydney, for a front desk job. After six rounds of interviews over three weeks, I ended up as the banquet manager for that hotel,’ he recalled. -A big part of Menon’s training was in the F&B Operation side of the business, which held him in good stead. He travelled around Australia working for Radisson for the next five years before joining a company called Stanford who were entering Australia with an eye to buy hotel assets. ’I started with them as Director F&B for what was the largest food and beverage operation in South Australia in Adelaide. I grew to become the operations manager for the group’as they continued to acquire various hotels, the Intercontinentals, the Four Seasons, the Ritz Carlton, I was like the ops guy for the CEO of the company,’ he said. One of Menon’s life goals was to become a general manager by the age of 30. ’I got the job 15 days after my 30th birthday in 1998. I ended up taking over a couple of Ritz Carlton Hotels that Stanford owned and were re-branding,’ he remembers. This was also the time that Menon decide that he wanted to be in an organisation where he was going to spend a large part of his career. He had shortlisting two organisation and it was in March 2001, that Menon joined Marriott, one of his two choices. ’The opportunity that Marriott gave me was to move back to India in late March 2001, and open what was going to be our second complex here--the Renaissance Mumbai Hotel Convention Centre and the Marriott Executive Apartments,’ Menon told me. He opened the complex in September 2001. Though the going was tough initially, he said, once things caught on, the destination really shone. Not only was Mumbai shifting outwards towards the north, but from a destination point of view, it was like an urban resort, he felt. At the end of 2004 Menon was asked by Marriott to go back to Australia and run Australia and New Zealand as country GM, as well as be the GM of the flagship hotel which was the Sydney Harbour Marriott. ’So I moved back and almost three years later I got a phone call from our head of Asia Pacific, asking me to set up the India Area Office,’ he remembered. In 2007 Menon moved back and set up the area office in Mumbai. ’At that point we had six hotels in India. I was looking after South Asia, which included Pakistan all the way down to Malaysia and I had Australia as well. As India started to grow, I slowly started to shed countries and basically eventually it was South Asia given where we are with India today,’ Menon explained. His latest move has been to Singapore to take over the whole Asia Pacific region, which happened in early 2015. His career path has stayed well on course, because in his words, he has been in the right place at the right time. When I asked Menon about what was his style of management and how it worked, he began by saying, ’to me there are three things that are important. One, is an inclusive style of management which means you need to engage with the team, get people's opinions and make decisions based on sound advice. Second, focus on performance through simplicity. Don't overcrowd your sheet with too many goals. Focus on key goals. Third for me is to lead by example, you need get dirty and learn with the team. That is my personal style.’ From a company perspective, he added, ’the aim was to position each of our brands as the best in class. We do a lot of research before we bring in a brand into India and when we do, we want to make it the best in class. This is proven by the premiums that we drive compared to our competitors’. The other critically important factor are the people. ’As a company we have always enjoyed a very strong culture. We wanted to make sure we were creating global careers with Indian associates. If you look at our journey over time, we have really gone from having loads of expats in the early days to today where 98 per cent of our colleagues are Indians. Over the years we have sent hundreds of Marriott associates to work in other hotels around the world. Our core culture is taking good care of our people. We make sure we focus on our training development growth and really create careers,’ he explained. And the life lesson which has really held him in good stead was the experience of working at the Searock Mumbai, during the strike. ’We worked from 6 am till 12 or 1 am at night, non-stop. Even today, if things get tough, I can roll up my sleeves and jump into anything,’ he told me, with a glint of excitement in his eyes. A version of this interview first appeared in BW Hotelier Magazine. The author is Executive Editor of BW Hotelier.