The Coffee Chat (#44)
My conversation with Ernest Lee - Chief Commercial Officer, citizenM hotels, an experienced real estate / hospitality executive and dad to a 6 year old & 2 year old!
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Hi there 👋🏽
My husband and I recently went to the movies and contributed to the Barbenheimer box office records!
I am by no means qualified to write movie reviews and so won’t even go there. However, I did enjoy both the movies, for very different reasons and would certainly recommend you watch both.
But what I do want to talk about is a scene or two that struck me while watching Oppenheimer. It is the brief moments when we get a glimpse into who he was as a father. Oppenheimer who is often credited as “the father of the atomic bomb" seemed to be a very average (possibly even below average) father to his two kids.
At the end of the day there are always trade-offs and greatness in one aspect of life always comes at a cost. There is no perfect human who can achieve perfection in every aspect of their being. In a strange way, this realization is very comforting …
☕ Now, on to today’s coffee chat…
Meet Ernest Lee
Ernest is currently the Chief Commercial Officer for a global hotel brand called CitizenM. He oversees Marketing, Sales, and Revenue and manages a 100 FTE org in 12 countries spanning 21 nationalities! His wife is a Program Lead at a Big Tech company and was previously a partnerships Director at WeWork. Together they have two young kids and live in suburban NY, USA.
I had an absolutely wonderful time chatting with Ernest and getting a peek into how he thinks. I am so excited to share this chat with the rest of the world.
Below is my conversation with Ernest…
Please tell us a little bit about yourself and your family
Hi I’m Ernest and my wife's name is Christina, we live in Westchester, New York, which is a suburban county immediately north of Manhattan. We picked that location because it just felt right for us to raise our family in - we have two kids, ages two and six. They were both born in New York City. And like many people during the pandemic, we felt the need to make different lifestyle choices. We wanted more space, more fresh air, and a better quality of life. So, about a year and a half ago, we moved to Westchester.
Around the same time, I was promoted to my current role as the Chief Commercial Officer for a large multinational hotel chain. I lead our sales, marketing, revenue, growth, and partnerships team, which consists of about 100 employees worldwide. My wife is currently a program lead at a big tech company. She joined this role during COVID, at that time it was a remote and that has played a big role in us as a family getting the balance we need to be a dual career household with young kids!
Interesting and yes normalizing remote work has been a blessing. It looks like after becoming a mom, your wife has made intentional choices to build a career that allows her a certain amount of flexibility and freedom. Did you make any changes or different choices in how you approach work or structure your day after becoming a father? And how did this change after the second kid?
Ah well, having two kids definitely brings additional challenges and requires more sacrifice. The level of fatigue and energy, both physical and mental, is nonstop. With the first child, it was still possible to find some moments of respite, but with two, it feels never-ending and takes a toll. With a toddler there is a lot of intense hands on work.
From a career standpoint, my responsibilities have only increased. My role requires a lot of international travel and is very demanding. I do my best to balance it all.
I believe that in life, we play various roles, such as being a child, a spouse, parent, a friend, or a business person. The sacrifices I make in one area can impact other roles. For me, being a good parent is non-negotiable, and it often means sacrificing in other areas like maybe I could be a better son or a better friend. Being a parent requires focus and sacrifice, and it has taught me the importance of understanding my breaking point and giving myself and my wife micro-moments for self-care. It's a commitment to each other and our well-being.
So how do you manage to carve out time for self or each other? Are there any choices you and your wife have made together as a couple to navigate dual careers and raising a family?
We are privileged to have a support system with family members who help with childcare. Having that village has been crucial for us to balance work and parenting. Additionally, we prioritize our mental and physical well-being. We make sure to give each other time for activities like going to the gym or pursuing personal interests. It's about investing in ourselves while being understanding and supportive of each other. Communication is key, and we both recognize the importance of giving each other these micro-moments.
So we both make sure that we're rotating responsibilities with the kids and thereby creating these moments of time for the other that they could invest back into themselves. Also, as the man I am careful to not make it feel like the entire childcare burden is on my wife. Like if I notice my wife’s stress levels are really really high I'll try to take the kids and we'll go to the farmers market or a trampoline park or something. Essentially do not let your partner reach their breaking point and remember that you both are really making sacrifices for each other and the family.
It is amazing that you do this when you are in town. However you also mentioned that you travel frequently for work. How do you and your wife manage when one of you is away? Do you have any strategies or arrangements in place to handle the demands of work and parenting during those times?
Yeah, I think this applies to any working couple where one person travels. There's a level of understanding that the other person may not fully grasp. My wife, for instance, doesn't travel at all, while I travel quite extensively. I go to Europe once a month because our headquarters are there, and in between, I have domestic trips. The other person often sees the traveling partner as if they are just having fun on a boondoggle the whole time, but they don't realize the intensity and challenges that come with it.
I, on the other hand, understand my own situation very well because I experience it firsthand. I know how taxing it can be. To minimize the time away from home, I have to strategize my schedule, even doing crazy things like going back to back and then jumping on a redeye. I try to minimize the number of days and hours I spend away.
Working couples really need to understand each other's situations. Both being home alone with the kids and going on physically taxing business trips aren't enjoyable experiences.
For me, the turnaround between trips is quick, which means there's a high level of absolute exhaustion. As a working parent who travels, I know that the moment I step off the plane and return home, my responsibilities as a parent immediately kick in. It's crucial for both partners to understand the balance and boundaries in such situations. Communication is key in navigating these challenges effectively.
I hear you and I have felt that complete exhaustion! Energy management is so crucial when raising kids and having demanding careers. Are there any strategies you and your wife employ to manage your energy levels effectively?
I believe that building more energy and endurance for life involves a somewhat counterintuitive approach. For me, it means expending more energy by staying physically fit and focused on my physical fitness. Additionally, there are some psychological hacks that, in theory, can help. One of them is reframing challenges as sprints instead of marathons. Instead of feeling like we are constantly racing on a hamster wheel, we can set short-term goals, like getting through the next month, and then reward ourselves with something enjoyable, like visiting family in the Midwest or going on vacation. This mindset helps remove the drudgery and mental exhaustion that comes with feeling like life is just a continuous race. It's a helpful way of thinking that allows for breaks and moments of rejuvenation.
So you seem to have a bunch of these mental models or frameworks that you have adopted. For most people as they go through transformative experiences these frameworks change. And becoming a parent is such a transformative experience. What have you learned about yourself and your wife through this journey of parenthood?
Yeah, we used to have this fantasy of being cool, metropolitan parents, retaining as much of our adult life as possible while still raising kids. We envisioned taking our kids to restaurants a couple of times a week and enjoying nice, affordable vacations. However, reality set in, and we realized that we often make considerable sacrifices for the benefit of our kids. Finding a balance became essential.
Currently, we are at a stage where we are navigating the heavy period of toddlerhood. Despite that, we try to incorporate elements of adult sensibilities into our lives. For instance, we recently returned from a vacation in Europe, and we are now focused on introducing the kids to appreciate cultural experiences. We take them to art museums and other places that expose them to different cultures. It's a way for them to have more than just the usual trips to the swimming pool and playgrounds.
I typically ask for advice for other parents but I want to switch it around this time. You are a business leader, what are some of things you feel you can do to retain high-caliber female talent. A lot of studies show that as soon as these women become mothers, their career trajectory changes dramatically. There is a very real fear among women that their progress will slow down, and they may hit a glass ceiling that prevents further advancement. It is almost as if there is this conflict between their biological clock and career clock…
As a leader in an organization with a large team , I've had time to think about how to address this issue and break the cycle or, at the very least, not perpetuate it. I believe it's crucial to create an environment where parenthood doesn't hinder career growth. Finding solutions that support work-life balance and providing equal opportunities for all employees, regardless of their family choices, is essential.
Organizations often claim to be results-oriented and not activity-based. However, this might not always be the case, as certain policies like mandatory in-office presence may not be rooted in data but driven by other factors such as short-term shareholder interests or employer power dynamics. To truly focus on productivity, location should not necessarily be correlated with performance or productivity output. Having data-driven evaluations can help ensure that women are evaluated fairly, regardless of their location-based challenges. This shift can enable a more inclusive and supportive work environment for working mothers and other employees facing similar challenges.
The other thing that is a bigger question but connected to this also is maybe how people view their career progression. Many tend to see it in a linear format, where it's like, "I'm here now, and my next step is to become a manager," and so on. This traditional view in a certain way holds both men and women back where there is this pressure to always be on and slowing down for a few years is equated with a lack of ambition.
So like so many couples, especially many women in North America delay parenthood or hesitate to have children due to concerns about career setbacks. It's unfortunate that the choice to become a parent is often seen as a barrier to career progression.
Quick-fire questions:
What’s the best thing you have watched recently?
My wife and I recently finished watching Succession. The other one that I would add to the list is The Bear
What’s the best thing you have read recently?
I don’t do as much deep reading, I do what I call Micro reading. I really like this writer from The Atlantic, Derek Thompson. He writes things that are at the intersection of the socio-political-business sphere. I am also a local politics junkie and one of Derek’s article that I really enjoyed reading was called - The Dangerous Rise of ‘Front-Yard Politics’.
What’s the best thing you have listened to recently?
There's a podcast I've been really interested in called "Founders." It's part of a new segment in podcasting that combines elements of long-form audio and short-form audiobooks. The idea behind it is to take books typically found on platforms like Audible and condense them into two-hour episodes with an editorial design. The podcast specifically focuses on business history, where they take biographies of well-known figures and provide condensed versions along with personal commentary. It's a great way to extract key lessons from the books without going through the entire text. It's like a fascinating hack that I find really interesting.
🤓 Open tabs…
(I have modeled this section after those “open tabs” that we all have with a few (okay 30-40) interesting links that we promise we will eventually get to one day. These are the links that I had open for sometime that I finally got to …)
⭐How to do Great Work
“If you collected lists of techniques for doing great work in a lot of different fields, what would the intersection look like? I decided to find out by making it. Partly my goal was to create a guide that could be used by someone working in any field. But I was also curious about the shape of the intersection. And one thing this exercise shows is that it does have a definite shape; it's not just a point labelled work hard.”
⭐Your professional decline is coming (much) sooner than you think
"I had started to wonder: Can I really keep this going? I work like a maniac. But even if I stayed at it 12 hours a day, seven days a week, at some point my career would slow and stop. And when it did, what then? Would I one day be looking back wistfully and wishing I were dead? Was there anything I could do, starting now, to give myself a shot at avoiding misery—and maybe even achieve happiness—when the music inevitably stops? Though these questions were personal, I decided to approach them as the social scientist I am, treating them as a research project. It felt unnatural—like a surgeon taking out his own appendix. But I plunged ahead, and for the past four years, I have been on a quest to figure out how to turn my eventual professional decline from a matter of dread into an opportunity for progress.”
⭐We need to rethink discipline in schools
The podcast digs into school discipline and the achievement gap with Francis Pearman of Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education. For many Black children, their first encounter with the discrimination that will trail them their whole lives comes from the school system — a system where they are five times more likely to attend a segregated school than their white counterparts.
📖 My private thoughts from my very public diary…
(My Twitter use has drastically gone down, I am now more active on Threads)
I would love to hear from you, feedback is always welcome!
And if you happen to know an inspiring working parent who should be featured in a future edition (or if you yourself are one) - please do get in touch
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Disclaimer: All views expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer