Victoria Roos-Olsson joins Culture & People Advisory Board

Victoria Roos-Olsson is a senior leadership consultant working with FranklinCovey. She is an expert in leadership development and has trained, developed and coached leaders across the world for the past 20 years. She has also lead Learning & Development organizations for large corporations across Europe and in the Middle East. In fact, learning is one of her key interests and she loves to learn new things, as well as passing on knowledge to see others grow. She is currently writing a book on leadership together with two of her American colleagues from FranklinCovey.

Her background is from the hotel industry and her first summer job was as a room attendant at her family’s hotel in Stockholm, Welcome Hotel. Since then she has worked for Hilton across Europe, with Jumeirah in the Middle East and Scandic Hotels in the Nordic Region.

Victoria is an experienced facilitator and public speaker who engages her audience, no matter if 20 or 2000 people are in the room. She is a popular facilitator in all the major FranklinCovey workshops and content, such as The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and 4 Roles of Leadership and has worked with many leadership teams from different industries to help them grow.

She believes in a holistic leadership, taking all aspects of body, mind and brain into consideration to achieve your full potential. Passionate about movement, she is a running coach for teenagers and is also planning on starting up ‘teenage yoga’ once she has completed her yoga teacher training.

An additional “passion project” she is developing with her sister is the ‘Roos&Shine‘ community for global, professional women, in combination with the podcast ‘Roos&Shine’ that is being launched this very month.

‘Collaborating is the future, so we are very pleased that Victoria with her international background in developing leaders will be joining our new Advisory Board for Culture & People. One of the future challenges will be how to attract enough talent in the hospitality and travel related organizations, so this new Advisory Board will be very important for all of us moving forward,’ says HSMAI Region Europe’s President & CEO Ingunn Hofseth, adding:

‘Victorias experience will also be important for us in connection with the development of HSMAI Europe Commercial SummerCamp.’

See the different Advisory Boards here.

Q: You have a demanding job. What made you accept a seat on the Culture & People Advisory Board?

A: I am what you might call a natural connector. I believe the world will be a better place if we create better networks and as a result get more synergies. Culture & People is something that I feel extremely passionately about. Too many leaders don’t see the power of intentionally shaping the Culture of their organization and that’s an extreme loss in opportunity. With the new generation entering the workforce the importance of creating an appealing, passionate and attractive culture is more important than ever. And People are of course the ones that are making the culture. Culture is what people do in your organization. It’s not what you write about. So, to get a chance to be part of this new Advisory Board is a way to contribute and share my passion with others.

Q: You also have a background from another industry. How do you see the travel and hospitality industry can benefit from that?

A: It has been extremely good for me and my own development to take a break from the hospitality world, the industry that has shaped me since childhood. I have learnt a lot from the consultancy industry and also worked with a wide variety of clients, such as banks, construction companies, high tech and IT organizations, and other consultancy companies, etc. We do a lot of things really well in our industry. At times we have a passion and an energy that can be hard to find to the same extent in other places. At the same time, we can learn a great deal from others. In my new role I hope to be able to share these insights.

Q: What do you consider to be your personal strengths?

A: I often get to hear that I’m a very enthusiastic and passionate person, but that I manage to combine this with focus and drive. This helps me to create engagement and support others to achieve their desired results.

Q: What does it take to become a successful executive in today’s travel and hospitality sector?

A: Our industry is all about people. If you want to be a successful executive in today’s travel and hospitality sector you must be an excellent leader. If you do not have the skills to create engagement in your teams you will not succeed. There is a common misunderstanding that you are born a leader (or not), but leadership is made up of skills that you can learn, grow and develop. As the world changes around us we also need to develop our leadership skills. If anyone did Revenue Management today in exactly the same way they did 20 years ago they’d be the laughing stock. We should have the same approach to leadership. There are certain principles that are basic and constant, but we need to continue to grow and develop as leaders. Especially in our sector , as we are ultimately all about people.

Q: As member of this Advisory Board you will also be helping out with the Mike Leven Mentor program and the Service Pledge. Please share your experiences in mentorship.

A: Mentorship, formal or not, is the simplest form of sharing and learning, yet so effective. I’m excited to learn more about the new program and believe it’s a brilliant way for us to continue to grow and develop.

Q: How may HSMAI members benefit from the Advisory Board’s work?

A: As an industry we are being challenged with a new approach to work, especially from the millennials. The generation that is now entering the workforce sees the flexible lifestyle all around them with successful influencers working on their Mac in their yoga pants from their local coffee shop. They are grown up with always having their phone at hand. Now we tell them to leave their phone in their locker and show up at precise hours, work long shifts and serve others. This can, to say the least, create a conflict of interest. And this is a challenge for our entire industry. We might not be able to compete at all levels of today’s work-life-blend structure, but we need to become more innovative. And attractive. While all individual organizations can come up with great ideas for themselves I do believe in the power of synergies and I do believe the challenge is so grand that we need to work together to solve it!

Q: Could you tell us what a day at work looks like?

A: Ha, ha, I really don’t have a ‘typical’ day. During a week in my life I can spend a few days delivering a Leadership workshop with an international client, spend hours on zoom with the project team in the FranklinCovey U.S. office writing on our new leadership book, lunching and having Skype meetings with different clients, meeting with my colleagues from the Swedish FranklinCovey office, coaching a senior leader and having a lovely afternoon break from my home office when my teenage daughters come home from school. Almost daily I have a phone meeting with my sister when she is on her way to work at the UN head office in New York in the morning. We are launching the new community Roos&Shine. Once a week we record our podcasts and as a result of a 100-day new learning challenge I have just completed, I’m also editing the podcasts. So, a Saturday morning before the family wakes up you can find me with my headset absorbed in Audicity (a podcast editing program). One evening per week I’m coaching a running club for teenagers. I’m also training to become a yoga teacher and would love to incorporate that into my leadership trainings. So, as you can tell, I have taken to heart the new work-life-blend lifestyle and am really enjoying it.

Q: What is the best part of your job?

A: I really love most aspects of what I do. I love developing leaders and seeing people grow. It excites me to create connections, to travel and meet people. I also truly enjoy the combination of extremely extroverted and the moments of absolute introversion, reflection and studies.

Q: Is there anyone you’ve been looking up to?

A: My parents have been amazing role models to me. My father the born and self-made entrepreneur, my mother the inspiring leader and female role-model. They gave me the love and the courage to go out and create my own dream career!