I quit my job and my career took off… at the same company
Two lessons about career and life
How it started
Getting a job as a hotel security guard was not exactly a dream come true. I only applied because the hotel was owned by an airline and I wanted to work in travel. I figured security would be an easy gig—I had seen plenty of movies where guards spent most of their time napping. I liked to sleep. It seemed like a good fit.
Reality was different.
The security manager who interviewed me was just like the ones in the movies. Ex-cop, bushy moustache, and a cigarette in the corner of his mouth dangling off his bottom lip.
One glance at me and my resume and he said: “You’re too old and too educated for this job.” I was 27 and had dropped out of a master’s programme at university. I was desperate too, so I started a slightly untrue monologue about my work ethic.
“You have too many opinions.”, he said.
Two weeks later, he called and told me that the only other applicant for the job had withdrawn, and thus, the door opened to my career in hospitality.
Before the first shift was half over, I knew I had found my calling. Hotel security taught me lessons about people I never learned during six years of university psychology.
During that first weekend, one of the most respected faces on Norwegian TV rode into the lobby on a banana bike at 3:25 a.m., in the company of his “niece”, who was hardly a day over 16.
It was the late 1980s and Norway’s economy was booming with free-flowing North Sea oil and gas. The Soviet Union was cracking, the wall in Germany came down, and Eastern Europe was opening up. Optimism was everywhere.
In other words, it was the perfect time to start a career in hotel security.
In August 1990, I was "fired" after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, and our chain's only non-Scandinavian hotel was taken over. Corporate blamed me for the lack of an SOP for when hotels are commandeered by invading armies. The termination was retracted once it was clear no one else had an SOP for that either. Fortunately, the hotel staff, including two sent to Bagdad as human shields, safely returned home.
The early 90s also gave me unique experience in high-profile global events, including co-planning the state funeral of a monarch, hosting key figures in the Oslo Accords, and serving Salman Rushdie lunch during a secretive trip he made to Norway while living in hiding due to the fatwa hanging over his head.
Union staff at the hotel staged a wildcat strike during an economic downturn, where security helped negotiate deliveries and maintain hotel operations.
A conspiracy theory suggested that security was like the SS, pulling management strings to harm employee relations. The reality was that security staff were cleaning rooms by day and, under the cover of darkness at night, serving sandwiches to immigrant workers who had been told to go on hunger strike.
To rebuild relations between management and the union, the company decided to promote me to a corporate role. I still had an office in the hotel, but I would no longer be part of hotel management.
Corporate Guy
My corporate role was Special Programmes Coordinator.
You know the line in every job description that says, “…and will perform other tasks as deemed necessary by the employer.”?
That could have been my whole job description.
In addition to corporate safety and security, I was responsible for loyalty programme accounting, centralized travel agent commission payments on behalf of our hotel and database marketing, a long-gone art from the pre-digital days.
In 1995, the company decided that growth was our only route to survival and signed a franchise agreement with Carlson companies to expand the Radisson brand in Europe.
Our willingness to enter the wonderful world of franchising led to immediate growth all over Europe.
My four part-time gigs rapidly turned into four, could-have-been-full-time gigs. I worked long hours a day, 6-7 days per week and fell further and further behind.
In my spare time, I went to the pub and accepted payment in brandy to write silly song texts for departmental holiday parties.
A temporary fill-in for a regional CFO caught me in my office at 9 pm on a Sunday night.
“What are you doing here? It’s nine pm on a Sunday evening. Go home, go out, go somewhere, but get a life!”
Burnout
It was a beautiful, sunny autumn day when it happened. I was walking toward the hotel that had been my workplace for ten years.
Suddenly, I felt physically sick.
I thought I was going to puke.
I thought I was going to faint.
The wise words from my temporary supervisor came too late… I was burning out.
I never make threats, but I do make promises.
Right there and then, I promised myself that I would quit my job if the company wouldn’t allow me to work as a full-time corporate security officer before the end of the year.
I made several pitches for change that fell on deaf ears.
Just before Christmas, I made a final attempt.
“No, we’re not doing that.” was the short reply to my demand to work full-time on safety and security.
The Resignation
I had a choice to make. Be loyal to the promise I had made to myself, or do nothing and stick it out.
I handed the letter of resignation to my boss, the regional CFO, on December 27, effective December 31. With three months' notice, my final day would be March 31, 1998.
“I have to talk to the Regional VP about this.”, he said. “Are you sure you mean it?”
“Positive.”, I said.
About fifteen minutes later, I got a phone call. It wasn’t the regional VP, it was the CEO.
“Are you trying to put pressure on me?”, he asked.
Since I had already resigned, I had nothing to lose.
“It seems we don’t agree on what to do. I think one of us has to take the consequences of this and leave the company. I’m guessing that’s not going to be you.”
He laughed, agreed, and said he wasn’t going to leave just because I disagreed with company decisions.
“I accept your resignation, and anything I tell you after this stays between us. You can’t retract your resignation. You will leave the company on March 31.”
After an open, honest discussion including compelling reasons why the company couldn’t fulfill my wishes, he gave me this parting thought.
“The good ones always come back!”
The Return
As fate would have it, I never did get to test the greener grass elsewhere. A friend, and former colleague, hired me to help organize their new central reservations department. Someone in corporate HR saw my name on an email.
“What are you doing back on our email list?”, she said, and continued. “Do you want to move to Copenhagen?”
My career and my life blossomed after I resigned and then rejoined.
I had more discipline and understood that working extra-long hours every single day was unsustainable. Not just for me but for everyone.
In the back of my mind, the temporary bosses’ words, “Get a life” stuck.
I met and married Kirsten, who has been with me ever since. Her second sentence to me on our first date was “If my daughter doesn’t like you, we have no future.” Lucky for me, Vibe, who was ten at the time, accepted that I play the role of father in our home.
Having responsibilities outside of work broadened my mind, taught me the powers of communication and collaboration and strengthened my decision-making skills.
My role was expanded as the company went through an IPO and expanded further when, after an external review of corporate safety and security, I became the first employee with a global remit for the two companies that made up Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group.
Carlson honoured me with a Carlson Fellow, an award I didn’t know I was nominated for, allegedly because Rezidor, my formal employer, had hoped a different nominee would be rewarded.
As fate would have it, the same month I left the company I had worked for for thirty-one years (don’t worry, it was a mutual parting of the ways, and I consulted for the company for a year to smooth the transition after my long tenure), a jury of my peers, including the Chief Security Officer of Microsoft and other major global players selected me as the world’s #1 Chief Security Officer influencer.
An honour I never would have come close to achieving if, twenty years previously, I hadn’t resigned from the company that gave me so much for so many years.
The Lessons
My pre-resignation experience taught me that saying yes to everything leads to more work.
Experiences after I rejoined the company taught me the value of maintaining personal integrity and how important it is to “go home, go out, go somewhere, but get a life!
Stay safe, Always Care
Hi! I’m Paul. I was born, raised, and currently live in Canada. After high school, I embarked on a gap year in Europe. It lasted four decades. I went to university in Norway and started my hotel career in the basement of a five-star hotel in Oslo. The manager who hired me told me I was too old, too educated, and had too many opinions to be a security guard. He also told me that the only other person who applied for the job didn’t want it.
Thirty years later, I left that same company. It had grown from a small regional hotel chain in Scandinavia to become a large, global, multi-brand company. I moved from Norway to Denmark to Belgium. The company awarded me their highest individual honour for leadership, and security professional peers selected me as the world’s most influential corporate security executive.
I’m a hospitality professional. I’m a security professional. If you ask, I will tell you that security was my job, and hospitality was my business.
Today, I’m an educator and a consultant passionate about hotels, hospitality, and keeping people safe during their travels.
In addition to the Always Care Community, I also write for Risk Resiliency’s Keep Travel Safe. If safe, secure hospitality, hotels, and travel are important to you, please follow us there!
Written with the clarity of hindsight, the accuracy of a faded memory, and countless creative liberties, this is a newsletter of how life has made me an emigrant, an immigrant, and gifted me experiences I never dreamed possible.
Thanks for reading. Your support is my motivation and I’m genuinely grateful that you’re here. Please share, subscribe, and connect with me.