Speaker: Esther Busch, Director RMCC Americas
Esther Busch: Aloha ACS team. My name is Esther Busch and I'm a Director in the RMCC. In my role, I have a team that supports hotels in Hawaii and French Polynesia. With hotels as exciting as the Conrad Bora Bora in Hilton Hawaiian village. In this role, I get to have access to the best of both worlds, which is being part of the corporate ACS team, but I'm also part directly of the hotel teams on property.
Can you share a recent project or accomplishment that you're particularly proud of?
Esther Busch: Building this team from scratch has been a dream come true. We've grown in the last 3 years from 3 team members to 14 and from 4 hotels to 7. Right now, we've had 17 team members in this team and 7 of them have actually gotten promotions. Some of them have stayed within the team and some of them have moved to other teams within Hilton and seeing that career growth for others has been the most rewarding part of this role.
Tell us about your career journey leading up to your current role.
Esther Busch: I started my Hilton journey at the Caribe Hilton in Puerto Rico. And from the beginning, I found leaders that believed in me and had a passion to help others succeed. One of the keys to go from a reservations agent on property to the role that I have right now has been that I've declared my interests and my aspirations and I also took the ownership of asking for stretch goals. And from that, it just has led to going from one role to the other and growing in the different roles that I've had with Hilton.
How does your current role fit in to your career goals?
Esther Busch: Working with my leaders, I've been able to make my current role fit with my career goals and we've done that by taking the skills and the tasks that I would be doing in a next step and recreating them at a smaller scale within my current job.
What advice would you give to someone who is interested in pursuing a similar career path?
Esther Busch: Some of the team members that know me will probably laugh because I say this over and over. But it was really helpful for me to just write down on a piece of paper every single day, what was the favorite part of my workday? And the least favorite part of my work day? In about a couple of weeks, I was able to find a pattern of what kind of roles I wanted to go for. And from there, it was a lot easier for me to define what kind of stretch tasks I wanted to ask for and ones that I started to gain momentum on getting the stretch tasks that align with my goals. That really drove my moves in career progression over the last few years.
