She Quit a Promotion With No Plan and Now Runs 1,000 Hotels in Europe | Karin Sheppard

Karin Sheppard now leads more than 1,000 IHG hotels across Europe. Her career started with dishes in an Italian restaurant in Denmark, and the move that changed it began with a weekend of crying.

From the restaurant came a year as an au pair in Geneva, IT sales in London and a move to Sydney. There she said yes to a promotion, went home, cried all weekend and quit. She had no plan, no money in the bank and a brother pointing out that there was no rich boyfriend or husband to fall back on. She called it a trust fall. A friend of a friend knew of a job at a hotel company, and on her first day she was pulled into a meeting about the cocktail menu. She called a girlfriend to say she had landed the best job.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why Karin said yes to a promotion, cried all weekend and quit with nothing lined up

• The line her HR director used when she told her bosses not to give her a bigger job

• What she did with the little voice that lists every reason you can't

• How a woman who had never run a hotel ended up running IHG's Australian business

• Why a Kimpton and an InterContinental can face each other across a Paris street and both do well

• The meeting habit she skipped once, and how fast her team noticed

• What she learned sponsoring a diversity group after a younger colleague said she would start it only if Karin led

• How a goal that sounded too big took her team from 750 hotels to 1,005

• The day-one advice from her first boss that she still repeats 25 years later