Kristin Calve At the Table
Urgency, Proportionality and a Sense of Our Shared Humanity Rena Reiss, executive vice president and general counsel with Marriott International, discusses her leadership style, what she looks for in new hires, and how her career has come full circle with a second stint at Marriott.
CCBJ: What led you to your current position at Marriott International? Rena Reiss: This is my second tour of duty at Marriott. I’d been a hotel development lawyer, working for a small real estate firm in D.C., when I initially joined Marriott back in June of 2000. I spent 10 years in the law department at Marriott, then I got a call about becoming the general counsel at Hyatt in Chicago. Honestly, I spent lot of sleepless nights trying to figure out if it was something I wanted to do. My husband and I had been in Washington for a long time. It was our home. We’d raised our family there. But it was actually a good time for me to make a change, because of where I was in my career, and because the kids were grown and out of the house. So I made the leap. I didn’t know anyone in Chicago, and I’d really only been there for my college roommate’s wedding, years ago. So it was really a fresh start. My husband ended up staying in D.C. for 18 months because of his job situation, which was a bit overwhelming, but it also gave me the chance
talk. I’d known the general counsel who was retiring, of course, because he had been the one who initially hired me at Marriott. So it was like coming full circle. But also, by then Marriott was quite a different company than the one I’d left. It had gone through several acquisitions, including
of be completely immersed in my new job. I already had
the Starwood acquisition, so it was much bigger than
a pretty broad lens on the world, and then I felt like with
when I’d left. But I still knew a lot of the people there,
that general counsel role, the aperture of that lens widened
though of course they had moved into different roles in
even more. As a general counsel, you practice less law than
the intervening seven years. It was almost as if we had all
you might have before. You’re much more of a business
grown up during that time.
advisor. You’re much more involved with strategy. I loved it. It was also a personal decision, because as much as we loved Throughout all this, I kept in touch with a lot of people at
Chicago, D.C. was home for us. We had a lot of family there,
Marriott, because they were good friends of mine. So when
whole communities of friends there. We knew that one of
they called and asked if I might be interested in coming
my kids, my daughter, would likely move back there. And my
back as general counsel for Marriott, I was happy to
husband and I both have aging parents who were in the area,
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NOVEMBER • DECEMBER 2020
