Corporate Leader Daily § Executive Style

Article
My Charity : Executive Style

Kimpton Hotel COO Niki Leondakis helps women dress for success — and then some.

By: Hilary Lewis
Spring 2008 , Page 23

When Niki Leondakis got her first job in the early ’80s, she believed she needed to “neutralize her femininity” to be successful. To compete with men, she dressed in the style of the day — suits with big shoulder pads, blouses with floppy ties around the neck. “Women had the tendency to believe we had to act and dress like men to be considered equal,” recalls Leondakis, 47, who is based in San Francisco.

A decade later, the president of Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants suggested that Leondakis, who was Kimpton’s senior vice president of restaurants at the time, hire more female general managers. “That sort of gave me permission to start thinking, ‘How do we contemplate having more women leaders?’ ” she says.

“It wasn’t until later in my career that I became comfortable that I could be a woman and not have to act like a man,” she continues. “I had my own strengths and qualities that I brought to the table — and, in fact, that I needed to support other women.”

She began by helping low-income women in the Bay Area get suited up for job interviews through a local charity, A Minor Miracle. But her ambitions were greater. When she became Kimpton’s COO in 2003, she arranged a partnership between the chain and Dress for Success, an organization that provides interview attire, career advice and mentoring to women struggling to get on their feet.

Although the group has affiliates around the world, it lacked a presence in San Francisco — so Leondakis started a chapter. She also began holding fundraisers each spring in each of Kimpton’s 41 hotels in the U.S. and Canada, pulling in an average of $10,000 in donations and clothes per event. Guests can choose to donate $10 of their room rate for each night’s stay; the hotels also sell exclusive products — wine guides, jewelry, laptop totes — and donate the proceeds to DFS. “There weren’t a lot of women role models when I was starting out,” Leondakis says, “and I would have liked that.”

Perhaps most important, Leondakis has set aside management-training programs at Kimpton for DFS graduates. “For women sometimes, it’s like they’re in a foreign country but don’t know the language,” she says. These days, in both dress and diction, Leondakis is helping more women speak fluently.