The address of the five-star hotel Don Carlos in Marbella He changed to the head of a woman weeks before the Covid-19 pandemic broke out, with the Madrilenian Sandra Caballé at the helm, who premiered the position assuming the hardest stage that the Costa del Sol tourism industry has suffered in the last 50 years , a period with “negative connotations from which I learned a lot”.
Graduated as “technician in tourist activities companies”, has held various management positions in the Marbella establishment since 2007 after spending 7 years in London, which she considers to be her “professional home” and where she met “very powerful professional women”. She is also the mother of a child under 10 years old.
At the Don Carlos hotel he has held leadership positions since 2007the year in which she arrived in the capital of the Costa del Sol, her first position being that of director in ‘Deluxe Villas’, a concept based on “attention to 24 exclusive villas” to provide a high service standing, which was followed by the reception address to transfer the previous luxury service to the hotel, with 240 rooms. The “accommodation management” continued until reaching the “general” position in February 2020, which he considers to be his “passion”.
The directive has referred to the “mental barriers that we often put on ourselves” regarding the problems that women face when undertaking or adopting leadership figures, clarifying that “to lead, one must know how to navigate between the skills and competencies that are socially associated with the masculine or feminine world.”
At this point, he has detailed that aspects such as “empathy, care or being able to understand the other” are associated with the female gender, while “authoritarian leadership, perseverance or defiance are closely linked” to men. “The really important thing is to find that balance and really our difficulty is to maintain that balance of being very firm, challenging and demanding, but at the same time not losing our personality and our essence as a woman.”
Caballé highlighted the progress that currently exists when it comes to “value everything positive we have and to see all the strength we have or all that we are capable of, that we can move mountains when we really want to. I think that this is being valued and there are quite powerful managerial positions that are directed by women”.
Concepts such as the wage gap are not unrelated either and have pointed to the different remuneration that is perceived in the “negotiated salaries”that is, in those related to senior management positions, concluding that in the highest cases “they have more skills when it comes to negotiating or we give more importance to that emotional salary that we talk about many times and that maybe The masculine profile does not give so much importance, such as having a schedule or being able to combine it with family life”.
In this way, it has influenced that “women continue to have more family responsibilities and it is like that because we want it to be like that, and we have very powerful self-demands with ourselves”. “We want to be perfect in everything and be the best worker, the best manager, the best mother or the best daughter, we want to monopolize everything and we put significant pressure on ourselves”, has valued the manager, who has opined that under this criterion of the perfection “there will be some things that will compensate more than others and it is not necessary to be perfect in everything”, emphasizing that this is an aspect that “is in our unconscious and we have been with it for many years” in terms of approaching the work and family spheres.