Cindy O’Keefe is the guiding light of Caesars Palace’s hotel operations. As vice president, she not only oversees the day-to-day activities of the hotel, she is also responsible for motivating the employees that represent the resort on a daily basis.

As part of her mentoring capacity, O’Keefe recently issued a challenge to her team: With the economy down, revenue needed to be up, and if customer service agents could manage to increase the hotel’s up-sell revenue to $1 million, O’Keefe and a handful of her executive colleagues would shave their heads.

“We were trying to come up with something to engage our line employees, because the focus this year has been so much on wanting to be more efficient at doing the jobs and bringing as much to the bottom line as possible,” O’Keefe said. “I wanted to engage them to focus on the fact that we need to drive revenues. You can only go to a certain point to cut costs or be efficient and after that it’s all about driving revenues.”

That was in July. By August, up-sells—when customers are offered the option to upgrade their room reservations upon check-in—had increased from an average of $400,000 to $500,000 per month to $1 million. O’Keefe had to honor her part of the bargain. In the hotel lobby, salon stylists shaved her head.

“I was starting to freak out,” she said. “We’re going, ‘Uh oh.’ But you have to go through with it. They couldn’t believe that they had executives that lived up to what they said they would do, but most importantly, they delivered and we delivered.”

For O’Keefe, losing her hair in the challenge was a positive outcome, encouraging employees to realize their potential.

“The objective was not for me to shave my head or to really hit $1 million,” she said. “I wanted to give [the employees] the courage to understand and the ability to feel that they could do it. It was just getting over that, ‘Oh my God, an up-sell? I’m not a salesperson.’ You don’t have to be. That’s all that it was.”

O’Keefe’s vibrant personality and education background (she nearly became a music teacher before landing a job at Nashville’s Opryland Hotel) have landed her in the perfect position. She is able to meet and greet hotel guests while also passing her skills on to new employees.

“I absolutely love the team of people that I work with and inspiring them to do a good job,” she said. “The mentoring is the biggest piece. Seeing a lot of them develop and grow and go on to other positions and promoting them into and helping them reach their goals—it’s the best thing. I think there’s always been a teacher in me.”

The Maryland native has a Southern accent from her time in Tennessee, including 16 years at the Opryland. She relocated to Las Vegas in 1994 upon receiving an offer from the Las Vegas Hilton, working in convention services and then hotel operations before moving to Caesars Palace to become assistant vice president of hotel operations. As the now vice president, O’Keefe is now where she is supposed to be, calling Caesars the place she “would have always wanted to work.”

And employees appreciate her positivity, her patience and her experience—months after the head-shaving incident, tales of the challenge still circulate amongst the customer service agents who made it happen.

“It’s not the fact that Cindy shaved her head; it’s the fact that they’re going to remember that they did something as a team together,” O’Keefe said. “They did $1 million.  That’s unbelievable.”

By Caitlin McGarry