How Do You Build a Leadership Pipeline in Hospitality?

I've been in this industry for over thirty years, and I've watched a version of the same crisis play out more times than I can count.

A senior leader leaves – whether it's a retirement, burnout, or sometimes they just got a better offer somewhere that was paying attention – and the venue goes looking. They ring their preferred recruiter, they post the role, and then they wait.

And while they're waiting, the gap does what gaps do. It grows.

This week's episode of The Michelle Pascoe Hospitality Podcast is a solo one, and it's the conversation I've been building toward all month. Four guests, four very different perspectives on the same underlying problem. What they all kept circling back to is that the hospitality industry in Australia does not have a real leadership pipeline.

Not most of it, anyway.

What is a hospitality leadership pipeline and why does it matter?

A leadership pipeline is simply knowing who your next leaders are before you need them.

It's not a spreadsheet or a succession planning document that gets reviewed once a year and filed away. It's the lived reality of a venue where frontline team members with potential are being identified and invested in now, supervisors are being developed into capable middle managers, and middle managers are being stretched so they're ready to step into senior roles when the time comes.

The reason it matters is straightforward. If you don't have one, you're always reacting. You're always behind. And in the current market, being behind is an expensive place to be.

Grant and Ian from White Now made this point clearly when they were on the podcast earlier this month. White Now is Australia's number one hospitality recruitment agency. They're exceptional at what they do. But even they said it: if you haven't built the culture and developed the people internally, you'll spend more time and money recruiting than you would ever have spent on development. By no means is that a criticism of recruitment, it's simply a description of what happens when development doesn't happen.

Why don't most clubs and venues have a leadership pipeline?

Because until very recently, they didn't have to.

For a long time, if you needed a GM or an operations manager, the market had candidates. You could recruit your way out of a gap. It wasn't ideal, but it worked well enough that most venues never built the internal discipline to develop leaders from within.

That market has now changed. Kim Seeling Smith, the business futurist I spoke with this month, shared her thoughts on how the labour market we’re currently operating in has fundamentally shifted. Candidates have choices – even the bad ones! And good ones have more choices than they've ever had. So if your venue isn't an attractive place to build a career, they'll just go somewhere else.

Lewis Butterworth, CEO of Young Services Club, was very blunt in his view. There is a massive pool of skilled, capable people out there who won't look at clubs because clubs look old, fuddy-duddy, and out of touch. He wasn't being harsh, he was being honest!

The candidate pool is shrinking at exactly the moment the retirement wave is accelerating. Senior leaders who built their careers through the club structure of the 1980s and 90s are leaving, and the generation below them simply hasn't been developed enough to step up.

That's not anyone's fault, but it’s certainly everyone's problem.

How do you know if your venue has a leadership pipeline problem?

Ask yourself this: if your GM, Venue Manager or COO walked out tomorrow, do you know who would step in?

If the answer doesn't come immediately, and if the person you're imagining doesn't already know they're being prepared for something bigger, then you don't have a pipeline. You have a vacancy waiting to happen.

Lewis made a point about boards that I think applies equally to operational teams. He said every director he meets over fifty is saying "this is my last year". And he keeps asking the same question: who's coming in after them? In most cases, nobody's thought that far ahead.

The governance succession gap and the operational succession gap are the same problem wearing different clothes. Both come from the same assumption: that leadership will appear when we need it, from somewhere, somehow.

It won't. Not anymore.

How do you identify future leaders in your team?

Look at who you already have.

In most hospitality teams, there are one or two people who are ready to be developed into the next level. They're not always the ones who put their hand up. Some of them are quietly excellent and have no idea they've been noticed, or worse, they've decided they haven't been noticed and are starting to look elsewhere.

Your job is to see that potential before they stop believing it's worth showing you.

This is the first step in my Middle Management Movement program, and it's consistently the step that surprises venue leaders the most. Not because the talent isn't there – it almost always is – but because no one has ever formally asked the question: who are we building, and for what?

That’s when the development becomes intentional. Otherwise, it's just hope.

Does AI change what hospitality leaders need to know?

Yes, and not in the way most people think.

Kim Seeling Smith walked me through what she calls the agentic AI wave, the next stage where AI doesn't just assist with tasks but begins to handle multi-step processes independently. The administrative work that takes up so much of a middle manager's week, rostering, scheduling, reporting, will increasingly be handled by technology.

What that leaves is the work that requires a human: coaching, culture-setting, guest relationships, decision-making under pressure, and knowing how to read a room. These are critical leadership skills, and it means the investment you make in developing your people right now has more value than it's ever had.

The venues that automate the routine and develop the human capability are the ones that will pull ahead. The ones that automate the routine and forget the humans will end up with efficient operations and a leadership vacuum.

What should you do right now to start building a pipeline?

Four things, in order of immediacy.

First, look at who you have. Identify the one or two people in your team who have the potential to move up, and have a direct conversation with them about their future.

Second, have an honest conversation with your board about succession. Who's leaving in the next two to three years, and who are we developing to replace them?

Third, stop cutting leadership development when the budget gets tight. I know it's tempting. I've watched venues do it for thirty years. But it always costs more in the end than it saved. If your service culture depends on one or two people and those people leave, your service culture just becomes a gap.

Fourth, broaden your talent pool. The skills that make a great hospitality leader are largely the same whether someone came from a cruise ship, a pub in England, or a restaurant group. If you're only considering candidates with previous club experience, you're limiting yourself in a market that won't forgive that kind of narrowness right now.

The next five years are going to show us which venues were building something and which were just managing the day. The ones that were building will have leaders ready to step up, and the ones that were just managing will be on the phone to their recruiter, wondering why the pool is so shallow.

You still have time to choose which one you want to be.

If you'd like to explore what a structured leadership development program looks like for your club or team, visit michellepascoe.com/traininganddevelopmentprograms. The Middle Management Movement and Executive Leaders Movement are designed specifically for venues at exactly this point.

And if this resonated, share it with a GM, a CEO, or a board member who needs to hear it.

 Listen to the full episode: The Michelle Pascoe Hospitality Podcast, Episode 331