The Leadership Culture Your Team Is Already Judging
Jul 03, 2026
Your team has already made up their mind about you.
Not from your last all-staff meeting or the values poster in the break room. From the Tuesday afternoon when someone was visibly struggling and you kept walking. From whether you know what's actually going on in their life, or just their name. From the way you say "my door is always open" and then make people feel foolish for walking through it.
I had a conversation recently with Eoin Clancy, Principal Associate at Galileo Hospitality Consultants. Forty years in the industry - Hilton, Marriott, the Cheesecake Factory, his own multi-unit operations across Europe, the US, and the Middle East. When I asked him whether servant leadership is genuinely practiced in hospitality, or whether it's mostly aspirational language sitting on top of something much more controlling, he didn't hesitate.
"The practical application is sometimes sadly lacking."
That's a generous way of putting it.
What does servant leadership actually look like in hospitality?
Eoin described a global director of operations he worked under at The Cheesecake Factory. Long hours, high standards, worked them hard. And yet Eoin told me that if this man called him tomorrow and asked him to come back for a week's opening, he'd drop everything and go.
Think about that. Forty years later, and that's still the standard this person set.
He wasn't managing from a distance. He stood beside his team, showed them how, and then stepped back and said: now you do it, and if you hit a problem, come to me. That's it. It's definitely not complicated, but it certainly is rare.
When you see it working in a venue you can feel it. The way the team moves around each other. The way they handle things when something goes sideways. Guests pick it up without being able to explain why they liked the place so much.
Why do hospitality operators keep losing good people?
Eoin worked at a 1,674-room Marriott in Atlanta under a general manager named Ted Ranner. Ted knew the names of all 1,800 staff. Not from glancing at name badges as he walked through, he actually knew them. Their families, what mattered to them, the things going on in their lives.
His team valued their jobs more. They worked harder. They stayed longer. And it didn't cost the business anything except genuine interest in the people already there.
Most venues pour energy into recruiting and inducting new staff while paying very little attention to the ones they've already got. A new person isn't really contributing for the first month or two at minimum. Every time someone leaves, you start that clock again. The financial cost is significant. The cultural cost is even worse, because the people who are still there notice who leaves and why.
How do you reduce staff turnover in hospitality without starting from scratch?
Eoin talked about a team member who was working below his potential. Not because he wasn't capable, simply because his family commitments were his priority right now and nobody had thought to ask him about it. Eoin sat down with him and said: I want you to grow here. How do we make that work around your life?
That's it. A simple, honest conversation.
We're seeing a lot of this across hospitality at the moment. Gen X leaders managing ageing parents while still raising families. Younger staff coming through who were genuinely affected by Covid in ways that changed how they relate to work, to authority, to stress. The easy response is to label it attitude or commitment. The more useful response is to ask what's actually going on and whether there's something you can do about it.
I've been in this industry long enough to know that the operators who take the time to have that conversation tend to keep their best people. The ones who don't spend a lot of time wondering why nobody stays.
Does employing older staff actually improve team performance?
Eoin's view on this is clear; a blended workforce works better than a team where everyone is roughly the same age.
Hospitality has a bias toward younger staff. Social media drives a lot of it and the image venues want to project. But when a team is entirely young, the social dynamics outside work start affecting the roster. People go out together, someone doesn't show up, and everyone else carries it. It happens constantly.
What Eoin has seen work well is a genuine mix of ages, and particularly having experienced older women in the team. His words, not mine, but I do think he's right. They tend to take the newer staff under their wing, provide a kind of steadiness that you simply can't train into someone who hasn't had enough life experience yet. It's not a mentoring program. It's just what happens naturally when you get the mix right. People look out for each other and that changes everything.
What makes a guest experience genuinely memorable?
We were at Eschalot in Berrima for my husband's birthday recently. It’s one of those restaurants you book well in advance. My husband doesn't drink, and he misread the menu and ordered what turned out to be from the juice list rather than the mocktail list.
The waitress could have corrected him. Instead, without any fuss, she asked if she could make him a very special tropical cocktail. She came back with this beautiful glass, ice, an umbrella, and told him it was complimentary for his birthday.
We had four courses and rolled out. We will absolutely go back and we’ve already told many of our family and friends about it. And honestly the thing we'll tell them about isn't the food, as wonderful as it was. It's that one particular moment.
What Eoin about this interaction was that she wasn't following a script. She had space, she'd been trusted to read the moment and do something with it. That only exists in venues where the leadership has done the work of making people feel capable and confident enough to back themselves. You can't manufacture it from a procedure manual.
When everything goes smoothly and the experience is pleasant, people often don't say much about it. They had a nice time. Maybe they'll go back. But when something goes wrong and a team member handles it with genuine care and a bit of creativity, that becomes the story people tell. And stories from a real experience carry more weight than any marketing you'll ever produce.
The culture inside your venue is what your guests experience. It's the same thing in two different rooms. If your team feels managed rather than developed, underestimated rather than trusted, that shows up at the table whether you want it to or not.
What's the single most common mistake when launching a new hospitality venue?
Not enough training before the doors open.
The Cheesecake Factory trains staff for sixty days before opening. Sixty days. Most operators can't come close to that and I understand why. But the principle matters. Your team needs to be prepared for the things that will go wrong, not just trained on how to do the job when everything goes right.
Your guests on opening week may not know it's opening week. They're forming an impression that's going to be very hard to shift if you get it wrong.
Eoin keeps coming back to consistency, and so do I. A consistently clean kitchen. Consistently good food. Service that's warm and attentive whether the best manager is rostered on or not. That comes from systems, real ones that people are trained to, not the ones that exist in someone's head and walk out the door when they do. Good venues have a standard operating procedure. Venues that struggle have a person who "takes care of that".
What type of leader are you?
What I kept thinking about after talking to Eoin was how much of what he described comes down to the same thing. Whether it's servant leadership, or keeping good people, or building a team that guests remember, all of it starts with a leader who is actually paying attention to the people around them.
Not performing attention. Not "my door is always open" attention. Real interest in who these people are and what they need to do their best work.
Your team is watching for that every single day. They've probably already decided whether they're getting it from you. The good news is that decisions like that can be changed, but only by what you actually do, not what you intend to do.
My Middle Management Movement program and customer service workshops are designed for hospitality venues, clubs, and hotels across Australia. If you'd like to talk about what that could look like for your team, start here: https://www.michellepascoe.com/traininganddevelopmentprograms
And if you want to hear the full conversation with Eoin Clancy, it's available now on The Michelle Pascoe Hospitality Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. Or just click the link below.
