How Do You Build a Leadership Pipeline in Hospitality?

TRANSCRIPT: How Do You Build a Leadership Pipeline in Hospitality?

The Michelle Pascoe Hospitality Podcast

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Michelle: Welcome to this week's episode of The Michelle Pascoe Hospitality Podcast. Can you believe it's already the end of July? It's going so fast.

This week is a solo episode, and it's a topic I've been wanting to speak on all month.

Over the last four weeks I've had some genuinely brilliant guests on this show. Eoin Clancy from Galileo Hospitality Consultants, talking about servant leadership and why what gets called leadership in this industry is still just aspirational language. I had Kim Seeling Smith — wow — business futurist. I've known Kim for many, many years. She walked us through the three disruptions that are already reshaping our industry right now. Lewis Butterworth, the General Manager at Young Services Club — we had a good chuckle on our episode — giving us the unfiltered view from the floor. And Grant and Ian from White Now, the team behind Australia's number one hospitality recruitment agency, telling us the truth about why recruitment alone is never going to be the answer.

Four very different conversations. Four different angles on the same problem. And the problem is this: the hospitality industry in Australia doesn't have a leadership pipeline. Not a real one. And the cost of that is going to become very visible over the next five years.

Today I want to talk about what a leadership pipeline actually is, why most clubs haven't built one, and what you can do about it right now while you still have time to act.

Let's start with what's happening right now, because I think some of us are still treating this as a future problem. But it isn't.

The senior retirements have already started. As Lewis said, every director he meets over the age of fifty is saying "this is my last year." And he's asking the right question: who's coming in for them?

That's a board-level succession gap. But the same thing is happening in the operational ranks. GMs and CEOs who've been in this industry for thirty years are leaving or looking to leave. Operations managers who built their careers through the club structure of the eighties and nineties are either retiring or burning out. And the generation below them hasn't been developed to step into those roles.

This is what a leadership pipeline crisis looks like. It's a series of very difficult conversations about who's available, who can step up, and why none of the candidates are quite ready.

And unfortunately, recruitment alone won't fix it. Grant and Ian made this point clearly. White Now is exceptional at what it does. But what they said, and what I've been saying to clubs for the last thirty years, is that if you haven't built the culture and you haven't developed the people internally, you're going to spend more time and more money recruiting than you would ever have spent developing the talent you already had.

Now, the phrase "leadership pipeline" may sound strategic and theoretical and a little bit corporate. But it isn't. A leadership pipeline is simply knowing who your next leaders are before you need them. It means your frontline team members with potential are being identified and invested in now. It means your supervisors and team leaders are being developed into middle managers. It means your middle managers are being coached and stretched so they're ready to step into senior operational roles. And it means your senior team is being prepared for the eventual transition.

It's not complicated. But it does require you to be intentional about it. And that's where most clubs fall short. Because intentional leadership development costs time and money, and it very rarely feels urgent — until suddenly it is.

Eoin talked about this beautifully through the lens of servant leadership. The best leaders he has seen in over four decades, the ones who built great operations, were the ones who were actively investing in their people. Not just setting KPIs or running rosters. Actually building the capability of the people around them, so that the operation could run without them needing to be there for every single decision.

That is a pipeline. It doesn't look like a program on a spreadsheet. It looks like a leader who is deliberately developing other leaders.

Most clubs haven't built a leadership pipeline because the structure of the industry just hasn't demanded it until recently. For a long time, if you needed a GM or an operations manager, there was enough movement in the market that you could recruit your way out of that gap. You could ring White Now, or whoever your preferred agency was, and there would be candidates.

The pool is shrinking. Kim Seeling Smith made this point in the context of AI and the empowered workforce, and she's right. We're operating in a labour market that has fundamentally shifted. Candidates have choices. Good ones have so many choices to choose from. And if your club is not an attractive place to build a career, they're going somewhere else.

Lewis put it even more bluntly. He said there is a massive pool of skill and talent out there that will not look at clubs because clubs look old, fuddy-duddy, and out of touch. And he's talking about talent at every single level, not just the frontline.

At the board level, Lewis raised the issue of governance succession. Clubs in New South Wales in particular are doing some work with the AICD on this, and it's genuinely positive. But we're behind. And behind means that the people responsible for the strategic direction of these venues are often operating without a clear picture of who is coming after them.

But I don't want this all to sound doom and gloom. So here's something practical to take away from this episode.

The first thing is to look at who you have. Not who you're trying to hire — who you already have in your team right now. Because in my experience, in most hospitality teams there are one or two people who are ready to be developed into the next level, and they're being overlooked because no one has formally identified them. Some people need that nudge. They want it. Your job is to see that potential in them. Not everybody is going to put their hand up and say "what about me?" You need to prompt them. You need to ask them those questions.

The second is to have honest conversations with your board about succession. Who's leaving in the next two to three years? Who's being developed to replace them? If you can't answer that question right now, that's really important information.

The third thing is to stop treating leadership development as a budget line that gets cut when times are tight. This is the investment that protects everything else. If your service culture depends on one or two experienced people, and those people leave, you don't have a service culture. You have a gap that grows bigger.

And the fourth thing, which Grant and Ian really reinforced, is to look more broadly at your talent pool. Lewis said it perfectly: the skills that make a great hospitality leader are largely the same whether someone came from a cruise ship, a pub in Manchester, or a restaurant group. If your club is only looking at candidates who have previous club experience, you're limiting yourself in a market where you can't afford to be limited.

The next five years in this industry are going to reveal which clubs were building something and which clubs were just managing. The ones that were building something are the ones that invested in their people, that developed their middle managers, that had a conversation with their boards about what comes next, that treated leadership as a priority and not an afterthought. The ones that were just managing are going to find themselves in a very difficult situation when the next wave of retirements rolls through and there's no one ready to step up.

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

If you'd like to explore what a leadership development program looks like for your club and your team, I'd love to have that conversation with you. Visit michellepascoe.com/traininganddevelopmentprograms and you'll find everything you need there.

Thank you for listening today. If this episode resonated with you, please share it with a general manager, a board member, a CEO, or anyone in this industry who you think needs to hear this conversation. And if you haven't already, subscribe to The Michelle Pascoe Hospitality Podcast on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify so you never miss an episode.

Until next time, take care. Bye.

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