The Real Reason Your Community Work Isn't Sticking

TRANSCRIPT: The Real Reason Your Community Work Isn't Sticking

The Michelle Pascoe Hospitality Podcast

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Michelle: This month I sat down with three people who, on paper, have nothing to do with each other. Don Tilley, who's spent his career moving between clubs, gaming, and charity, and now runs community grants for Gotcha4Life. Lucy Waterreus, who runs Clubs New Zealand and has worked her way from behind the bar to the boardroom. And Stacy Jane, who founded Escabags after surviving domestic abuse herself, and who now has her charity's bags sitting in over 3,000 locations across Australia, a lot of them clubs.

But here's the thing that connects them, and it took me a while to see it properly, even though I was the one asking the questions. None of these conversations are really about charity, or generations, or crisis training. They're about what can happen inside a club, over many years, that either builds something durable or it doesn't. Community work, generational culture, crisis readiness, none of it holds unless someone is deliberately building it. It doesn't just happen because you're a nice venue with good intentions.

So that's what I want to unpack today, starting with Don, and a number that surprised even him.

If you listened to my conversation with Don, you'll remember the number. About a month into his job at Learning Links, he went along to a ClubGRANTS ceremony, the kind where the cheques just get handed out, and he found out one single club had given away just under $1 million in grants. He was staggered. He asked the person next to him, is this serious? Is it really that much? And it was.

He drove home that night and rang his brother-in-law, who runs a hi-fi business, and told him what he'd just learned. His brother-in-law said, they're not for profit? He had no idea either. So many people he's spoken to have no idea what clubs do for the community. He certainly didn't, and he wasn't the only one.

This is a man who'd spent the better part of a decade in the room, adjacent to the exact work being funded, and the scale of it still came as a shock. Which begs the question: if the people closest to the work don't always know the scale of what their own industry does, the issue isn't that clubs aren't telling their story loudly enough to the public. It's that they're not telling it to their own people first.

Now, it would be easy to hear this and think, right, we need to do more PR, get a journalist in, run a social media campaign about our community grants. That's not it, or rather, that's downstream of it. The actual gap is internal. It's whether your own duty managers know what your club funds. Whether your bar staff could tell a member, off the top of their head, one thing your club does for the community beyond the bistro specials and the weekly bingo. Whether a new starter learns your club's community footprint in their first week, or never learns it at all, because nobody thought to tell them.

Don also said that when he talked to patrons about what their club was actually doing, they'd stand up and give him a round of applause. The information wasn't new to the world, but it was certainly new to them, sitting in a venue they'd been coming to for years.

If your own patrons don't know, and your own staff don't know, and a man who spent five years in the industry adjacent to this exact funding didn't know, then the story was never actually missing. It just never left the building. That's where we need to establish a leadership habit of narrating the work deliberately, repeatedly, internally, before we ever worry about whether the wider public has heard of it.

Now, to the conversation that's given me the most to think about this month, and that's this one with Lucy from Clubs New Zealand.

She highlighted that the most lonely generation globally right now is Gen Z, which sounds inconceivable on the surface, given that they're the most connected generation there's ever been. They've never not had a screen in their hands. But connected isn't the same as known, is it? And Lucy's point, which I think is exactly right, is that clubs are one of the few remaining places where that gap can actually close, where a Gen Z staff member and a seventy-year-old member end up in the same room, having an actual conversation rather than a virtual one.

But I want to push past what we covered in the interview, because I think we undersold how hard this actually is for the person running the floor.

Think about what's genuinely being asked of a middle manager in a club today. On a single Saturday night shift, they might be rostering an eighteen-year-old straight out of school alongside a sixty-five-year-old who's been on that team for four decades. Those two people don't receive instruction the same way, and they certainly don't hear feedback the same way. They don't understand loyalty the same way. And the manager standing between them has to translate the club's values so that both of them actually receive and understand them.

That ultimately generates friction, and I've seen it over the last thirty years, between this is the way we've always done it and this is the way we could do it. That friction highlights a skills gap that almost nobody has actually been trained for, because the managers running clubs today came up through a system where their manager was, at most, dealing with two generations in a workforce, possibly three at a stretch. Nobody running a venue twenty years ago had to figure out how to lead four or five generations on one roster, because that workforce just didn't exist yet. So the skill of translating across that many generational lines was never modelled for them, because the job itself has changed shape underneath the people doing it.

And let me be really clear here, this is not a personality trait. Nobody is naturally gifted at leading five generations at once. I don't care how warm or how likeable a manager is, that doesn't automatically make them capable of holding an eighteen-year-old and a sixty-five-year-old on the same team without either one of them feeling unseen. This is a trained, learnable skill, the same way reading a P&L is a trained, learnable skill. We would never expect a manager to just understand financial reporting. Yet we seem to expect them to just naturally understand generational leadership, and then we're surprised when it goes badly, when the older staff feel dismissed and the younger staff feel micromanaged, and everyone blames the other generation for being difficult.

But there is true value in that mixing when it works. The social fabric outside our clubs is under pressure right now, and clubs are one of the last remaining places where that fabric gets rebuilt, face to face, rather than on screen. Now, none of that happens automatically just because different ages are physically present in the same building. It happens because someone in the middle is actively building the conditions for it. But that someone is mostly improvising, because nobody ever sat them down and taught them how. And it's one of the more urgent gaps in hospitality right now, because the workforce isn't going to get less generationally diverse from here. It's only going to get more so.

I want to talk about a bit of personal experience here. Growing up, I went to a bush school. It was one classroom with ten kids when I first started, mostly made up of two families and a couple of oddities like me who were there by ourselves. By the time I left, there were a whole thirty-three of us.

I didn't know any different, so having Mr Buttram, our teacher, stand out the front and involve all of us felt completely normal. I was four years and nine months old, and then you had those in Year 6 who were twelve, possibly even thirteen. They looked so grown up to me when I was so tiny. But that man, that teacher, could captivate us all. He ensured each of us was learning as an individual, as our year group, but also as a whole community.

I didn't know any different until I got to high school, and was shocked that you had multiple classrooms to go to, multiple teachers, and that I didn't see anybody else apart from my own age, my own year cohort.

When I discuss that with friends and family, even my husband asked me the other day how Mr Buttram did it. When I reflect on it now against the workplace, that intergenerational classroom, and other teachers like him, including the female teachers who worked in bush and regional communities, they had adapted their style of teaching to handle multiple generations. Well, I suppose it was technically one generation, but from four years and nine months to a twelve or thirteen-year-old in Year 6, they're all thinking very differently. Sure, we didn't have all the technology, but we still had to learn different things at different ages.

So when I look at teams now in clubs, I think to myself, this is just that classroom, but on a much bigger and broader scale. And it's that person at the front of the room, that middle manager, who makes the connection.

And then we had our last guest, oh my goodness, Stacy Jane, the founder of Escabags.

If you listened to that episode, the story itself is confronting. But there's a detail buried in the middle of that conversation that I think is the most useful thing in the whole episode for anyone running a venue.

Stacy told me about her corporate volunteer days, every Tuesday, where teams come in and pack the escape bags themselves. And she made a point of saying some clubs are on their tenth, eleventh, or even twelfth volunteer day. Nearly half their staff have been through it, across every part of the venue, kitchen, gaming, front of house. Whoever you ask in that building, kitchen staff, someone in the gaming room, or someone on the front desk, they all know what an escape bag is, and they've all had the lesson in how to respond to someone with empathy and compassion.

That's the definition of readiness. It's built the only way readiness actually gets built, through repetition, deliberately, over time, until it's not a special skill anymore, it's just how that team behaves.

The thing that makes a venue ready for a domestic violence disclosure at the front counter is the exact same mechanism that makes a venue capable of holding five generations together on one roster. It's not a one-off briefing or a value statement in the staff handbook. It's repeated, deliberate practice, until the behaviour is simply part of your culture, not something staff have to consciously remember to do under pressure.

Think about what Stacy described with the Bendigo Bank stockist. A regular customer, husband and wife, coming in year after year, same day every week. One day he pops next door, and she says straight away, please can I have an escape bag. It still makes my skin tingle thinking about that moment when Stacy shared it with us.

That moment worked because the systems around her, that lady and that staff member, had been rehearsed long before she needed them. The poster was there. The staff had been properly trained. Nobody had to improvise in the moment, because the readiness had already been built, over many years, through Tuesday after Tuesday of practice.

That's what I mean when I say readiness is culture, not compliance. Compliance is the one-off session you run because an industry body or the board says you have to. Culture is the thing your team does without thinking, because it's been drilled in gently and repeatedly until it's simply who they are. And whether we're talking about a family violence disclosure or a nineteen-year-old and a sixty-five-year-old figuring out how to work a Saturday shift together, the answer is the same discipline, applied to a different problem.

In reality, every club listening to this is one resignation away from losing the person holding your culture and your community relationships together. Recruitment doesn't solve that. You can't advertise your way out of losing that person, because what they hold isn't a set of tasks you can put in a job ad.

If you're running a venue right now with four or five generations on your roster, and you're relying on your middle managers to just figure that out on their own, you're basically hoping instead of actually leading. But the good news is these are all capabilities you can train and build deliberately, the same way you've built any other leadership skill.

If you'd like to explore what a leadership development program looks like for your club or your team, particularly for managers navigating a workforce spanning more generations than before, I'd love to have a conversation with you. Visit michellepascoe.com, or click the link in the show notes, and you'll find everything you need there.

Thank you for listening today. If this episode resonated with you, please share it with a CEO, a board member, a colleague, or anyone in this industry who you think needs to hear this conversation.

And if you haven't already, please subscribe to The Michelle Pascoe Hospitality Podcast on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify, so you never miss an episode.

Next month we're moving back into leadership territory, and I've got some conversations lined up that I think are going to sit really well alongside everything we've covered here about generational culture and readiness.

So until next month, take care. Bye.

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