Leadership in Hospitality: Developing Leaders for the Realities of the Work
Updated: Sep 7
Hospitality leaders rarely get to deal with one thing at a time. A guest needs help while a new employee has a question. Someone has called in sick, service is falling behind, and an experienced employee has started taking shortcuts.
Leaders are expected to keep the work moving while supporting their teams, maintaining standards, responding to problems, and making decisions that often cannot wait until tomorrow.
That is the environment hospitality leaders learn to lead in, and leadership development needs to reflect it. Understanding leadership concepts can be useful, but leaders also need to know how to apply them when the situation is busy, imperfect, and involves real people. The closer development comes to the work leaders are actually responsible for, the more useful it becomes.
Leadership in hospitality should start with the work
“Build stronger leaders” sounds like a reasonable development goal, but it does not tell you enough to design useful learning. The better starting point is to identify what you want leaders to do differently at work.
Perhaps supervisors need to address performance problems earlier instead of allowing them to continue. Managers may need to coach new employees more consistently, or leaders may understand a service standard but struggle when a guest situation does not fit neatly into the usual process. In another organization, the issue might be helping leaders recognize when they can make a decision themselves and when something needs to be escalated.
These are different performance needs, even though all of them might initially be described as “leadership development.” Once the expected performance is clearer, you can look at what is getting in the way. Leaders may need more knowledge, but they may also need practice, feedback, clearer expectations, better tools, or support from their own managers. That is why we start with the work before deciding what the learning should look like.
Give leaders opportunities to work through the grey areas
A lot of leadership work happens in situations where knowing the policy is only the beginning. A supervisor may know how performance management is supposed to work and still have difficulty deciding what to say to an employee who keeps making the same mistake. A manager may understand the service-recovery process but still need to make a judgment call when a guest is upset and an employee is also involved.
These are the kinds of situations leaders need an opportunity to work through. Realistic scenarios allow them to consider different responses, explain why they would take a particular approach, hear how others might handle the same situation, and think through the consequences before they are making the decision under pressure.
We used this approach in our work with the Calgary Stampede. Their safety leadership workshops were built around situations leaders could realistically encounter in their roles. Participants needed to understand their responsibilities, but they also needed to consider how those responsibilities affected the decisions and conversations they were expected to have as leaders. The scenarios gave them a place to work through that application rather than leaving it until they encountered the situation on the job.
What happens after the learning matters too
Even a well-designed workshop has to compete with everything waiting for leaders when they return to work. There are schedules to manage, staffing issues to solve, guest needs to address, and routines that were already well established before the learning happened. A leader can leave a session with a clear intention to try something differently and still find that the old way is easier once the shift gets busy.
Whether additional support is needed depends on what leaders are being asked to do. Someone learning to have better coaching conversations might benefit from a short conversation guide until the process becomes familiar. A leader trying a new approach to performance conversations may need feedback from their own manager the first few times they use it. In other cases, simply being asked to try something specific before the next session and come back prepared to discuss what happened may provide enough reinforcement.
The support does not need to become another training program. It should make it easier for leaders to use what they have learned when the opportunity arises at work.
Connect the pieces of leadership development
Longer leadership programs create another design challenge. Organizations may have excellent workshops, coaching, activities, and resources, but participants are often expected to make the connections between them for themselves. They attend one session, move on to another topic several weeks later, complete something in between, and may not be clear about what they should be practising or how the different parts contribute to their development.
This was one of the design considerations in our work with Centrivity. Their year-long leadership program combined in-person sessions, virtual learning, participant resources, asynchronous activities, and executive coaching. We helped strengthen the connections across those pieces so participants had a clearer sense of how the learning fit together and what they should be applying between sessions.
A hospitality leadership program does not need to last a year to benefit from the same thinking. If leaders attend a workshop today, it is worth considering what they should try when they return to work, what might help them use it, and whether their own managers need to notice or reinforce anything. If another learning experience follows later, it should be clear how it builds on what leaders have already learned and applied.
Make leadership expectations concrete
Leadership development is much harder to design when the organization itself has not clearly defined what good leadership looks like. Expectations such as “communicate effectively,” “support your team,” or “lead with care” can mean very different things to different people.
For a hospitality leader, those expectations become more useful when they are connected to recognizable moments at work. What should a supervisor do when a new employee is struggling during a busy shift? How soon should a performance concern be addressed? What authority does a leader have to resolve a guest issue? How should they respond when an experienced employee has developed a way of working that no longer matches the organization’s standard?
Answering questions like these gives leadership development something concrete to build around. It also gives leaders a clearer picture of what they are working toward and makes feedback more useful. Telling someone to “communicate better” gives them very little direction. Helping them recognize that they need to set clearer expectations before work begins or address a problem sooner gives them something they can actually change.
Look for the change in the work
Attendance and participant feedback can tell you whether leaders completed the learning and how they experienced it, but they do not tell you whether the reason for providing the development has been addressed. The evidence you need will depend on what you wanted leaders to do differently in the first place.
If inconsistent coaching was the problem, you might look for whether leaders are now coaching more regularly and whether employees have a clearer understanding of expectations. If standards were drifting between teams, you might look at whether that variation has started to decrease. If leaders were avoiding difficult conversations, the meaningful change may be that concerns are being addressed sooner.
Sometimes there will be operational data that helps answer these questions. In other cases, the evidence will be more qualitative and will come from managers, employees, participants, or observation. What matters is deciding what change you are looking for before the development is designed, rather than assuming that completing leadership training is evidence that leadership has improved.
Developing leaders for hospitality work
Hospitality leadership happens in the middle of the work. Leaders are making decisions, coaching employees, interpreting standards, responding to guests, and dealing with situations that do not always have a tidy answer. Leadership development should give them a chance to prepare for those moments and support them as they begin applying what they have learned.
At WorkWise Design, we design leadership learning around the situations leaders need to handle and the performance the organization wants to see. Depending on the need, that may include workshops, realistic scenarios, facilitator resources, practical tools, application activities, or support that connects learning across a longer development program.
Explore our Hospitality & Tourism services or see examples of our leadership development work in Client Results.
