Why hospitality has a leadership crisis and what the industry needs to do about it

If you have worked in hospitality, you already know what this article is about.

You have felt it in a kitchen at 11pm on a Saturday. You have seen it in the revolving door of staff in a hotel that cannot seem to hold onto anyone beyond six months. You have watched talented people leave the industry entirely, not because the work stopped meaning something to them, but because the environment around the work made it impossible to stay.

Hospitality has a leadership problem. It is not new, it is not unique to any one employer, and it is not going to fix itself.

The numbers

Ireland's hospitality sector employs over 180,000 people and contributes significantly to the national economy. It is also one of the most challenging industries to retain staff in, with turnover rates consistently running well above the national average across sectors.

The reasons given most often are pay and unsociable hours. Both are real and both matter. But they are not the whole picture.

Research consistently shows that people leave managers more often than they leave jobs. When the Chartered Management Institute surveyed over 4,500 workers in 2023, they found that one in three had left a role because of a bad manager or toxic workplace culture. There is no reason to think hospitality workers are the exception to that finding. In many cases the conditions in which hospitality teams work make the quality of management more important, not less.

What makes hospitality different

The pressure in a hospitality environment is unlike almost any other industry. A busy service in a restaurant or hotel is a real-time, high-stakes operation with no room for error and nowhere to hide when things go wrong. The margin between a smooth evening and a damaging one can be a single staffing gap, a single miscommunication, a single moment where the leadership of the room fails.

In that context, how a manager leads is not a soft issue. It directly affects the quality of the guest experience, the cohesion of the team and the resilience of individuals working under sustained pressure.

And yet the industry has historically treated leadership development as a luxury. Something for the bigger groups. Something that can wait until the immediate staffing crisis is resolved. Something that is less urgent than the Friday night cover.

The staffing crisis and the leadership gap are not separate problems. They feed each other.

How the gap opens

Most people who reach leadership positions in hospitality got there the same way. They were good at the job. They worked hard, showed up when it mattered, impressed the right people. And then they were given a team.

Nobody taught them how to run a briefing that actually prepares a team for a difficult service. Nobody showed them how to give feedback in a way that lands without damaging the relationship. Nobody helped them understand how to manage someone who is burning out before it becomes a resignation. Nobody told them that the authority that comes with a new title is not the same thing as trust, and that trust takes time and consistent behaviour to build.

These are learnable skills. The problem is that in most hospitality businesses, there is no structured opportunity to learn them. The assumption is that competence transfers, that a great sous chef will intuitively become a great head chef, that a strong front-of-house manager will figure out the people side of the role as they go.

Sometimes they do. More often they develop habits that are hard to unpick later.

What it costs the industry

High turnover is expensive in any industry. In hospitality, where the cost of recruiting, training and getting a new team member to competency can run to several thousand euros per person, the cumulative cost across a season is significant.

But the cost that rarely shows up in a spreadsheet is the cost to the people who stay.

When a team is poorly led, the capable people absorb the most. They cover gaps, manage around dysfunction, carry the weight of colleagues who are checked out or underperforming. They do this for a while. Then they leave. And the business loses the people it could least afford to lose, often to competitors or out of the industry entirely.

The turnover cycle then repeats, usually with a new cohort of people who are learning the same hard lessons.

The culture question

There is a version of hospitality culture that has historically made it difficult to address this honestly.

The pressure is celebrated as character building. The hours are treated as evidence of commitment. Toughness is admired and the suggestion that things could be done differently is sometimes read as weakness or ingratitude. This culture has genuine roots. The industry is demanding and the people who succeed in it are often genuinely resilient.

But resilience built on a culture of silence and endurance is fragile. It holds until it does not. And when it breaks it tends to break completely, which is why the industry loses so many people not gradually but suddenly, after they have held on longer than they should have.

The hospitality businesses that are getting this right are starting to ask different questions. Not just how do we fill the rota, but how do we build a team that wants to stay. Not just how do we get through service, but how do we develop the people running it. Not just what do our managers produce, but how do they make people feel while producing it.

What change looks like in practice

None of this requires a large budget or a dedicated HR function. It requires a decision to treat leadership development as operational, not optional.

That means investing in the people who have been given management responsibility. Not assuming they know what to do because they were good at the job before. Giving them access to development that is relevant to the specific demands of their environment, not generic management theory that has no connection to the realities of a busy kitchen or a hotel floor.

It means creating regular feedback loops between managers and their teams. Not annual reviews. Ongoing, low-stakes conversations about what is working and what is not. The kind of environment where a team member can raise something before it becomes a problem, and a manager can hear it without reacting defensively.

It means being honest about the behaviours that are tolerated and the behaviours that are not. Culture in any team is set not by what is written on a wall but by what happens when someone crosses a line. If aggressive behaviour in a kitchen is met with silence, that silence is a message. If it is addressed consistently and directly, that is also a message.

Small decisions, made consistently over time, are what build or erode a culture. Leadership training is not a single intervention. It is an investment in the quality of those small decisions.

A final thought

Hospitality is one of the most human industries there is. At its best, it is about creating experiences that matter to people, often at moments that matter. The work itself has meaning.

The people who choose it, who stay in it, who build careers in it, generally do so because they care about that. They care about the craft, about the guest experience, about being part of something that functions well under pressure.

What drives people out is rarely the work. It is the experience of being poorly led while doing it.

That is fixable. It is not easy and it is not fast, but it is fixable. The industry has the talent. What it has consistently underinvested in is developing the people responsible for leading that talent.

That is where the work is.