The Accidental Counsellor
Words by Caitlin Allwood
There is a particular moment that anyone who has run a section, a floor, a department or a kitchen will recognise. You are mid-shift or mid-prep when someone on your team catches your eye and says they need a word. Not about the rota, but about something more personal. And in that second, you become something nobody trained you to be.
I sat in on Hospitality Action’s Accidental Counsellor session at The Grand Hotel, Birmingham, at the start of this month, and that moment was the whole reason the room was full. Emma Keeble of Anchor People delivered a session, and at one point, she asked everyone who had ever found themselves being an accidental counsellor to put a hand up. Almost every hand in the room went up, which tells you something about how common this has gradually become and how rarely we talk about it.
We are, on the whole, in a better place than we used to be. People are more willing to say out loud that they are struggling – and that is progress. But hospitality has a particular set of conditions that turn that progress into a load very few people are prepared for. The job itself is emotional work because reading people and managing how they feel is what we do, all day and night, so everyone who lasts in the industry has an overdeveloped instinct for spotting distress.
Service is the controlled crisis we walk into together every evening, working hard side by side to keep it under control. That builds a closeness in weeks that an office role takes years to develop. And the debrief happens after service, often late, often with a drink and the guard down in a way a nine-to-five never allows. So when someone needs to talk, the person they turn to is often not a friend, a partner, or a GP, but whoever happens to be standing closest and seems steady. For young workers who move around a lot and are often far from home, that person is sometimes the most stable adult within reach, and more often than not, it is you.
Emma makes the point that any industry built on helping people will see this happen, and she is right, but hospitality stacks the conditions higher than most. We train teams to listen to strangers and go above and beyond as a matter of routine, then we add the long unsociable hours that turn colleagues into friends, and the result is a workforce primed to be leaned on.
Sometimes they come to you because you have built a relationship over months of shifts, and they know you will not repeat what they tell you. And sometimes, just as often, it is the opposite. It is easier to say the hard thing to someone slightly outside your circle, someone who will not see you at Sunday lunch, someone whose job feels like it comes with a measure of confidentiality even when nobody ever agreed to that. Either way, you end up holding something you did not ask to hold.
I will be honest: I have been on the receiving end of this, and I want to be careful how I describe it, because the overwhelming feeling at the time was not resentment or that I could not be bothered. It was the opposite; there is something good about someone trusting you enough to come to you, and the instinct to help is the right instinct. But underneath that, there were two feelings I am less proud of. One was the clock. Tight payroll means you are never really free. I had set up to do, and a briefing to prepare, and some selfish part of my brain was counting the minutes even as I was listening. The other, which has stayed with me far longer, was the doubt. Was the advice I gave any good? Should I have pointed them somewhere else entirely? In all likelihood, I was not the right person for them in that moment, and I knew it, but I felt so obligated that stepping back never occurred to me. I was out of my depth, but helping felt kinder than the alternative.
What Emma’s framework does, and what made the session resonate for so many of the operators in the room, is that it permitted people to stop wading in. She is careful not to call this a mistake, because people become accidental counsellors precisely because they care about others and want to help, and that can never be a bad thing. What matters, she says, is recognising where the line is for you, which all of us draw in different places, and asking yourself the real question in the moment: am I the right person to support this now, have I got the capacity, or is there someone better placed? The quote of hers that stayed with me was: “Your job is to hold the ladder, not to climb into the hole.” You are not there to fix it, to diagnose it, or to carry it home with you. You are there to listen properly, to show that you have heard, and then to know where the line of your role sits and to signpost the person beyond it to someone who is properly equipped to help. Put like that, it sounds almost too simple, but anyone who has felt that obligation to have an answer knows how hard it is in practice to say, “I am not the right person for this, but I know who is.”
There is a version of this conversation I want to be careful not to drift into, because it suits businesses a little too neatly. It is very easy to frame the manager as the stable adult in a chaotic week, the safe pair of hands the team leans on, and to leave it there as though it were a compliment. From where I have stood, in hospitality for the better part of two decades, that framing can gradually become a way of loading an enormous amount of unpaid emotional labour onto whoever happens to be the most empathetic person on the rota, someone with potentially no training, no time, and no support of their own. And it is worth being clear about what that free work is doing, because in a lot of businesses, it is what holds retention together. People stay because they feel cared for.
The point is not to blame anyone, because most of us would rather be the person who picked up than the person who walked past. The point is that we have reached a stage where businesses ought to arm their leaders for these conversations rather than relying on instinct and goodwill to bridge the gap. Emma is blunt that the wider support has not kept pace with our new willingness to talk. She points to Mind’s finding that mental health makes up a fifth of the illnesses the NHS treats, while its share of the budget is set to fall to 8.4 per cent, and to the simple fact that most of us were never taught growing up how to recognise when someone is struggling or where to send them. That is the gap, and it is why she rates Mental Health First Aid so highly – because it builds a middle layer of support in the workplace and gives people tangible skills they often end up using without realising they are doing it. How to spot when someone is struggling, what to say, and crucially, what you can do in a practical sense, including when to step back. If a member of your team told you they thought they had an illness, you would not pass them on to a mate with good intentions. You would point them to a professional, because that is what care looks like when the stakes are real. Mental health deserves the same seriousness, and that means giving the people on the floor the tools to act on it.
And the appetite for that is there on both sides. Hospitality Action’s 2025 survey found that 55 per cent of team members wanted managers trained to support them above all else, that 89 per cent of managers said they took the time to listen, and that 75 per cent would ideally then signpost someone to an Employee Assistance Programme so that expert help could take over. Jeremy Gibson, Marketing and Operations Director at Hospitality Action, frames the role this way: “Managers occupy that challenging space where organisational policy meets human reality, and it can be tough to say the least.” The charity’s answer is an EAP that managers and team members can use together, so that, as he puts it, “the team member is supported to address their challenge, while the manager is given the tools to help while protecting their own boundaries.” Alongside it sits a free 24/7 helpline for anyone who needs to talk, whichever side of the conversation they are on.
Emma is clear that signposting is not the brush-off it can feel like, as long as you do it properly. Handing someone a phone number and telling them to call it themselves is, for a lot of people, no help at all. Done well, it looks like doing the research together, making that first call alongside them, finding out in advance what will happen when they reach out, so the unknown is less frightening, or helping someone write down what they want to say before they pick up the phone. As she puts it, that goes so much further than brushing someone off. It also means knowing that recognising you do not have the answer is not a failure. It is the moment you connect someone to support that does.
Which is why the part of the session I keep coming back to was not about the team at all. It was Emma’s reminder that you have to look after yourself first, that five minutes of something that is yours, a walk, a glass of water, a voice note to a pal, is not indulgence but maintenance, and that the support Hospitality Action offers is there for the person holding the ladder just as much as for the person in the hole. She is candid that the early signs are easy to miss, because she has missed them herself, but she offers two worth watching for. Notice how you respond when someone comes to you. If you feel a flush of dread because you cannot see where the time will come from, or if you find yourself brushing problems off as small, that is probably the signal that you are not the right person for this conversation right now. Not because you have stopped caring, but because you have run out of room, and that is allowed. Keep somewhere to signpost to in your back pocket, and remember to look after yourself first. If you are carrying every tray, something will eventually get dropped. The most supportive managers I have worked with were never the ones who absorbed everything. They were the ones who listened without taking it all on, and who knew exactly when to hand over.
I left thinking about the advice I gave all those years ago, and what I would do differently now. I think I would still listen. I think I would still let them know I was glad they came to me. But I would be honest, sooner, that there were people far better placed than I to help, and I would treat saying so not as a failure of care but as the most caring thing available to me. Handing over is not the same as letting go.
This is a conversation we want to keep going, so we are delighted that Emma will be joining us at a future session of the Midlands Hospitality Network, the group we run that brings hospitality people together every couple of months for honest conversations about the industry and the people in it. If you would like to come along, or you simply want to talk through any of this, you can reach out by emailing: caitlin.allwood@tonictalent.com.
Hospitality Action’s Employee Assistance Programme is free and confidential. The helpline is 0808 802 0282. Anchor People delivers mental health training for teams who want to be better prepared.
