Habits that build big hospitality careers.
We spend a lot of time talking to senior hospitality leaders about how they got where they are, and it’s rare to find one who planned it. General managers, operations directors and head chefs might have wanted to be teachers, graphic designers, photographers and footballers at school, and they ended up here because a part-time shift turned into a full-time job, and someone along the way spotted something in them and gave them a push.
Find the people who will put your name forward
A mentor gives you advice; a sponsor mentions your name in a room you’re not in yet. Almost every senior career we’ve heard described has a sponsor at its turning points: the old colleague who rings to say a restaurant manager’s job has come up in another hotel, the boss who says “come and be my GM”, the director who tells the rest of the business that you’re going places.
The best of these people are your cheerleaders. They want you to succeed, and they make sure everybody else knows it. Senior leaders talk about them with real warmth, and they tend to describe the move that changed everything as a phone call they didn’t expect.
We’d add a word of caution, though, because “wait for someone to notice you” is easy advice to give once you’ve been noticed. Sponsorship tends to flow towards people who look and sound like the people already at the top, and if that isn’t you, waiting can turn into a very long wait. So be the person worth vouching for, with the reliability and loyalty that make a manager want to take you with them, but also ask. Tell your manager where you want to be in two years and ask
The industry is smaller than you think
Hospitality is a village. You’ll bump into the same people again and again, in different companies and different cities, often in very different roles from the ones they had when you first met. The head chef who trained you might be an exec chef a few years later, and the GM you worked under might be the person interviewing you for an operations role ten years from now.
A good reputation can travel further than any CV, and so does a bad one. Leave jobs well, keep in touch with the people you rated, and treat the KP with the same respect as the owner, because people remember and they talk.
Take the role that stretches you, even if it’s sideways
The career paths that sound neat in hindsight were often anything but at the time. People move from running a restaurant into a central role checking food and beverage controls across dozens of sites, then back into a hotel as a GM after a restructure, then into regional roles, and each move teaches them something the straight line wouldn’t have.
There’s also something to be said for not rushing. Some of the most senior people in the industry will tell you they weren’t especially ambitious; they got experience wherever they could and said yes when the right role came along at the right time. If you’ve worked in enough places, there will always be something you can draw on later, whether it’s an interaction you handled well or one you got badly wrong.
The salt shaker theory
There’s a piece of advice that we think every new leader should hear, called the salt shaker theory. If you want the salt shaker in the middle of the table, you move it to the middle of the table every single time you walk past it and it isn’t there, and you keep doing that until it’s always there. You can’t walk past it once.
It sounds almost too simple, but there’s a lot to it. The moment you walk past a salt shaker on the edge of the table, you’ve told everyone watching that the middle of the table doesn’t really matter, and your team will take their lead from what you do far more than from anything written in a training manual. Standards slip one ignored shaker at a time, and they’re rebuilt the same way.
It also says something about how you set standards for other people. The theory starts with you moving the shaker yourself, then showing someone else how and why you want it there, then coming back and checking, again and again, until it becomes habit. That’s a world away from the manager who barks at the team about standards they’ve never been shown and never seen anyone senior keep up. People are much quicker to meet a standard when they understand why it’s there.
The part we like most is the condition attached to it: you have to be confident that it matters. If you try to apply the salt shaker theory to every tiny thing in the building, you’ll exhaust yourself and your team, and you’ll end up being the supervisor everybody dreads. Pick the things that make a real difference to the guest and to the team, explain why they matter, and then be relentless about those.
That’s what consistency looks like in practice. It isn’t glamorous, and the people who are good at it rarely get much credit early on, but it’s the skill that gets noticed when the business is deciding who will be best to enforce standards or, later in your career, run more than one site. Processes, controls, stock, standards: if you can make a place run the same way on a quiet Tuesday as it does on a Saturday night, someone senior will eventually want more of you.
Make mistakes and learn from every one
When one of our team was working in a Michelin-starred restaurant, she was handed the chef’s handwritten menu to type up. His spelling wasn’t great, and one dessert was written as something very close to “luckyrice”. It never occurred to her that it might be liquorice ice cream, partly because that sounded disgusting and partly because she had no idea anyone would put it on a menu. It wasn’t something she’d ever seen before.
“Lucky rice” did seem a bit odd, but she was new, she’d never worked at that level before, and she was surrounded by people who all seemed to know exactly what they were doing. Asking the chef, or anyone else in the kitchen, felt like it would show everyone she didn’t belong there, so she kept her head down and typed what she thought she saw. So every single menu that night was printed with Lucky Rice Ice Cream on it.
She learnt two things that day. The first is to double-check everything and never assume, and the second is that if something sounds weird, it probably is, so ask. Asking felt far more daunting at the time than it should have, but thirty seconds of feeling daft is nothing next to reprinting a whole night’s menus.
It also says something about who gets into this industry. Plenty of us come in without the background that makes fine dining feel familiar, and you’ll get things wrong that other people seem to have been born knowing. That doesn’t make you less capable. You’ll learn as much from the things you get wrong as from the things you get right, as long as you own them and work out what to do differently next time.
Get choosier as you go
Early in your career it’s fine to be less fussy, because almost every job teaches you something. As you get older and better, you earn the right to be choosy about who you work for, and you should use it.
Work for people you want to work for, in businesses heading in a direction you believe in. A great boss will accelerate your career and a bad one will drain you, and no salary or job title makes up for spending years with someone who doesn’t want you to do well.
Remember, hospitality can be a very good life
We do not say this enough. Hospitality can give you a really good salary and a really good lifestyle, and the people at the top of it are proof. Leaders who started out carrying plates now sit in meetings designing kitchens, hotel bedrooms and entire restaurants, look after hundreds of staff and millions of pounds of revenue, and negotiate with global brands. Few of them would have believed it when they were at school.
That isn’t everyone’s experience, and we’d be dishonest to pretend otherwise, because not every corner of the industry treats its people well. But the ladder is there, and if you love being around people and you know you couldn’t sit in an office all day, there are very few industries that will take you as far, or reward you as well for being good with people.
Don’t pull the ladder up behind you
The leaders who talk most warmly about their mentors are almost always the ones doing the same for others now. It keeps people engaged, it builds better teams, and it’s how the industry gets better at holding onto its talent.
So find your people, get as much experience as you can, don’t be afraid to get things wrong, and when it’s your turn to make that unexpected phone call to someone with potential, make it.
