Hospitality promotes its best cooks and servers into management with zero leadership training, then acts baffled when they struggle. The industry's fix for this is usually an expensive away day rather than an actual skill. I've seen this go wrong in spectacular, five-figure fashion. Here's the story, and here's what's actually missing.
There's a ritual in this industry, repeated in every restaurant group that's ever existed. Someone's brilliant at the job — best cook on the pass, sharpest supervisor on the floor — and management responds by taking them off the thing they're good at and putting them in charge of people instead. No training, no handover. New badge, bigger rota, same skillset.
This isn't a vibe, it's a stat: the Chartered Management Institute found 82% of UK managers step into the role with zero formal training. So when someone above you says "we need better leadership," the honest translation is "we never built any, we just promoted people and hoped."
The time it went spectacularly wrong
A managing director I once worked under decided the leadership team needed developing. Good instinct. Then he flew in a mate, put him up in a genuinely lovely hotel — repeatedly — and paid a jaw-dropping day rate, thousands of pounds a pop, for a "leadership expert" whose main qualification was knowing the MD personally.
The session itself was the worst I've ever sat through, and that's a competitive field. He lost his place in his own slides. He asked questions he clearly hadn't thought through himself. At points he seemed to be discovering the point of the exercise at the same moment as the twelve managers he was supposedly developing. Nobody left better at a difficult conversation or a P&L. What they left with was a very expensive demonstration of the actual disease: leadership development treated as a favour for a mate, not a discipline worth investing in properly.
What's actually missing
Cut the consultants out and the real gap is unglamorous. Restaurant managers lack commercial literacy — nobody promotes on spreadsheet skills — and the ability to have a hard conversation without either avoiding it for six months or losing it in the moment. CMI's own data says exactly that: untrained managers feel least confident handling sensitive issues and poor behaviour. They also can't delegate, in the specific sense of letting someone else do it slightly worse on purpose so they eventually do it just as well. Technically brilliant people would rather do everything themselves at 11pm than teach it once at 3pm.
Head chefs get the same disease, nastier strain. Culinary training is knives, sections, temperatures — nothing about running a team, a budget, or an inbox. Chefs promoted purely for cooking ability often can't plan, forecast, or control cost, and some genuinely can't get through a meeting or an email without it turning into a war of attrition. Layer on a kitchen culture with a long history of shouting as management style, and a head chef's real development need often isn't food cost — it's learning to regulate themselves under pressure instead of taking it out on the nearest commis. One well-known industry mental health survey put stress-related issues among UK hospitality workers at 80%; I'd treat the exact number with a raised eyebrow, self-selecting surveys always skew towards people with something to say, but the direction isn't seriously in dispute.
The point
The fix isn't "buy a course." It's "stop promoting people into jobs you've never trained them for, then acting surprised." Skip that and reach for an away day instead, and you've put a plaster on a burn — looks like action, changes nothing. Somewhere, some MD's mate is checking into another lovely hotel to go and prove it.