The most dangerous feeling in hotel leadership isn’t irrelevance. It’s indispensability.
It’s the property that hums when you’re there, and only when you’re there. It’s the team that calls you with every decision they could probably make on their own. It’s ownership telling you, again, that they don’t know what they’d do without you. Every hospitality leader I know has felt some version of this, and most of us have quietly enjoyed it.
That feeling isn’t wrong. The results are real and the recognition is earned. But it is one of the most effective traps in our industry, and it accounts for more of our burnout problem than we tend to admit.
Consider what indispensability means from the other side of the desk. Every person who needs you for an answer hasn’t been built to find one on their own. Every gap that only you can fill exists because no one else has been developed to fill it. When a team performs because you’re watching, the standard doesn’t live in the team. It lives in you. When you leave, it leaves with you.
A statistic about a room, not individuals
Axonify’s 2024 survey of 500 front-line hospitality managers in the United States found that 47 percent were burned out, and 64 percent had lost someone on their team to it. Turnover across accommodation and food services runs near 74 percent a year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Job Openings and Labor Turnover survey.
Those numbers are not a story about people who can’t hack it. They’re a story about how we build hotel leaders, and what we ask them to carry once they’re built.
People are not being let go. They are choosing to leave.
Hospitality has always promoted heroes. The general manager who stayed late. The director of sales who won the account no one else could win. The chief engineer who came in at two in the morning. There’s nothing wrong with that, and I’d argue there’s a lot right with it. A property that has never had a heroic moment is a property that has closed.
But heroics are individual skills, and individual skills don’t scale. The more we promote leaders for heroics, the higher we push people whose whole identity is being the one who does the thing. And then one day, someone hands them a team. They look at that team the way they’ve always looked at a problem: how do I fix this? The answer their whole career has taught them is do it yourself.
That’s the quiet math behind the burnout numbers. The skill that gets a hospitality leader promoted is often the opposite of the skill the new job actually requires.
The job nobody handed you
There is a second job description that arrives with every promotion in this industry, and nobody hands it to you: it’s the job of building the people who do the work, rather than doing the work yourself.
Slower. Less visible. Rarely rewarded in the moment. It is also the only version of the job that scales past your own capacity.
So what does it look like in practice? Not in a workshop, not in an annual review; on a Wednesday morning, when a front office supervisor walks into your office with a problem you’ve solved forty times. You know exactly what to do. Two sentences would resolve it, and they’d walk out grateful.
The developmental move is to keep those two sentences to yourself, and ask one question first. What do you think we should do?
Leaders who develop their people and leaders who don’t spend roughly the same number of hours with their teams. The hours are the same. What happens inside them isn’t.
Developing leaders ask. Non-developing leaders answer.
The answer your supervisor finds on her own, even if it takes longer and even if it isn’t as clean as yours would have been, belongs to them in a way your answer never will. The next time that problem shows up, and it will, they won’t be standing in your office. They’ll handle it at the front desk, because the standard has finally moved from you into them.
The standard that holds
There is a question every hospitality leader owes themselves, honestly, and most of us are afraid to ask it.
When you leave this role, whether that’s next year or in ten years or in a way you don’t get to choose, what happens to your team?
Does the standard hold? Do the people you developed rise into what you built them for? Or does something quietly come apart, because the standard was always living in you, and you took it with you when you went?
The leaders who build something that lasts in this industry, in my experience, aren’t the ones who were indispensable. They are the ones who spent years making themselves less necessary, one small conversation at a time. That is the work—and the industry, right now, needs more of us willing to do it.
Story contributed by Amanda Wickham, vice president of culture & communications, Ivy Hospitality.