Who Taught Us to Manage Like This?

Promotion is, more often than not, a reward for excellence in something other than management. The best section chef becomes the sous, the most capable supervisor becomes the general manager, and the qualities that earned them the job often bear little relation to the ones on which they will now be judged. After this promotion the dominoes fall softly and slowly, barely noticed until they are all on the floor: a P&L that nobody has explained, a difficult conversation deferred and then deferred again, a grievance that arrives without warning on a Saturday. The person carrying all of it is generally doing their considerable best with a set of instincts assembled by watching other people improvise. This is not a failure of character or of effort, but the predictable consequence of an industry that has never regarded leadership as something it is obliged to teach. By the time the last of the dominoes goes over, they are being paid for in the culture of the room, in how long good people stay, and in what the business takes while they are there.

Learned by watching

Ask almost any head chef where they learned to run a kitchen and the answer will be a person rather than a place. Somebody showed them how to hold a section together on a bad night, and before that somebody showed that person, and so it goes back through the industry like a family recipe nobody has ever written down. It's one of the loveliest things about this business, and it's why we remain one of the very few industries that will take you on with no qualifications, no CV, no references and nothing much to show on paper. You turn up, you watch, you get good.

The trouble is that we teach leadership the same way. You learn to manage by watching whoever managed you, exactly as you learned to break down a chicken or turn a section, which means what gets handed on isn't best practice at all. It's simply whatever the last person happened to do.

The cruellest trick in the trade

Two things make this harder than it needs to be. The first is that a great many of us came into hospitality precisely because it isn't a desk, and that's a perfectly reasonable preference right up until somebody hands you a set of accounts, a disciplinary procedure and a body of employment law, and expects fluency by the end of the month.

The second is the people. When the Access Group surveyed 1,446 UK hospitality workers this year, 72% said that working with great people was the single most important reason they stayed in a job, ahead of pay and ahead of hours. Anyone who has done a Saturday double will recognise that immediately, because the friendships you make in a kitchen or on a floor are forged in the particular intimacy of getting through something difficult together, several times a week, for years. It's the best thing about working here. It is also the cruellest trick the industry plays on you, because the qualities that make you beloved on a section are not the qualities that let you hold that section to account, and nobody warns you that the first honest conversation with a friend will feel like a small betrayal.

So where did the shouting come from?

Shouting isn't a temperament. It's a technique, handed down by chefs who were shouted at themselves and concluded, quite logically and quite wrongly, that this was the mechanism by which a kitchen is held upright. Nobody ever sat them down and offered them anything else, so they reproduced the only model they had ever been shown, and the industry spent the next forty years mistaking it for character.

Whether it ever worked is no longer an open question. The global survey of 460 chefs published in January by Bournemouth University with The Burnt Chef Project found that 69% often or always think about leaving their current role, with toxic leadership named as a decisive factor. Its conclusion is the line every operator should have pinned above the pass: chefs are not leaving cooking, they are leaving the conditions that surround it.

What's striking, when you talk to the people getting this right, is how many of them describe learning it the hard way. Marie Mitchell says that the most important quality in a leader is being "willing to teach", and is disarmingly honest about how she arrived at that view, having earlier in her career held what she calls "the misconception everyone would work in the same capacity as me". Nobody had told her otherwise. She worked it out by getting it wrong, at somebody else's expense, which is how most of us learn most of this.

The quieter damage shows up in what people feel able to say out loud. VERiFAIR's survey of 3,140 hospitality workers across the UK and Ireland, published this month, found that 52% had experienced inappropriate, unsafe or unacceptable behaviour at work in the past year. The figure worth sitting with, though, is a different one: 63% of senior managers and owners felt able to raise a concern, against only 31% of frontline and junior staff. Hospitality Action found much the same from the other direction, with 65% of people reluctant to speak up for fear of what it might do to their progression. As VERiFAIR's founder Justine Murphy puts it, a responsible workplace "shouldn't just be something a business says it has".

A business where two thirds of the people at the bottom won't tell you what's wrong doesn't have a communication problem. It has a manager nobody ever taught to make it safe to speak.

What it actually costs

It would be convenient if all this stopped at atmosphere. In a great many independent businesses, disciplinaries, grievances, sick leave, hiring and dismissal are handled by somebody who inherited the job along with the keys, and was never offered a route to competence in employment law. That gets considerably more dangerous on 1 January 2027, when the Employment Rights Act 2025 cuts the qualifying period for unfair dismissal from two years to six months and removes the compensation cap altogether. The conversations we have always handled worst are about to become the most expensive ones to handle badly.

The rest of it is arithmetic. For most of our history the case against training was really a case about replaceability, on the understanding that anybody who walked could be replaced by Friday, and that simply isn't true any more. Applicants are thinner on the ground, the shortage is sharpest in exactly the roles we're talking about, and an employed hour at the National Living Wage now costs an operator somewhere near £16.53 once you've counted holiday accrual, employer National Insurance and pension. Agency cover for the same shift runs at £19 to £21 before VAT.

That loaded rate is payable from the first shift, long before the person is worth it, because a new starter can't carry a section alone, can't upsell what they haven't learned to describe, and slows everyone down around them. Given that as many as 30% of new hospitality starters leave within their first ninety days, a good deal of that money buys nothing but the unproductive weeks, and then you spend it again on the next person. Which is roughly how turnover across UK hospitality arrives at close to 39%.

The business that won't develop the people it already has isn't saving money. It's choosing the more expensive option, in instalments small enough that the choice never looks like a choice.

The part that can be taught

Here's the good news, and it's better than it sounds. One midscale UK hotel group, running fourteen properties, redesigned its onboarding and early development in 2024 and watched graduate retention at eighteen months move from 41% to 67%, while guest satisfaction rose by eleven points over the same period. Nobody became a different sort of person. They were simply told what the job involved.

That's not a coincidence, and it isn't soft. Set it against the finding that 72% of hospitality workers stay for the people they work with, and the mechanism is obvious enough, because the quality of the people you work with is very largely a description of the person in charge of you. Michael Miles at Crispin puts it about as well as anyone, saying he wants the kitchen "to be an educational space where everyone is pushed just a little out of their depth technically and creatively, including myself". That last clause is the whole thing.

Will Guidara, who took Eleven Madison Park to the top of the World's 50 Best list and then wrote Unreasonable Hospitality about how he did it, has a useful way of describing what happens when we don't bother. Knowledge in a business behaves like a bank account, he says, and when only two or three people are making deposits while everybody is making withdrawals, it empties faster than anyone expects. His answer to that was structural rather than sentimental. He turned the pre-service meeting into a teaching session, created a role whose whole job was helping other people execute their ideas properly, and treated criticism as a form of investment rather than something to be got through quickly. None of it is about being nice to your staff. All of it is about deciding that instruction is something you do on purpose.

Which is the principle the Countertalk Academy was built on, because the development this industry has left to chance for so long is precisely what will decide who is still trading in three years. It runs as training and as mentorship, made with Electric Mayonnaise and delivered by people who have run independent businesses themselves, and it exists to give the chefs, managers and team leaders holding this sector upright the education their commitment has always deserved.

So: who taught us to manage like this? Whoever happened to be standing nearest, mostly, on a night when they were far too busy to explain. The least we can do is make sure the next lot get a better answer.

Countertalk Training offers affordable training for operators who want to develop their emerging managers and team leaders, and strengthen the business as they do it. Built in partnership with learning experts Electric Mayonnaise, each module is tailored specifically to the needs of independent hospitality.

Unlike traditional training programmes which disrupt rotas and cash flow, every stand-alone session runs for just four hours, built to ensure that knowledge can be used impactfully the moment the session ends. Each module works independently, so operators have the flexibility of sending their people to whichever suits their role and stage, or to all of them, and each one is suitable for kitchen AND front-of-house.