Middle managers at hospitality businesses work behind the scenes and on the floor. Photo: Recep-bg.
Ever been out for dinner at your favourite Canberra venue and left wondering why the night didn’t quite click?
The food might have been good, the service quick enough, and yet something about the experience felt flat.
Maybe your waiter seemed distracted, or the energy of the place was a little strained. Most of us chalk it up to a busy night, but behind those small cracks is often a bigger story, one that begins with the people tasked with holding a team together: middle managers.
In hospitality, middle management isn’t a corner office or a lofty title. It’s the duty managers, floor supervisors and assistant venue managers who keep the wheels turning day and night. These are the people who wear many hats at once: they’re writing rosters, fielding last-minute sick calls, placing supplier orders, and still the ones you’ll see running food to your table or making your morning coffee.
Their job isn’t just to oversee; it’s to jump in wherever the pressure is greatest.
Unlike owners or directors, who set the big picture, middle managers live inside the rush of each shift, where small decisions ripple quickly across the entire operation.
The truth is, these roles are some of the hardest to recruit for in the whole industry. Middle management demands everything at once: physical stamina to work long shifts on their feet, social skills to juggle guests and staff, and emotional resilience to handle constant pressure.
Yet the pay rarely reflects the weight of responsibility.
On top of that, managers are tasked with leading workforces that can be transient, undertrained, or simply unmotivated.
Faced with this reality, many operators fall back on the easiest option: they promote strong frontline staff into management. A great barista becomes a cafe supervisor, or a confident waiter is suddenly the floor manager.
When this happens, the consequences ripple across the whole business. Instead of being a shield for frontline staff, unprepared managers often become amplifiers of pressure. They pass negativity down the chain, sometimes without realising it, and morale suffers. Staff turnover spikes, service standards drop, and suddenly the entire venue feels heavy.
Guests might not be able to name the problem, but they feel it.
This is where emotional intelligence matters. At its simplest, it’s the ability to understand and manage your own emotions while recognising and responding to the emotions of others.
In hospitality, it’s not a “nice to have”: it’s a core skill of leadership.
When you’re managing people on their feet for long hours, dealing with demanding customers, and working at speed, the human side of leadership is everything. A manager with strong emotional intelligence can set the tone of a shift, lift spirits when things are tough, and de-escalate conflicts before they get out of hand.
And yet, emotional intelligence is rarely prioritised. Middle managers are often promoted and left to sink or swim.
They might be shown how to fill out a stock order or balance the till, but they’re not given the tools to manage people. Studies have long shown emotionally intelligent leaders bring out the best in their teams, boosting motivation, lowering turnover, even lifting the quality of service customers feel at the table. Still, in hospitality, these skills are too often treated as afterthoughts rather than essentials.
The new generation of leaders is also sending a clear message: wellbeing matters more than financial reward alone.
These roles may never be the highest paid in the industry, but if we invest in soft skills and provide managers with the ability to navigate stressful environments, they will not only stay, they will create workplaces where frontline staff also want to stay.
In an industry defined by turnover, that stability could be transformational.
So what can be done?
The solution isn’t complicated, but requires a mindset shift. If we want hospitality to be sustainable, we need to invest in developing people skills as deliberately as we do technical skills.
That means building emotional intelligence into training programs, giving managers the chance to learn how to lead with empathy, and providing mentoring rather than just throwing them in the deep end.
Imagine if every new duty manager, shift supervisor or assistant venue manager received the same attention to their leadership development as a barista does to their latte art. Imagine if investing in emotional intelligence was seen not as an optional extra, but as a core part of running a business.
The result would be managers who didn’t just keep the wheels turning, but created environments where staff felt supported, valued and motivated to deliver their best work.
Middle management will never be glamorous. It’s tough, demanding and often thankless. But it’s also the layer that holds hospitality businesses together.
If we want thriving venues in Canberra and beyond, happy staff, and guests who leave with a smile, we need to start valuing middle managers and giving them the tools to succeed.
Because when they thrive, so does the entire industry.
