The Michelle Pascoe Hospitality Podcast · 2026-07-28 · 10 min
Building a hospitality leadership pipeline means identifying your next leaders before you need them. Michelle Pascoe, Certified Speaking Professional and hospitality training expert with over 30 years' experience, outlines a four-step approach: identify internal talent now, have honest succession conversations with your board, protect your leadership development budget, and broaden your talent pool beyond traditional club experience. Are the clubs around you already running out of leaders, and they just don't know it yet? In this solo episode, Michelle draws on a month of guest conversations to address one of the most pressing structural issues facing Australian clubs right now: the leadership pipeline gap. Senior retirements have already started. GMs and operations managers who built their careers through the club structure of the 1980s and 90s are retiring or burning out, and the generation below them has not been developed to step into those roles. Recruitment alone will not fix this. If you have not built the culture and developed your people internally, you will spend far more time and money recruiting than you would ever have spent on development.
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