Hospitality Leadership Isn’t About Having More Skills, It’s About Having the Right Ones

As artificial intelligence, technological disruption, and shifting workforce expectations reshape hospitality, one question becomes increasingly important: what leadership capabilities will matter most in the future? Drawing on nearly four decades of research data and focus group interviews with industry executives, EHL has released the Hospitality Leadership Skills Executive Insights Report. 

In this Q&A, co-author Dr. Sowon Kim, an associate professor at EHL specializing in leadership and organizational culture and founder of Women in Leadership, explains why leadership effectiveness depends on building a strong foundation of self-leadership skills and developing the right configuration of human connection, hospitality business, and future-ready capabilities for the context at hand.

Hospitality is undergoing profound technological and societal changes. What motivated you to investigate which leadership capabilities will remain relevant in the future?

We all know that skills matter more than ever, leadership skills especially, and they always seem to come in lists: the “top 5 skills,” the “10 skills that matter,” and so on.

Yet hospitality is being transformed by powerful forces such as AI and rising expectations for meaningful human experiences. We were therefore curious to identify what the hospitality leadership skills actually are, and more importantly, which of them are durable in a world of constant change.

How did you investigate this topic?

Together with my colleague Dr. Bertrand Audrin, assistant professor in Human Resources and Organizational Behavior at EHL, we started with almost four decades of academic literature and identified more than 1,500 individual leadership skill statements.

Through several rounds of coding, we consolidated these into 30 sub-skills organized across four domains: self-leadership, human connection, hospitality business, and future-ready capabilities.

That gave us the academic rigor. But a framework that only lives in the literature has limited value to practitioners.

To ensure relevance, we took it to 22 senior hospitality executives and pressure-tested it through focus groups. The research design was built around that combination: systematic evidence and real executive judgment.

Your research suggests that self-leadership forms the foundation of effective leadership. Why have capabilities such as self-awareness, ethical grounding, learning agility, and adaptive resilience become non-negotiable today?

Across every single focus group we ran, senior executives described these skills as a precondition for leadership to work at all, not a nice-to-have.

For example, it is what enables leaders to connect with people genuinely; imagine a leader who is unaware of their blind spots or makes decisions that are unaligned with the values they claim—people might follow them for different reasons, but would such a leader inspire trust?

Ethical grounding works the same way: it is what keeps decisions aligned with stated values when no one is checking.

And adaptive resilience is what lets a leader keep functioning, rather than freeze or overcorrect, when conditions destabilize.

These foundational self-leadership skills are non-negotiable today because they are also what gives leaders inner stability, in a context where uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity keep on mounting.

And what makes learning agility so important today?

Leaders today function in a context of constant change, so they must absorb new inputs quickly and adapt accordingly. Unlearning (letting go of old knowledge) and relearning (replacing old mental models with new ones) are part of the learning process, which in practice is not that easy.

Evidence shows that learning agility is the single best predictor of executive success, yet only around 15 percent of executives qualify as genuinely strong agile learners (De Meuse, 2019; Korn Ferry, 2026)!

So in order to be a good leader, these skills are indispensable?

Self-leadership skills are foundational, necessary but not sufficient. They are the price of entry to becoming a good leader, not a competitive advantage in themselves.

Like building a house, you would not construct it on land exposed to floods, landslides, or other natural hazards. Stable ground is a prerequisite, yet it does not guarantee a beautiful, functional, or valuable home; it simply makes one possible.

Likewise, self-leadership provides the foundation on which leadership is built, but other capabilities are required to translate that foundation into leadership effectiveness.

One caveat to the metaphor: unlike ground, this foundation is not laid once and left alone. It has to be maintained, or it erodes.

These skills are all very personal and human. How can leaders develop greater self-awareness if they did not grow up like this? Is it possible to learn that at a later stage in life?

What a great question, and the answer is yes, because self-awareness is not fixed. It is built through reflection, feedback, and deliberate practice, the same way any other skills are built.

As humans, we tend to overestimate our own abilities, knowledge, performance, or likelihood of success. It’s called the overconfidence bias.

For example, research shows that around 95 percent of people believe they’re self-aware, but only 10 to 15 percent meet the bar for it (Eurich, 2018)!

So, it takes a dose of modesty to see the gap, and once you see it, the willingness to do something about it.

In order to develop this, you need learning agility, right? So, is this not kind of a chicken and the egg type of conundrum?

That’s a fair point. But the way I see it is that self-awareness and learning agility are closely intertwined. Self-awareness helps us recognize the need to learn, while learning agility helps us act on that realization.

In my view, each strengthens the other, creating a virtuous cycle of growth and development.

Your report argues that leadership is highly context-dependent. Why is there no universal leadership model anymore?

There has never been a universal model of leadership. To be universal, it would need to hold across cultures, times, and contexts. Different eras have favored different leadership styles, and what counted as effective leadership a generation ago is not necessarily what counts today.

That said, universal is not the opposite of foundational. Self-leadership skills are foundational because they underpin leadership practice, much like basic car-handling skills underpin driving.

Yet no single leadership model is universal because leadership is enacted and evaluated differently across contexts, cultures, and histories. The mix of human connection, hospitality business, and future-ready skills required will vary depending on the situation.

What matters in one context may be far less relevant in another. Leadership must therefore be understood in context, not measured against a fixed checklist.

How then can companies choose the ‘right’ leader?

There isn’t a single “right” leader, only the right fit for what a specific role is going to demand.

Research shows that senior leadership transitions judged as failures or serious disappointments occur because an executive who was successful in one context is promoted into a role that demands something different, yet continues relying on what worked before.

Organizations should start asking what combination of skills actually produced their results so far, and whether the new role calls for that same combination or something different.

AI tools are on the rise, and whereas they are creating many opportunities, they also bring challenges with them. How will the roles of hospitality leaders change in the near future?

The operational side of the job will continue to shrink with AI. What grows in importance is the part of leadership that was never really about tools: reading people accurately, building trust, and holding teams together under pressure.

That work stops being something leaders do between operational tasks and becomes the main job. At its core is the ability to see the person in front of you, guest or colleague, as a human being rather than a resource, and to let that shape how you act.

In my view, that is not something a machine can do. So the role does not become less human with AI; it becomes more focused on the part that was never mechanical to begin with.

Building trust is something that happens over time. Can leaders step up as fast, as AI is evolving and changing the business world?

Relational credibility is the ability to earn trust through competence, benevolence, and integrity, and there is no way around the fact that it takes time.

You cannot compress it, no matter how fast everything else moves. AI and automation can free leaders from tasks that consume their attention, but if that time is simply filled with more output, the benefit is lost.

Leaders end up becoming another part of the process rather than the people the process was meant to serve. The time AI buys back only matters if it is reinvested in the one thing that was never going to get faster: being present with people long enough for trust to build.

What practical steps should hospitality organizations take today to develop future-ready leaders?

Executives told us that horizon scanning matters, but the day-to-day wins. That suggests the solution must be structural, not something we ask leaders to squeeze in on top of everything else.

First, give future-oriented work its own protected time and budget so it is not constantly competing with operational priorities.

Second, tie that effort to something concrete as for example, a pilot in guest experience, a new way of working, not just discussion.

And finally, make the ability to think ahead part of how leaders are evaluated, alongside the operational and people skills we already assess. This is too important to leave to good intentions.

How can the industry create room for innovation, while it is facing challenges such as labor shortages and the increasing digitalization?

High staff turnover generally hurts innovation because new ideas depend on people who know the business, trust each other, and share ways of working that build up over time.

When teams keep changing, you lose tacit knowledge and relationships faster than you can rebuild them, making it much harder to move from ideas to implementation.

At the same time, some turnover can bring fresh perspectives, so the real risk is sustained, high turnover that continually disrupts the culture.

Digitalization can help by capturing knowledge before people leave and automating routine work, but it only addresses part of the problem.

My view is that technology creates room for innovation only when it is paired with more human-centered leadership.

If organizations use the capacity technology frees up to improve the employee experience and reduce turnover, knowledge stays in the business and people stay long enough to build something new. Innovation comes less from the technology itself than from what organizations do with the time and capacity it creates.

If there is one message hospitality leaders should take away from your research, what would it be?

If there is one message hospitality leaders should take away from our research, it is that there is no universal leadership formula, but there are capabilities that consistently matter.

We identified 30 leadership sub-skills, with self-leadership forming the foundation. Effective leadership is therefore less about applying a model and more about having the judgment to draw on the right capabilities at the right time.

Bianca Lüthy – Corporate Content Manager at EHL Hospitality Business School. Connect with Bianca on LinkedIn.

Source: View the original article at EHL.