Stop firefighting the bottom. Start multiplying the middle

Every multi site business I have ever worked with sorts into roughly the same shape. The top ten percent: your standout GMs. They are usually already on somebody's succession plan, they get the interesting projects and they know they are good. You are not neglecting these people. The bottom ten percent: struggling, visibly. They absorb an enormous amount of senior attention, and they usually need something other than training. More on that in a moment. The middle forty to sixty percent. Solid. Reliable. Consistent. Been with you a while. Nobody worries about them, which is exactly the problem, because nobody thinks about them either. I did not arrive at this on my own. It came out of asking a straightforward question. If I want to help businesses turn sites around, where is the actual leverage? Three senior people gave me the same answer independently in the space of a month, two Heads of People and one operations director. It is not at the tail. It is in the middle.

I want to be careful here, because this is not about writing people off. But be honest about what you are usually dealing with. A manager who is genuinely struggling is rarely struggling because they lack a leadership framework. It is a fit issue, or a clarity issue, or a personal circumstance, or a recruitment decision that was made too fast eight months ago, or in some cases a business that has never told them what good looks like. None of those get fixed by a development programme. You can put someone on the best course in the country and if the problem is that they are in the wrong role, you have spent your money teaching them to be unhappy more articulately. Fixing the bottom is a rescue. Even when it works, and sometimes it does, you have moved someone from poor to acceptable. That is a lot of effort for a small commercial return. And here is the bit that stings. While all that is happening, the solid manager at your second best site has gone eighteen months without a single conversation about their own growth, and has quietly started reading job adverts on their day off.

Run the numbers in your own head. Take a group of twenty managers. Two are excellent, two are struggling, sixteen are somewhere in the middle doing a decent job. Pour everything into the two who are struggling and, at best, you have improved two sites from bad to alright. Move the sixteen. Not transform them, move them. A few percent on spend per head. A noticeable drop in team turnover because they have got better at the conversations. Better conversion on the bookings they were already taking. Less waste because they are finally holding people to the standard rather than doing it themselves at eleven at night. Same estate. Same wage bill. Same rota. More back from all of it. That is not a training argument, it is a margin argument. You are not adding hours, you are making the hours you already pay for worth more.

Three reasons, and I have been guilty of all of them as an operator. They do not create urgency: nothing is on fire. Nobody is complaining. In a busy week, the person who is fine gets skipped, every single time. We mistake steady for finished: a manager who has been consistent for four years gets read as someone who has found their level. Sometimes that is true. Far more often they have never once been asked what else they fancy having a go at. We assume they are happy: they are not necessarily unhappy. But "not unhappy" is a fragile thing to build an estate on, and it is exactly the state of mind that answers a recruiter's message. There is something in this that goes right to the heart of why I do this work. The middle are the ignored ones. The industry has spent decades telling hospitality managers they are lucky to be here and should get on with it, and the solid, dependable ones cop that worst of all, because they never make enough noise to be noticed. They deserve more than that.

You do not need a system for this. You need an hour and some honesty. Write down every manager in the business. Then, for each one, answer three questions. When did we last invest anything in this person? Not a compliance module. Not a briefing. Actual development, aimed at them. What would happen if they were handed a bigger site tomorrow? If your instinct is "they would probably be fine but I would want to keep an eye", that is your middle, and that instinct is the gap you can close. Would I be surprised if they resigned this month? If the honest answer is yes, that is a good sign about them and a warning about you. Surprise means you have not spoken to them properly in a long time. The names that come out of that exercise are your list. It will usually be longer than you expect and it will usually contain at least two people you had not thought about in a year.

Whatever you do, do it as a group. The single biggest thing that shifts a solid manager is not new information. It is discovering that the person running your site in Bristol is wrestling with exactly the same thing they are, and that between them they have most of the answer. That is why our work runs in cohorts rather than one to one. A GM with eleven peers they can ring is a completely different proposition to a GM with none. [Here is how the 90 Day Leadership Accelerator works](/90-day-leadership-accelerator) Then give them something real to own. Middle managers do not want a certificate. They want a target and the trust to go after it, which, funnily enough, is what most of them thought they were signing up for when they took the job.

Stop firefighting the bottom. Start multiplying the middle. Deal with your bottom ten percent, of course. But deal with them for what they are, a performance or recruitment issue, and stop dressing it up as a development programme. Then go and find the people who have been quietly holding your business together and never once been asked what else they could do.