Are We Training Managers to Be Nice — When What We Need Is Kind?
Is the leisure industry brilliant at promoting people who don’t rock the boat? I think it might be. Someone who’s great with members, never causes a fuss, and keeps everyone happy – they get the supervisor role. Then the manager role. And somewhere along the way, nobody teaches them that their job has fundamentally changed. Being liked was their superpower as a frontline team member. As a manager, it becomes their biggest weakness. We’ve built a leadership culture around niceness. And it’s quietly doing a lot of damage.
I want to be clear — I’m not talking about being harsh. I’m not talking about managers who shout, who belittle people, who rule by fear. That’s a different conversation and an easier one. The harder conversation is about the manager who is universally well-liked, who everybody gets on with, whose team would describe them as brilliant — and whose team is quietly underperforming because nobody has ever had a real conversation about it.
That’s nice leadership. And it’s everywhere in leisure.
There’s another version of this problem that I see just as often, and it’s baked into the job title itself. Duty Manager. Two words. The second one is Manager. The first one — Duty — is what most of them actually do during their shifts. Checking the pool, covering a gap on reception, dealing with a complaint, unlocking the sports hall, and resolving the issue with the booking system. By the time the shift ends, they’ve done everything except manage anyone.
It’s not laziness. It’s not incompetence. It’s what the job has quietly trained them to do. The operational tasks are time-sensitive and visible. The management work — the 1-to-1, the coaching conversation, and the five-minute checking in with a team member who seemed off last week — is important but never urgent. So it is pushed. Every shift. Every week. And over time, a Duty Manager who never manages stops developing the skills to manage at all. They get excellent at duties. They stay average at leadership. And the cycle continues.
What Kind Leadership Actually Looks Like
Kind leadership isn’t soft. If anything, it’s harder than nice. It requires you to have the conversations that make you feel uneasy. It means sitting down with a team member who’s been late three times this month and talking about it directly — not hinting, not hoping they’ll notice, and not mentioning it in a team briefing without naming anyone. It means doing it with genuine care for the person in front of you and a genuine belief that they can do better.
Kind leaders have tough talks early, while the details are still fresh and the fix is still simple. Nice leaders wait. They wait until it’s a pattern, until it’s a crisis, until HR is involved. By that point, the conversation that should have taken fifteen minutes at the start now takes months to resolve — and the team member, who probably knew something was wrong, feels blindsided.
Here’s the thing about the leisure industry specifically: we promote people from the floor. Your best lifeguard becomes a duty manager. Your best receptionist becomes a team leader. That’s not wrong — experience in the role matters. But we rarely stop to ask, ‘What leadership training are they getting?’ What does their first 1-to-1 structure look like? Who’s teaching them to have the hard conversation?
Usually, the answer is nobody. So they default to what feels safe. They stay nice.
The Meeting That Goes Nowhere
You know this meeting. Twelve people around a table. The duty manager at the front. Thirty minutes in, nothing’s been decided. There are no numbers on the wall — no task completion rates, no training gaps, no problems outstanding from last month. Someone mentions that “things could be better on the gym floor.” Everyone nods. The meeting ends. Nobody knows what they’re doing differently tomorrow.
That’s not a meeting. That’s a social event with agenda items.
I have a saying I’ve used for years in this industry: run your meetings with facts, not feelings. It sounds simple. It is simple. But you can only do it if you have the facts in front of you.
What percentage of tasks were completed last week? Which team members have outstanding training? How many problems were logged, and how many are still unresolved? If your managers can’t answer those questions before they walk into a team meeting, the meeting will always drift toward opinion and away from action. And opinion without evidence is just noise.
This is one of the places where having the right operational visibility changes everything. When managers can walk into a 1-to-1 with a live dashboard showing task completion rates, outstanding training records, and problems raised – the conversation becomes factual by default. Not confrontational. Factual. “I can see you’ve got three overdue tasks this week — help me understand what’s getting in the way.” That’s a kind conversation, grounded in evidence, aimed at finding a solution. It’s a very different thing from a vague feeling that something isn’t right.
Kind Leadership Development — What Does Yours Look Like?
Here’s the question I want you to think about, and I’d genuinely love to know your answer: What does leadership development look like in your organisation?
Not the induction. Not the statutory training. The actual development of the manager as a leader is what we are focusing on. Do your duty managers have a structured 1-to-1 template? Do your site managers have a conversation guide for performance discussions? Is there any training — formal or informal — on how to give specific, honest feedback rather than vague praise?
CIMSPA’s professional standards give us a framework for what competent management in sport and physical activity looks like. But a framework is only useful if someone is actively using it to develop the people in your business. A qualification on a wall doesn’t make someone a kind leader. Practice does. Feedback does. Seeing a more experienced manager model the behaviour does help.
In most leisure businesses I’ve worked with over 30 years, leadership development is the first thing that gets cut when it gets busy — which, in leisure, is most of the time. So managers develop themselves, which usually means they become better versions of whatever they were when they started. If they were nice to begin with, they get nicer. The hard conversations never happen.
The Best in the World Still Put the Hours In
Think about the people you genuinely admire. Sporting legends, musicians, actors — the ones who seem to operate at a level most of us can barely imagine. There’s a pattern, and it’s not particularly glamorous: they practice more than everyone else, not less.
Jude Bellingham is one of the best footballers in Europe right now. Erling Haaland scores goals at a rate that defies logic. You might assume that players at that level arrive fully formed — that natural talent carries them. But the story that comes out of every elite football environment is the same one: the best players are first in, last out. They do extra sessions after training ends. They review footage. They work on the one specific thing that isn’t quite right. They are the best precisely because they practice like they’re not.
Cristiano Ronaldo is probably the most documented example in world football. Multiple teammates and coaches across his career — at Sporting Lisbon, Manchester United, and Real Madrid — have said the same thing independently: he was always the last to leave the training ground. At a level where everyone is gifted, he outworked them all. The free kicks, the heading ability, the fitness at 39 — none of it happened by accident. It happened because he treated every gap in his game as something to be practised until it wasn’t a gap anymore. Kylian Mbappé has spoken openly about working on his weaker foot throughout his early career for exactly the same reason. These aren’t stories about talent. They’re stories about deliberate practice.
So here’s the question I’d genuinely like you to sit with: what do your managers practice?
Not what training have they done. What do they actively, deliberately practise to get better at their role?
Is it DISC profiling – genuinely understanding how different people need to be communicated with and applying that in every conversation? Is it running structured meetings, working on getting better outcomes from forty-five minutes than most managers get from three hours? Is it questioning techniques – open questions, active listening, and the discipline of letting a team member finish their sentence before you jump in?
Go and ask a manager now. Literally, just ask the first one you see. Ask them: what do you practice to improve at your job?
I suspect the answer will tell you a lot about the development culture in your business.
The Cost of Keeping Everyone Happy
Let me put some numbers around this issue, because this is where it gets real.
Staff turnover in leisure and hospitality is significantly higher than most other sectors. A 2025 report from Menzies LLP noted that operators are under sustained pressure from rising wage costs — employer National Insurance is now at 15%, and the national minimum wage sits at £12.21 for those over 21. Every person you lose costs you in recruitment, onboarding time, and the training investment you’ve already made. And underperformance — the kind that nice managers avoid addressing — directly accelerates turnover. Good people leave because nobody holds the standards. Poor performers stay because nobody’s challenged them.
Nice leadership feels kind in the short term. In the medium term, it’s expensive.
Kind leadership — the 1-to-1 that addresses the issue early, the team meeting run on facts, not feelings, and the manager who has a coaching conversation instead of crossing their fingers — that’s what actually keeps good people. Not because it’s comfortable, but because people know where they stand. They know what’s expected. They feel developed, not just employed.
The operations dashboards that managers use in OpsPal aren’t just compliance tools. They’re conversation starters. They give managers something to look at together with their team, rather than relying on memory and gut feel. They make the kind conversation possible because the facts are already on the table. And when training records clearly show gaps – who’s current, who’s expiring, who hasn’t acknowledged a new procedure – managers can act early, before it becomes a performance issue or, worse, a safety one.
So What Does Your Training Look Like?
I’m not asking to catch anyone out. I’m asking because I think most leisure operators, if they’re honest, would say leadership development is underfunded and underdone. That’s not a criticism — it’s a structural reality of an industry that runs lean, covers long hours, and has historically promoted people for operational competence rather than leadership potential.
But the world has changed. Labour costs are higher. Good staff are harder to find and keep. The margin for managing people poorly — for keeping everyone happy at the expense of holding everyone accountable — has got much thinner.
Kind leadership is a skill that can be trained. The difficult conversation has a structure. The effective 1-to-1 has a format. The fact-based team meeting has a template. These aren’t complicated things — but they need to be taught, modelled, and practised. They don’t appear by accident.
If you’re reading this and thinking, “I need to look at this properly,” then that’s a positive sign — that’s the right instinct. If you want to see how other operators are approaching this, our post on management behaviour in leisure facilities covers some of the patterns we see most often. And if you haven’t read our piece on operational visibility, it’s worth five minutes — it covers managers who are scared of knowing and those who aren’t.
The leisure industry doesn’t need more nice managers. It needs more kind ones. The difference isn’t temperament. It’s training, structure, and the courage to have the conversation early with the facts in front of you.
Monday Morning Action: Pick one person in your team who you’ve been meaning to have a proper 1-to-1 with. Book it for this week. Before the meeting, pull whatever data you have on their performance — task completion, training status, anything logged. Walk in with facts, not feelings. That’s where kind leadership starts.
What does leadership development look like in your business? I’d love to hear what’s working — drop a comment or connect with me on LinkedIn.
