You're Not Leading. You're Rescuing.

A critical reflection for hospitality leaders who keep everyone aloaft - and queitly drown doing it.

Picture this. It's a Friday evening in the middle of a full hotel. Your front desk manager called in sick, a VIP complained about their suite, the F&B team is short two servers, and your GM is locked in a board dinner. Who does everyone call? You. They always call you. And you answer, every single time — because that's who you are. The person who holds it all together.

Now ask yourself honestly: when did being that person start to feel less like a strength — and more like a sentence?

That question sits at the heart of a compelling article recently published in Harvard Business Review by executive coach Dr. Luis Velasquez (2026). He argues something that many of us in hospitality have felt but never had words for: the very competence that earned you your reputation may now be quietly eroding your influence, your strategic capacity, and your wellbeing. Let's dig into it — honestly, critically, and with our industry firmly in mind.

Hospitality breaks its best people first

Velasquez (2026) describes what he calls over-functioning: a concept borrowed from family systems researcher Dr. Murray Bowen, describing what happens when one person routinely absorbs the dysfunction of an entire system to protect those around them. In organizational terms, this means stepping in to cover gaps, smooth tensions, and fix things that aren't technically yours to fix — at high personal cost.

If there is one industry on earth perfectly designed to manufacture over-functioning, it is ours. Hospitality is built on responsiveness, service recovery, and a cultural norm that says the guest experience always comes first. These are noble values. But inside a hotel, restaurant, or resort, they can also quietly license dysfunctional organizational structures to persist indefinitely — because someone reliable is always there to compensate for them.

Consider the research on emotional labour in service industries. Hochschild's foundational work (1983) showed that workers in hospitality expend significant cognitive and emotional resources managing both their own feelings and those of guests. More recent studies have built on this, linking chronic emotional labour to burnout, depersonalisation, and diminished job satisfaction (Kim et al., 2019; Grandey et al., 2013). What Velasquez adds is a structural layer to this conversation: it's not just guests demanding emotional labour from your best people. It's the organisation itself.

You are not leading, you are covering

Velasquez identifies three hidden roles that reliable leaders gradually absorb: the Buffer, the Fixer, and the Translator. Each role is initially praised. Each eventually becomes a liability. This framework is genuinely useful, and in a hospitality context, it maps almost perfectly onto real leadership archetypes I have seen time and again.

The Buffer is the department head who shields their team from every piece of bad news coming down from above, softens every critical message, and steps in to mediate every bit of interpersonal friction before it escalates. Their team loves them. But their team also never develops conflict resolution skills, never faces accountability, and never builds the resilience required in a high-pressure service environment. When that manager eventually leaves or burns out, the team cracks.

The Fixer is perhaps the most common archetype in hospitality. This is the F&B director who rewrites every rota because the supervisor does it wrong, the rooms division manager who personally calls the dissatisfied guest because the duty manager fumbled the recovery, the executive chef who steps on the line every service because — let's be honest — it's just faster. Each individual act is defensible. Cumulatively, it creates a team that has learned to wait for rescue.

The Translator shows up when leadership at the top is unclear or conflicted. This is the general manager who quietly fills the authority vacuum left by an absent or politically distracted operations manager, turning vague strategic intentions into operational decisions — taking on decision-making rights that were never formally assigned. Velasquez (2026) calls this decision creep, and it is both exhausting and politically dangerous.

Good advice. Incomplete picture

The core insight of Velasquez's article is valuable and largely well-supported by adjacent literature on systems thinking, psychological safety, and leader-member exchange theory. His practical prescriptions — surface problems rather than absorb them, build capability rather than fix gaps, clarify ownership before acting — are sound and actionable.

That said, it is worth pausing on a few points that the article handles too lightly, particularly for those of us operating within the specific pressures of hospitality.

First, context matters enormously. The article's prescriptions assume a degree of organisational safety that is not always present. Velasquez advises leaders to "let silence sit in the room" and to redirect problems by asking "who should own this?" These are excellent moves — in a psychologically safe environment. In a workplace defined by hierarchy, instability, or a leader actively undermining their direct reports, naming gaps publicly can be career-limiting rather than career-building. The literature on workplace psychological safety (Edmondson, 1999; Newman et al., 2017) consistently shows that speaking up carries real interpersonal risk, especially in high-power-distance cultures. Many hospitality organisations, particularly in luxury and international contexts, retain precisely those cultural dynamics.

Second, there is a gender and identity dimension here that deserves acknowledgment. The article's central figure — Laura — is a woman doing invisible work to keep a system afloat while being labelled as "overreaching" and "too intense." Velasquez notes this dynamic but does not fully explore it. Research on gendered expectations in leadership is clear: women leaders are more frequently expected to take on the emotional and relational labour of organisations, and when they do, they are less likely to receive credit for it (Eagly & Carli, 2007). Telling Laura — and all the Lauras in our industry — to simply stop buffering is not wrong, but it is incomplete without acknowledging the structural forces that put her in that position.

Third, there is a timing question. In hospitality, there are moments — a major event, a crisis, a leadership transition — when someone does need to step up and absorb more than their fair share. The skill is not refusing to do so. It is knowing when to do it, doing it deliberately, and then actively extracting yourself when the crisis has passed. Velasquez's framework is better suited as a long-term operating philosophy than a rigid daily rule.

Three moves starting tomorrow

Drawing on Velasquez (2026) and the broader leadership literature, here are three shifts worth making — framed for the realities of our industry.

1. Narrate the problem before you solve it. The next time you step in to fix something, pause and name it first. "I'm going to help with this, and I also want us to look at why this keeps happening." This does two things: it protects your reputation as a leader who thinks systemically, and it slowly trains the people around you to expect accountability, not rescue.

2. Make your delegation visible. When you stop fixing something and hand it to someone else, say so explicitly and in public where appropriate. "Sam is going to own this going forward — I'll be in a supporting role." Invisible delegation breeds confusion and backsliding. Visible delegation builds ownership and protects you from the gravitational pull of the fixer role.

3. Protect your strategic hours like you protect your VIP guests. The best hospitality leaders I have known treat a chunk of their week as non-negotiable thinking time — protected from operational fire-fighting. This is not a luxury. It is how you maintain the strategic perspective that differentiates a leader from a very experienced operator.

Conclusion

Our industry has a complicated relationship with reliability. We celebrate the person who never says no, who always finds a way, who is the last to leave and the first to arrive. And those qualities, when applied with intention, really do build extraordinary careers and extraordinary teams.

But there is a version of that story that ends in burnout, stalled careers, and organisations that never develop the resilience they need — because one brilliant person kept making it unnecessary. Velasquez (2026) puts it plainly: strength is not measured by how much you carry. It is measured by how deliberately you choose what is yours to carry.

That is a reframe worth sitting with — especially in an industry that has long confused endurance with leadership.

References

Eagly, A. H., & Carli, L. L. (2007). Through the labyrinth: The truth about how women become leaders. Harvard Business School Press.

Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999

Grandey, A. A., Diefendorff, J. M., & Rupp, D. E. (Eds.). (2013). Emotional labor in the 21st century: Diverse perspectives on emotion regulation at work. Routledge.

Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. University of California Press.

Kim, T. T., Yoo, J. J.-E., Lee, G., & Kim, J. (2019). Emotional labor and employee well-being in the hospitality industry: A review of literature and future research agenda. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, 31(7), 2808–2826. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJCHM-09-2018-0788

Newman, A., Donohue, R., & Eva, N. (2017). Psychological safety: A systematic review of the literature. Human Resource Management Review, 27(3), 521–535. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hrmr.2017.01.001

Velasquez, L. (2026, February 27). When being the most reliable leader becomes a liability. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2026/02/when-being-the-most-reliable-leader-becomes-a-liability

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