Who Extends Hospitality to the Host?

I remember being offered my first management role and discovering something slightly unsettling.

The promotion itself did not feel particularly dramatic. No new knowledge appeared overnight. No hidden reserves of judgement suddenly revealed themselves. The following morning, I woke up exactly the same person I had been the day before.

Yet something had changed; not operationally, but perceptually. People began relating to me differently.

The shift was subtle enough that I did not fully notice it at first. Conversations changed, expectations changed, and mistakes seemed to take on a different weight. The strengths that had made the promotion possible were taken for granted almost immediately, while attention shifted elsewhere, towards decisions, judgement, accountability, and responsibility. The person remained largely unchanged; the role did not.

What interests me now is not the promotion itself, but the transition it revealed. At what point do we stop seeing a person and start seeing only the function they perform for us?

Hospitality offers an unusually clear view of this phenomenon because hospitality is full of roles: guests become covers, waiters become service, managers become management, owners become ownership. The language itself begins the transformation. This is not necessarily a problem as human beings rely on abstraction constantly. No organisation could function if every interaction required us to hold the full complexity of every individual in mind at all times. Roles allow coordination, and responsibilities become visible through them. Yet something interesting seems to happen when the abstraction becomes sufficiently stable. The role gradually becomes more visible than the person carrying it. After a while, criticism aimed at a manager no longer feels directed towards an individual but towards management itself. Frustration with ownership begins to absorb the owners. Expectations attach themselves to functions rather than people. The distinction sounds minor, yet I suspect it alters perception quite profoundly.

Perhaps this is why leadership often feels different from the way it is described.

Leadership literature frequently presents authority as a form of power. Managers are depicted as decision-makers, culture-shapers and sources of influence. There is truth in this, but it has never fully captured the experience I observed. Many managers spend their time translating between realities. The team wants understanding, ownership wants results, and guests want attention. The manager moves continuously between them, interpreting, mediating and balancing demands that rarely arrive in perfect alignment. From the outside, this may appear powerful, but from the inside, it often feels closer to responsibility.

The distinction matters because power implies control, while responsibility frequently exists without it. Perhaps this is partly why charitable assumptions occupy such an interesting place within leadership.

Managers are routinely encouraged to seek understanding before judgement, to assume positive intent, to remain curious about what might be happening beneath another person's behaviour. Entire leadership philosophies have been constructed around this principle.

The assumption is sensible. What interests me is its direction. The flow is remarkably consistent.

Managers are expected to understand their teams, ownership, and guests, but the reciprocal movement appears far less frequently.

Who is taught to understand the manager? Not sympathetically. Interpretively.

The question becomes particularly interesting during moments of failure. A team member has a difficult day, and curiosity often appears naturally. People wonder what happened, they search for context, they seek an explanation. When a manager has a difficult day, the reaction is different.

The role arrives before the person: management was abrupt, management made a mistake, management failed to communicate.

Sometimes these observations are entirely correct because accountability, standards, and consequences matter. Yet I wonder whether something else happens simultaneously.

The function becomes so visible that curiosity quietly disappears. This may explain another phenomenon I have repeatedly observed in hospitality: the confusion between kindness and weakness.

Some of the strongest leaders I have encountered were remarkably charitable in their interpretations of others, not because they lowered standards, quite the opposite. They often held exceptionally high standards. What distinguished them was their willingness to postpone certainty. They remained curious longer and came to understand that understanding and accountability were not opposing forces but complementary ones.

A charitable assumption does not remove responsibility; it merely creates enough space for reality to reveal itself more completely before judgement arrives.

The longer I spend thinking about hospitality, the less convinced I become that it is fundamentally about service.

Hospitality seems closer to a discipline of perception, a practice of resisting reduction.

The guest is more than the booking.

The colleague is more than the role.

The manager is more than management.

The owner is more than ownership.

The person remains larger than the function.

Perhaps this is why the question continues to interest me. Hospitality teaches us to look beyond what is immediately visible. To consider what another person may be carrying before they arrive. To remain attentive to realities that have not yet fully revealed themselves.

The question is whether that attentiveness extends equally in every direction, or whether responsibility itself gradually transforms people into functions.

And if hospitality is, at its heart, the practice of receiving others well, then perhaps there is one final question worth leaving unanswered.

Who extends hospitality to the host?