Strong, stable, and consistent leadership is the single most important requirement for successful club operations. While there are many styles of leadership suited to any industry or endeavor, experience over many years in the club business makes it clear to this writer that a service-based approach to leadership works best in the service industry with its often young, mixed gender, and multi-ethnic workforce. This style of leadership has as its primary motivation service to others — to members, to the owners of the club, and to the employees.
This leadership style differs from others in its focus on serving the needs of employees to provide them with the proper tools, training, resources, motivation, and empowerment to serve the club’s members. In simplest terms, when a club’s employees are served by their leaders, they will serve the members, who by their continuing patronage serve the club’s bottom line. An understanding of the importance of this style of leadership can be inferred from the simple question,
“How can employees provide quality service if they are not properly served by the leadership and example of their managers?”
While it is recognized that the General Manager must be a strong leader, it is also critical that the club’s subordinate managers and supervisors are also trained to be strong service-based leaders. While some degree of a leader’s skill-set seems to be inborn, such as personality and an analytic mind, and others, such as confidence, judgment, and basic communication abilities, are developed early in life, the great majority of a leader’s skills are attitudinal and can be learned.
But to expect that your managers with varying backgrounds, education, and experiences will have a common understanding of what constitutes effective leadership is naïve in the extreme. Unless junior managers are systematically trained to develop the skills which have to do with building and sustaining meaningful work relationships with their constituencies, particularly employees, their leadership development will be hindered and haphazard. This results in the General Manager’s vision and message of service not being communicated consistently or faithfully to line employees. Instead of having a cohesive team dedicated to a common purpose and acting in a concerted way to further the aims of the enterprise, the club is a collection of tribes who don’t necessarily approach the mission or their jobs in the same way or with the same attitude.
Without leadership consistency, employees get a mixed service message, and their morale, engagement, and commitment will vary from manager to manager and department to department. It’s really quite simple — if your management team does not provide consistent:
- Vision, values, and example,
- Communication and engagement,
- Training, resources, and support,
- Regard for and treatment of employees,
You’ll never gain consistency of employee commitment, contribution, and performance.
But the good news is that successful leadership skills can be taught and learned. Warren G. Bennis, widely regarded as a pioneer in the field of contemporary leadership studies, has said,
“The most dangerous myth is that leaders are born — that there is a genetic factor to leadership. This myth asserts that people simply either have certain charismatic qualities or not. That’s nonsense; in fact, the opposite is true. Leaders are made rather than born.”
So the solution to fragmented leadership is to promote a consistent style and application of leadership club-wide. This can only be done by providing consistent leadership training to the entire management team. But how does the General Manager teach leadership when you have so much else to do and possibly haven’t given a lot of thought to the issue?
Over the years while serving as general manager in hotels, resorts, and clubs, I searched a number of times and read a number of books — most extolling the successful leadership techniques of Fortune 500 or celebrity CEOs, or written by Academics with a lot of theory but little practical advice for those toiling in hospitality management. My frustration in trying to find something useful finally led me to write my own leadership guidance for my team, and this ultimately became Leadership on the Line: A Guide for Front Line Supervisors, Business Owners, and Emerging Leaders, first published in 2002 and now in its 2nd edition.
This past year, in response to frequent requests to prepare a more “hands on” learning tool, I wrote and published Leadership on the Line - The Workbook, a companion piece to the original book that builds on the themes of Service-Based Leadership from the book by offering self-study sections on Leadership Basics, Values, Lessons, Applications, and Assessments. Taken together the book and the workbook provide an effective way to teach and to learn a consistent, service-based approach to leadership.
Given the primary importance of leadership in any successful venture, it should never be left to chance. Even if confident of your own leadership abilities, do yourself and your managers a favor by promoting a consistent, club-wide conception and application of leadership. When consistently reinforced by your leadership and example, it will have a dramatic impact on their performance, as well as the club’s.
The book ($19.95) and workbook ($29.95) may be purchased at Amazon.com or on the Club Resources International website (never a shipping charge).
Thanks and have a great day!
Ed Rehkopf
This weekly blog comments on and discusses the club industry and its challenges. From time to time, we will feature guest bloggers — those managers and industry experts who have something of interest to say to all of us. We also welcome feedback and comment upon the blog, hoping that it will become a useful sounding board for what’s on the minds of hardworking club managers throughout the country and around the world.
Club Resources International - Management Resources for Clubs!
Most of us recognize that our business is not rocket science. The basics of what we do are well-known to any club professional. What makes our jobs so challenging is the sheer volume of things that must be attended to daily in a detail and people-intensive business. Unless a club operation is well-organized and its managers highly disciplined, it operates in a state of barely-controlled chaos interspersed with periods of downtime. The challenge for all is to transition quickly from storm to calm back to storm while remaining focused on long term goals, ongoing projects, and continual process improvement. The solution is to organize the club so that most things happen routinely and that managers at all levels be highly disciplined in approaching their duties and efforts to improve the operation.
Given these and other specific challenges that vary from club to club, it is absolutely imperative that club managers organize their operations in detail. My own list of requirements includes:
Each of these necessities, while challenging, will improve the organization and discipline of the club while fostering consistently higher levels of service. The resulting efficiency and service of a well-run club will make it easier to attract members, which improves dues and revenues and ultimately better positions the club in the marketplace.
1. Start with a plan. As with any major project, there must be a plan. Things to consider when planning include: goals, program requirements, training principles, impacted positions, priorities, budget, timelines and milestones, curricula by position, equipment and supplies, resources and materials, benchmarking, administration and documentation, annual certifications, plan and implementation review, and designated responsibilities.
Tip: Many of these topics have been covered in materials found on the CRI website, for example: 
Training resources can be found anywhere. The advent of the Internet and search engines makes it relatively easy and convenient to find training material for almost any topic or position. Some will be free and some will cost, but once department heads determine topics, they should begin searching for relevant material.
To expect that different managers with different backgrounds and experiences from a variety of operational disciplines — golf, golf course maintenance, accounting, personnel, facility maintenance, food and beverage, membership, activities, tennis, and aquatics — will have a common understanding of and approach to leadership and management is foolish.
First, is the 
The basis for the traditional hierarchical organizational model is the military concept of “chain of command.” In this model, management is represented as the sequence of authority in executing the will of the owners—and certainly management plays that essential role. But in addition to not representing the importance of customers, it also places the employees at the bottom of the chain—thereby visually relegating them to the position of least consequence.
The Service-Based Organizational model depicts the importance of satisfying customers, as well as the important role of employees. The organization’s leaders are placed at the bottom, clearly emphasizing their role in serving the needs of all constituencies.
Instead of the traditional view that employees are easily replaceable elements in an organization, people who must be trained to do narrow, well-defined tasks and who must be closely watched and supervised at all times, the concept of empowerment says that today’s more educated and sometimes more sophisticated employees need and want to contribute more to their employer and workplace. Yet many clubs marginalize their employees by refusing to listen to them and by failing to let them contribute to the enterprise in any meaningful way.
1. Always keep an open mind. Try not to pre-judge situations or people.
As I began to dig deeper and deeper into the challenges of the club, Randy took to stopping by my office each morning. While I was anxious to learn as much as I could from him, each morning became a litany of complaints, usually that he did not have the necessary tools, staff, or time to take care of all the things for which his department was responsible. Frequently, he disparaged his employees and their lack of necessary skills. Further, I had the distinct sense that Randy was looking to me for solutions to his problems, both real and imagined.
Like Randy, John also stopped by my office each day for a few minutes. But he never complained; he only kept me informed of what he was working on. Sometimes he sought my permission to pursue a particular course of action or sought confirmation of his plans. With each passing day I grew less and less concerned about maintenance. Confidence in John and the job he was doing allowed me to turn my attention to other pressing matters.