Lately, I’ve been feeling that I need a scorecard to keep track of all the management shuffling that’s been going on in the club business.
Old-school baseball fans like me remember when ballpark vendors would hawk programs by yelling, “You can’t tell the players without a scorecard.” (And this was before the time when so many players were changing teams every time they had a chance to get a bigger contract, or because their teams needed to dump them and their big salaries, as so often happens today. It was back when there were no names on the back of players’ uniforms, and no giant Megatron scoreboards projecting ten-stories-tall, high-def photos of each batter and pitcher, along with their complete life stories. So you really did need a scorecard to help you match up numbers with names.)
Lately, I’ve been feeling that I need a scorecard to keep track of all the management shuffling that’s been going on within the club business. After 10 years covering the industry, I had a pretty good handle on who was playing for (managing) which teams (club and resort properties). But in the past year or so, there’s been a real shake-up of the rosters.
Some all-star names who seemed to have reached points in their careers where you thought they’d remain for the rest of their professional lives were suddenly no longer in those jobs. In some cases, they moved to other clubs—and in some cases it didn’t necessarily seem like an upward move. In other cases, they left their club management positions to become consultants, search executives, or do something outside the club industry. And it wasn’t always clear that it was their choice to make the move.
In some ways, this can all be seen as a good sign, as it seems to reflect a return to prosperity for many club and resort properties, or at least to the end of the most despairing times and a renewal of more clubs’ desire to be competitive, attract the best talent and not settle for less than optimal performance. It’s also been fueled to some extent by some natural attrition, as several long-time GMs have retired from prominent positions, ushering in a new generation of club management.
And the domino effect that’s been set off by all of the top-job shuffling has also provided opportunities to more golf professionals, course superintendents, executive chefs and people from totally outside of the club business. They’ve been given a chance to step up and show why club management, especially in today’s family- and business-oriented era, shouldn’t be limited to only those who have followed what was long considered to be the traditional (and really only) path to general manager positions. Certainly it’s not nearly as unusual today to find GMs who haven’t followed the “classic” hospitality education and career path as it was even five years ago, and that’s also healthy for the industry.
Still, some of what we’re seeing also seems to be related to the kind of cultural disconnects that Dan Ramella writes about in his column in the March 2015 issue (“Culture Club”). There’s no doubt that clubs are changing more dramatically, and rapidly, than in any other period of the industry’s history—and as a result, some managers who flourished in the less-complicated, pre-recession times may be finding it more of a struggle to keep up with all that the business now demands.
The statistic Dan cites, of club managers typically changing positions every three years, certainly wouldn’t seem to be the best prescription for stability and long-term success—especially in a recovery period when memberships must be restored and catch-up facility and course renovations must be fast-tracked. And from all of the job shifting I’ve seen recently, it seems like that average tenure may only stand to shorten. While that’s contributing to a nice boom for the executive-search business, I’m not sure it will add up to a good score to keep for the industry as a whole.
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