33 Leadership 33 It just made sense to do what we were doing, but it didn’t feel good to the “holdouts.” Not seeing that was blind spot and my failing, and as an executive, the experience was the best teacher I could have possibly had. I won many battles in the pursuit, but I felt I had lost the war. The remaining LLC members subsequently made moves to directly govern their one investment, and that’s what I had to leave. I couldn’t believe it, but I was leaving something I loved. I wasn’t on the PAII staff when the annual conference occurred (in my hometown of Charleston), but the PAII membership threw me a going away party that I will never forget. It was honestly one of the best evenings of my life. The Aftermath and Growth I don’t have the word count to tell the rest of the story, so here’s a hint: it took a handful of years, but a new non-profit emerged from the ashes and tumult. What I can share, though, is that this experience shaped me deeply as an executive. Many years later and in my current role as CEO of the National Golf Course Owners Association, I was ushering an emotionally-charged proposition to my board of directors: let’s consider changing the name of NGCOA. NGCOA was formed by a group of men and women who owned public golf courses: this privately- owned, public course thing was a fairly new phenomenon in the 1970s. Most courses were either private clubs or part of parks systems at municipalities across the nation. They were part of a new “tribe” of practitioners in our industry, which as an organization limped along for about 15 years until NGCOA’s first full-time CEO (my predecessor, Mike) was hired in 1990. In Mike’s quest to grow NGCOA, he brought on a whole new crop of golf courses over time, including private clubs, large golf course management companies, resorts and municipalities. By the time I became CEO, bonafide “owners” made up the entirety of the board of directors, but were not even a majority of the primary contacts at our member facilities. We had more CEOs, general managers and directors of golf than we did owners in NGCOA. And seeing we were adopting an aggressive goal to further grow NGCOA, the staff felt a name change might be in order. Under consideration was the National Golf Course Association, much like the National Restaurant Association (it’s not the National Restaurant Owners Association, after all). Applying the Lesson I could see that navigating this conversation would involve logic and emotion nearly equally. The owners in NGCOA did not want to feel relegated to an insignificant place in the organization they formed. I needed to not only respect that, but honor that. Changing the name to a more generic trade name made good sense from a membership recruitment standpoint (if you’d like to discuss that prospect with me, drop me an email), but it would also come with a perceived diminishment in clout. After all, the owner is at the top of the business food chain, right? But more importantly to the topic at hand, it would come with an emotional cost I wasn’t willing to make. The name change was tabled indefinitely, and we had to harvest a little extra creativity to determine how to move forward with an ambitious membership campaign. Ultimately, I no longer had the blind spot to emotional needs I once did. I could see the emotional costs involved, and could make a better, more comprehensive decision for NGCOA. And in the end, actually, the experience has made me a better parent, partner and friend (I think).
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