The future of leadership

If you have been in the golf course industry long enough, you have probably seen the recent shift in the workforce labor pool. Gone are the days of having excess applications and the ability to fill an empty spot on your team by the afternoon. COVID-19 has altered our labor market in such a way that we have a surplus of jobs and a shortage of people to fill those roles. This has changed the dynamic between the potential employer and the recruit.

The average person seeking to join the workforce now has options and the ability to be selective in their recruitment. These options don’t just appeal to new recruits. You can be certain that your current workforce is aware of all the newly created jobs and the inflation of salaries being offered to hold those positions. There has never been a more advantageous time for entry-level labor employees to find jobs — and they know it.

It’s not enough these days to just offer good benefits. Look at any available job position. Most openings offer the same thing. Good wage. Health care option. 401(k). Paid vacations. These are no longer incentives; they are now the new standard for employment.

What is keeping employees from leaving and enticing recruits to join the team? Leadership.

In its simplest definition, a leader is an individual who can motivate another to accomplish an action. The untold truth about leadership: the quality is based on behaviors learned through exposure to the leadership behaviors of others.

Leadership styles are as numerous as there are people on the planet. All categories of leadership are learnable. Nobody was born a leader. What we view as natural leaders are individuals who were raised with more exposure to good or bad leadership. Our individual styles of leadership are based on our own exposure to good — and bad — leaders in our lives.

Your current and future employees are going to stay with or choose you based on what they think you can do for them. Are you going to allow them to get their hours? Are you going to help them progress and make more money? Are you going to be understanding about their personal lives? You should have answers to these questions before hiring somebody. If the answer is no, be honest. Employees will respect you more for your honesty and enter the job with realistic expectations.

As a leader, you are ultimately responsible for two things:

• The goal you as the leader were appointed to accomplish
• The management of your subordinates

If you crush your subordinates, you will not achieve your goal. And if you coddle your subordinates, they will not reach the goal. A balance must be found.

In the past, it was possible to push your subordinates to their breaking points and see if they have what it takes to make it. If they didn’t, it was easy to replace them. I’m confident about 90 percent of the individuals reading this have worked for someone with that mentality. Now, employees aren’t that easy to replace, and they know it. This means we must adapt our leadership styles to meet the demands of our industry.

The future of leadership is called servant leadership. This leadership style shows your subordinates that you are operating with their interests in mind. Servant leadership is so powerful that even military leadership schools have adopted it. Invest in your subordinates and, in turn, they will go the extra mile for you. That is the main theme of this style. It takes trust, honesty and good intention to achieve.

Where can we start to develop this relationship with our employees? Begin with your normal work review process. Ask the following questions:

• What are your goals working at this job?
• What are your goals outside of this job?
• How quickly do you want to achieve these goals?
• Is there anything I can help you do to achieve these goals?

The above questions will give you a great starting point in developing this relationship. Write them down and use them to invest in your employee. Other ways of showing your employees that you want them to succeed can include the following:

• Get them enrolled in your club’s benefits package
• Provide a structure for career advancement
• Have financial professionals teach them money management skills If you know they can’t afford things like health care, find local programs employees can use and provide that information to them. It takes extra work on our part, but the benefits are worth it.
• It’s time to be the leader and mentor that your employees deserve.

Chris Warrick is the superintendent at Highland Country Club in LaGrange, Georgia. He is also currently a Staff Sergeant in the U.S. Army Reserve, where he has served for 12 years including one deployment to Afghanistan.

Tartan Talks 83

Communicating before engaged audiences didn’t fluster Rick Phelps once he made golf course architecture his official career.

Despite being the son of Dick Phelps, arguably Colorado’s most prolific designer, Rick had started pursuing a sports broadcasting career. His training as a student included working as the campus radio station’s play-by-play announcer for University of Colorado football games.

Golf course architecture eventually supplanted sports broadcasting as Rick’s profession. But lessons from broadcasting endure, especially when he must pitch and explain projects.

“It has helped in a lot of ways in making me feel comfortable speaking in front of an audience, whether it’s members or a board,” Rick says on the Tartan Talks podcast. “Also, hopefully, I’m trying to choose my words carefully to avoid excess words, but also to make points as clear as possible to the audience.”

Rick has received an even better seat for Colorado’s golf development than he did for football games. He started helping his father on projects as a 10-year-old and has witnessed changes in design styles as the state’s population rapidly grows. He’s also experienced shifts caused by water concerns in arid regions. “There are places here in the Front Range where the water system is as tapped out as it can get,” he says.

To hear Rick’s golf development and college football stories, download the podcast from the Superintendent Radio Network page on popular podcast distribution platforms.

Glass-inspired idea

A trio of Minnesota college students are using funding obtained via a business competition to launch a concept for rethinking the sand used on golf courses.

By Cassidy Gladieux

Three young entrepreneurs are aiming to make golf courses more sustainable one glass at a time.

Longtime friends Matt Gendreau, Ben Goelz and Matt Thielen want to turn recycled glass into sand for course bunkers and topdressing maintenance.

“We all love to golf, it’s one of our favorite pastimes,” Gendreau says. “We’ve had plenty of help along the way and really great mentors and they all love to golf, too, so that tends to be the type of people that are especially attracted to the idea.”

The idea for the project they originally titled “Greenscapes” came after Gendreau took an entrepreneurship class and learned of ways that oats from distilleries were being upcycled. He recognized that the United States recycles around only 30 percent of its glass waste compared to other countries, like Sweden, that recycle around 90 percent of their glass.

Since last fall, the newly named Circular Sands has been in full swing. Gendreau, who attends the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, pitched the idea at the Fowler Business Concept Challenge, and Goelz and Thielen joined the team soon after. Goelz and Thielen attend the University of Minnesota Crookston.

The team was one of 25 finalists that competed at e-Fest in Minneapolis. The competition provided the trio an opportunity to network with student entrepreneurs from across the country, promote their business to other organizations and have the potential to win a portion of $215,000 in cash prizes.

“We’ve done a lot of practicing,” Gendreau says, “presenting in front of different professors and even our friends and just constantly trying to refine it and make it the best that it can be.”

Since placing third overall at e-Fest and receiving $20,000 in seed funding, Circular Sands will use the money to establish an LLC, invest in the equipment and machinery necessary to make their product, and, ultimately, get it onto some willing courses.

It’s not just about the money, though. “The greatest takeaways of the weekend were getting connected with people who had a passion for golf and sustainability — both people who are excited to invest and also people who just love our idea and want to work with us to support our mission,” Gendreau says.

The glass being recycled comes from material recovery facilities, which will then go into a glass crushing machine, making it into a fine powder. The machine will allow the glass particles to be anywhere from zero to 300 millimeters and it can be adjusted to meet various course desires.

Concerns over glass shards or big chunks of glass making their way through the machine are easily dispelled by the group. “There’s a lot of different stops and ways to ensure that the sand is 100 percent pure, and that none of that extra debris is left in there,” Gendreau says.

Sourcing the glass comes at little to no cost, allowing Circular Sands to offer their product at a cheaper price than some other alternatives.

Continuing their research, the group found studies demonstrating that recycled sand is higher performing, provides a firmer footing, causes less plugging and comes with a steeper angle of repose.

“Combined with the fact that it’s fully customizable is why we think we really have the edge over these natural sands,” Gendreau says.

Gendreau explains that courses that prefer to use the aesthetic, fine-white sand spend a majority of the money on shipping costs, given you can only get that sand from parts of the country where it occurs naturally. “By offering this locally, we’d be not only slashing the shipping costs, but also the carbon emissions of doing all that shipping,” he adds.

The team recognizes that the depletion of natural sands in tandem with the large volume of water, pesticide and fertilizer usage, courses will eventually have to adapt sooner rather than later.

“With golf courses being a luxury, I think that one of the most important things for them is establishing that sustainability factor so they can keep ahead and keep an edge over sports and leisure as a whole,” Thielen says.

As for the future of Circular Sands, the team is motivated to succeed regardless of a competition outcome.

“Obviously, we know with any startup there’s underlying variables that you never know are going to occur until they occur,” Thielen says. “But as far as our projections go, a lot of what we’re projecting has come from direct quotes from suppliers, or customers, or experts, or has come from industry research.”

The team explained that they typically look at the conservative ends on projections to ensure some wiggle room when it comes to finances.

“The upside potential is that it could be even greater than we’re planning for,” Thielen says. “But as far as year one, it’s looking profitable and then through those first five years, we’ve factored in growth rates and we think we really think it’s extremely scalable as well.”

The team first plans to stay local and eventually grow into the bigger market. Minnesota, their home state, has a large golf market with 422 facilities, according to the National Golf Foundation. The Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington market has more than 3,000 golf holes.

“We’d like to start close to home,” Thielen says, “and then once we find success here, we look to branch out and eventually be in every golf course.”

Cassidy Gladieux is an Ohio-based writer and a frequent Golf Course Industry contributor.