Editor’s notebook: Hard lessons about critical skills

The grass grows and then goes dormant. It never talks back. It rarely leaves for another course. The ecosystem supporting it will never trim a budget or require feedback. Grass can be smoothly manipulated when given the proper tools.

Grass represents comfort for a golf maintenance professional. Angst emerges once people step on the surfaces they maintain. 

The grass was never discussed during the formal sessions of the 15th annual Syngenta Business Institute at the Gralyn Estate and Conference Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Instead, 26 superintendents and directors from 20 states listened intently and engaged actively as instructors from Wake Forest University guided discussions about work-life balance, management, leadership, negotiations and decision making.

The event is unlike any other in the industry because the topics are unlikely what attracted attendees to the profession. Unfortunately, the human realities of the job result in competent agronomists floundering on and off the course.  The people who work in the industry need more help handling people than grass.

Enter the Syngenta Business Institute.

Sessions have been tweaked to reflect relevant pain points. Work-life balance wasn’t a prominent industry topic in 2019. This year’s event started with Dr. Julie Wayne offering practical tactics to help mitigate the personal toll the job exerts on superintendents and their teams. Wayne has spent a significant part of her career studying work-life balance.

“A ball in a bunker is not an emergency,” Wayne told attendees. Chuckles ensued. Logic will hopefully prevail when attendees field future bunker complaints.

Andrew Fries, the director of golf properties at Tashua Knolls Golf Course in Trumbull, Connecticut, has attended industry gatherings for 35 years. Grass is almost always the focus of formal learning opportunities. Even sand is discussed more frequently than people.

“I have been to hundreds of seminars on grass, insects and all that, but very few on business,” Fries says. “Even in my college education, there were very few business courses. At this stage in my career, I wish maybe I had done this type of education 20 years ago. All of the sessions were relevant.”

Fries oversees a diverse team maintaining a 27-hole public hole facility in the Northeast. He reflected on his Syngenta Business Institute experience while standing on a brick driveway alongside Mark Speight, the second-year superintendent of the Westhampton Course at The Country Club of Virginia, a 54-hole private facility in the Transition Zone. Speight’s boss, The Country Club of Virginia director of golf maintenance Christian Sain, urged him to apply for the event. Sain participated in the inaugural Syngenta Business Institute.

“I kind of rolled my eyes and thought people who get into that are not second-year superintendents who didn’t come up through the traditional turf school system,” Speight says. “I was actually pretty surprised when I got accepted.”   

A welcoming atmosphere permeated. Speight met peers maintaining different grasses in different climates. He quickly learned they are facing similar human-induced conundrums. “Everybody was very open,” he says.

Steve Sarro, the superintendent at Pinehurst Country Club, a 27-hole private facility in Denver, joined his new friends Fries and Speight in the final-day conversation. Sarro oversees a team maintaining grass at high elevations, yet he found the stories shared in North Carolina relatable.  

“I learned pretty early in my career — and people have written and talked about it — that it’s really easy to get down in the industry and have your head down,” Sarro says. “When I go to other properties or meet other people, other superintendents, we commiserate a lot and talk about the negatives. And I look at it like they’re dealing with that problem too. A lot of times we can just talk through that.”

The talking yielded an abundance of positivity. During breakout sessions following a formal Thursday evening dinner inside Graylyn’s venerable Manor House, superintendents and directors shared stories of management and labor successes. Negative phrases such as nobody wants to work and younger people are always on their phones have been replaced with references to developing reliable labor pipelines and using technology to connect and empower employees.    

Immense challenges remain because people evolve. But the job doesn’t seem as daunting once a leader expands his or her interpersonal skills through training. A few perspective-changing thoughts shared by Wake Forest instructors:

• Wayne: “Balance is not a noun. It’s a verb. It’s always shifting and challenging.”
• Dr. Amy Wallis: “We tend to think of people leaving as a bad thing. Approach it like you’ll be leading people for two or three years.”
• Dr. John Sumanth: “When you think about negotiations, think about the reputation you are creating for yourself.”
• Dr. Sherry Moss: “Don’t bring the group together if you already know what you’re going to do.”

We’ll add one from our experiences observing the Syngenta Business Institute room: Handling the people side of the job requires the same curiosity and focused training as the technical parts of the job.

Start studying. Execute carefully. People aren’t getting any easier to manage and lead.

Guy Cipriano is Golf Course Industry’s editor-in-chief.