Leadership Lounge

This article originally appeared in BoardRoom Magazine, July/August 2017. If you didn't receive your copy, you can subscribe here. When you want to bake a cake, do you follow a recipe? The answer is likely “yes” unless you are an experienced chef or baker. Recipes help us put together the right combination of ingredients in the right order, and give us an idea of cooking time. In other words, when will your masterpiece be done? However when we want to retain (or attract membe

The past two weeks I have been writing about the need to involve operations in the operational planning stage of a renovation, in Part 1 and Part 2 of the "The Importance of Strategic Architectural Design in Club Operations" series. If you haven't given those a read yet, I encourage you to do so! Today I'd like to take a quick look at what involving operations in the planning stage of a renovation means for your numbers, so you can really understand what poor design could be

Happy Friday! Welcome to Part 2 of my piece on intelligent club design, which is a continuation of Part 1 that was posted last week. If you missed that, make sure to check it out here. In that article, I opened with: STRATEGY MUST INVOLVE OPERATIONS. I spoke about the fact that so often the actual design of a club, a kitchen, a bar, a hostess stand, the location of equipment or storage areas or even the offices can have a detrimental effect on long term operating costs and se

STRATEGY MUST INVOLVE OPERATIONS. I wish I could poll chefs, servers, bartenders, and managers working in facilities that weren’t designed with daily operations in mind. Or controllers and finance committee members who fret about the labor cost of their club every time there is an outdoor event or large influx of members in for dinner. Or a strategic planning or house committee who is trying to understand why the members continue to talk about dissatisfaction with speed of se

As a manager, training is an inescapable part of your responsibilities, and unlike teaching wherein your audience is usually children chances are you will be working with adult learners. Engaging with adult learners has its own unique set of challenges. When you train adults, there is a greater need for mutual respect and for the learners to find the trainer credible with enough character authority to teach them something new. Once the trainer has established their skills an

One of the coolest things we saw at the CMAA World Conference in Orlando this year was the tremendous amount of student groups that were present and engaged on the expo floor and during training sessions. It's always exciting to see the quality and talent of the next generation of club leaders, and this year was no exception. It got me thinking: while I am privileged to learn from RCS president Whitney Reid Pennell's immense knowledge and experience at close hand, I wondered