Month: November 2024

Andy Siddall is the Director and Co-Founder of Robincroft Consulting. For 20 years he held leadership roles within both educational environments and professional sport as an elite cricket coach and he has worked as a personal performance coach since 2015.

Personal performance coach Andy Siddall explains his theory behind Deliberate Leadership and how it can help you to achieve your business goals

If you are anything like me that question will annoy you! This is because leadership is so complex and dynamic we shouldn’t be looking to categorise people into boxes and one particular style, but instead recognise that the leaders who possess the most skills and flexibility of styles will be the most effective.

The style of leadership adopted by leaders can significantly impact their team’s motivation and performance, and we will all have natural tendencies for one style over another, a default as it were. But when it comes to the styles that leaders adopt a lot goes into the mix.

Naturally there is their personality, the impact of their cultural background and their experience to consider. Add to this their mindset and the time and space they are in, who they are leading, what needs to be achieved and in what timeframe, and of course, what is at stake.

Plenty has been written on leadership styles and a quick internet search will present you with various links and infographics on the subject. So, for this article, we won’t be duplicating a version of these or muddying the water with lots of approaches, but will list Daniel Goleman’s Six Styles of Leadership as a consideration point:

At Robincroft, we believe in leadership effectiveness and being able to make a positive impact is what it’s all about. With this in mind you may want to consider doing these three things:

1: Reflect on the culture, behaviours and outputs of those you lead. What’s good? What’s not? What needs to be different?

2: Reflect on your own leadership behaviours. What style do you spend most of your time in? Consider how those you lead would describe it, and answer the question of ‘what is it like to be led by you?’

3: Consider what the benefits could be if you adopted different approaches. What skills may you need to develop in order to be more effective?

It’s remarkable how many successful professional sports teams across the globe have had a similar mantra plastered across the walls of their changing room:

‘What does the team need from me now?’ The aim? To impact the decision making and behaviour.

As leaders we urge you to embrace a style of what we call Deliberate Leadership and to adopt a similar mantra by constantly asking yourself: What does my business/team need from me now? Or what does this person need from me now?

Deliberate Leadership is a style that requires both conscious thought and conscious action. It requires you to have a quality assessment of those you lead, which allows you to make quality decisions of what they need.

Deliberate Leadership is both purposeful and flexible, transitioning between styles and approaches depending on what’s required.

Deliberate Leadership is having both a clear intention in our approach and being clear where our attention needs to be to achieve the desired results while helping us grow and develop our employees. Leadership is complex, so don’t just do it – do it deliberately!

Vic Aliprando is the Senior Vice President of TPC Network Operations. Owned, operated, and licensed by the PGA TOUR, the TPC Network comprises 29 premier private, resort and daily fee golf properties designed by elite architects.

Vic Aliprando, Senior Vice President, TPC Network Operation

What is the best advice you have ever had?

I grew up in Pennsylvania, wanted to work away and ended up in Mississippi on an internship for 20 months for Arnold Palmer Golf Management company. Met some great people, one General Manager there really was my first mentor, and he wrapped his arms around me and took me under his wing. I always remember this one comment: ‘Never forget to take out the trash.’ At the time I didn’t understand what he meant. It means to never think that you above doing any of the jobs. Hospitality is why we’re so successful and I want to help our staff and I’m not afraid to roll up my sleeves and work on any project.

PGA Tour/TPC Network is a global brand associated with excellence. How are you trying to transfer that down through the operations?

Our first club opened in 1980 so we have a long history of standards and deliverables. Back at the beginning the leadership really set the standard for excellence in the golf business and we’ve continued to try and elevate and improve things as we’ve gone by.

We’re now in the midst of creating a new mission statement and tweaking some of the experiences that we’re trying to deliver at some of the clubs. It’s all focused on delivering a PGA Tour player’s lifestyle to our members and guests.

“We have a sales process in all areas of our business and that has always been very relationship driven and requires asking a lot of questions and 59club’s process is a perfect match for that”

Vic Aliprando

What is happening in the private member clubs’ marketplace place for you?

Half of our clubs are private and half of them are daily fee clubs. The private club business is still really good and we’re starting to see some attrition return back to pre-pandemic levels, we’re still not there, and membership sales have slowed down – but frankly we have slowed it down.

We’ve been reaching some capacity levels at some of our clubs, so we’ve had to work to sell only enough to fulfil the attrition that is actually left. The golf business is in a very good place, and we continue to hear that industry wide. I continue to speak to our clubs about the need to wrap our arms around these people who are playing golf, we need to keep them playing the game.

What are you trying to achieve in ‘sharing your brand’ with non-owned but carefully chosen properties?

We really have three different structures within our clubs. We own and operate 11 of the 29, we license and operate five more for other owners and the remaining 13 are purely licence-only clubs. The benefit is getting the credibility that the brand brings to their property.

I was talking to the owner of TPC Danzante Bay, he’s not a golfer and he owns a number of timeshare resorts throughout Mexico but only one with golf. He was talking to a friend who was a big golfer and he asked whether he would travel to a golf resort in Mexico and he said maybe. Then he asked what if it was a TPC and then it was an absolute yes as he knew that it would be great. That flipped a switch, there is credibility and an awareness of very high standards.

What does the TPC Network gain from 59club’s mystery shopping products?

We have a sales process in all areas of our business and that has always been very relationship driven and requires asking a lot of questions and 59club’s process is a perfect match for that. What we weren’t doing is measuring how our salespeople were delivering this and that’s what 59club can do for us with the mystery shoppers.

They will visit as a prospective member or guest and give us a clear scorecard on what we are doing and not doing, and we’ll get the results within weeks.

They will give us a comprehensive review, including images of the property, and test various standards from the initial phone call through to playing the course and analysing the conditioning, all the way to measuring the lunch experience at the end of the round.

How do you calculate the ROI on 59club’s services?

We have had a recent instance where we had a new salesperson and we found that there weren’t a lot of relationship-style questions being asked. So, we utilised 59club to go through a full training of the sales process, that person quickly got the hang of it, and they became one of our top salespeople. And a similar thing happened with a second member of staff.

I’m not going to let them go for as long as I’m in the chair, we’re so confident in their processes, it’s invaluable.