Golf Club Management

Lesson 13: Communication, reporting and decision-making

Goal: design the communication and reporting system between staff, management, the board and members, and explain the main research on how organisations make decisions.

Directions of communication

• Downward: board to GM, GM to staff, club to members. Decisions, policies, expectations, reasons.
• Upward: staff to managers, managers to the board, members to the club. Problems, risks, ideas, feedback.
• Lateral: between departments. Co-ordination (Lesson 2’s silos are mainly a lateral communication failure).

Clubs often have strong downward and weak upward communication. Information flows from the board, but bad news struggles to flow up.

Why bad news doesn’t travel up

• Organisational silence (Morrison and Milliken, 2000): when staff believe that speaking up is pointless or dangerous, they collectively stop. Silence spreads through shared beliefs, especially where managers fear negative feedback and believe they know best.
• Distortion of upward communication (Tourish and Robson, 2006): people with less power filter and soften what they tell those above them, and leaders mistake the resulting good news for reality. Boards end up making decisions on cheerful information.
• Psychological safety (Edmondson, 1999; Lesson 7) is the antidote, and it is built by how leaders react the first few times someone brings bad news.

Evidence: strong research base. For a GM, this means building channels that don’t depend on courage: anonymous staff surveys, incident reporting with no blame for reporting, skip-level conversations, and a board that thanks the GM for bad news rather than punishing it.

Board papers and reporting

A good board pack lets directors govern without managing. A typical structure:

1. Agenda, with each item marked for decision, for discussion or for noting.
2. Minutes of the last meeting and the action list.
3. CEO/GM report: strategic progress against the scorecard (Lesson 5), key risks (Lesson 11), and matters needing the board’s decision. Short, with exceptions highlighted, not a diary of everything that happened.
4. Finance report: results against budget, cash flow, forecasts, capital works.
5. Committee reports (finance, risk, nominations).
6. Papers for decision: each with a recommendation, options considered, costs, risks and the link to strategy.

A one-page decision paper template: purpose; recommendation; background; options; analysis (cost, benefit, risk, stakeholder impact); link to the strategic plan; next steps.

Minutes

Minutes are the legal record of the board’s decisions. Good practice (the Chartered Governance Institute of Southern Africa and the Companies Act’s requirements for NPC minutes) is to record:

• date, attendance, apologies, quorum and any declared conflicts of interest;
• each decision, in the form of a resolution;
• a brief summary of key discussion points where it matters (to show directors considered the risks);
• actions, with an owner and a due date.

They should not be a verbatim transcript. Minutes are approved at the next meeting, signed by the chair, and kept permanently. Members usually have rights to see minutes of general meetings (check the constitution), and in a dispute, minutes are often the first evidence a court or regulator will ask for.

Communicating with members

Members are owners, so communication with them is partly governance (annual report, AGM notices, special resolutions) and partly service (newsletters, course updates, app notifications). Principles:

• Explain the why before the what, especially for change (Lesson 8).
• Use the club management system to target messages to the members they concern, not mass emails.
• Two-way channels: member forums, surveys, focus groups for each segment.
• Consistency: the board speaks with one voice after a decision, whatever the debate beforehand (the principle of collective responsibility).

How decisions are really made

• Bounded rationality (Simon, 1955): people don’t optimise. They have limited time and information and choose the first option that’s good enough (“satisficing”). Good decision processes accept this and design around it: define criteria first, generate several options, and set aside time for the big decisions.
• Biases (Kahneman, 2011): confirmation bias, anchoring on the first number mentioned, and overconfidence. A board that sees one quote for the clubhouse rebuild anchors on it.
• Groupthink (Janis, 1972): close-knit groups under pressure suppress dissent to keep harmony. Club boards, made up of friends who play golf together, are at risk. Counter-measures: the chair speaks last, someone is asked to argue the other side, independent advice is sought.
• Context (Snowden and Boone, 2007, the Cynefin framework): simple problems need best practice, complicated ones need experts, complex ones need small experiments, and chaotic ones need decisive action first. Many club debates go wrong by treating a complex problem (culture, member behaviour) as a complicated one (find the right expert answer).

Critical view

• Board reporting can drown directors in data. More pages don’t mean better governance. King V’s emphasis on the board’s strategic role implies shorter, sharper papers.
• Formal channels can’t replace trust. Shilbury, Ferkins and Smythe (2013) found that the real relationship between a board and its CEO is negotiated in conversations, not in documents.

Seminar questions

1. How would you know whether your club suffers from organisational silence? What evidence would you look for?
2. Should staff ever speak directly to the board? Under what conditions?
3. Which bias do you think most affects club boards, and how would you guard against it?

Workplace task 13

Get one recent board paper or GM report (or a member communication). Rewrite it in the one-page decision paper format. Then list what information the board did not get that it should have.

Watch

• Building a psychologically safe workplace (Amy Edmondson, TEDxHGSE)
• The Cynefin framework (Dave Snowden, Cognitive Edge)

Sources

• Edmondson (1999), Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams, Administrative Science Quarterly
• Janis (1972), Victims of Groupthink, Houghton Mifflin
• Kahneman (2011), Thinking, Fast and Slow, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Morrison and Milliken (2000), Organizational silence, Academy of Management Review
• Shilbury, Ferkins and Smythe (2013), Sport governance encounters, Sport Management Review
• Simon (1955), A behavioral model of rational choice, Quarterly Journal of Economics
• Snowden and Boone (2007), A leader’s framework for decision making, Harvard Business Review
• Tourish and Robson (2006), Sensemaking and the distortion of critical upward communication in organizations, Journal of Management Studies
• IoDSA (2025), King V Code on Corporate Governance

Draft module material for the PGA of South Africa Director of Golf certificate, for discussion. South African law applies throughout. It is general education, not legal or financial advice: Acts, regulations and codes change, so check the current version and take advice before acting on them.