From The Legend’s Laptop
Currently Located In My Car On The Way
To Georgia, Got a Chauffer for a Change!
Dear Reader:
I was watching the Raiders- Cowboys game Thanksgiving Day and was impressed early on with the Raiders Quarterback, Bruce Gradkowsky. He had been a starter at Tampa Bay where after a couple of promising games he performed poorly, and was FIRED!
Tampa’s kicker this year missed three easy field goals in the first few games and he is also gone. So too is the Tampa punt returner, who fumbled the ball once too often, by game five.
When you think about it, the NFL offers the ideal employer/employee relationship.
Top performers can expect to make millions over a very short career (by most business standards) but do so because their play in turn, makes the club multi millions in the form of ticket sales and TV rights!
Where as poor performers, don’t get the typical three written warnings, or the option of a move to another position, they are simply cut from the team! It doesn’t matter if they are a rookie or a ten-year veteran, each is judged play-by-play, game-by-game, week-by-week. Talent, experience, time invested on the job mean little or nothing if the running back drops the ball, the cornerback misses a key tackle or the quarterback sets a new interception record!
It of course is much the same in soccer, baseball and basketball but I don’t think any one of those sports is as quick to react to poor employee performance or reward great performance as the NFL. Football players of course accept this situation, that their individual play effects the outcome of the team, in a way your average employee simply fails to understand.
Every employee on your team is making “plays” at your club and in this economy those plays had better be the right ones! There are too many golfers looking for an excuse to go somewhere else and too many out of work employees looking for jobs, for you to put up with anything less that 110% performance in every area of your operation.
The key word here is performance, many employees confuse activity (or hours spent on site) with productivity, they are of course, not the same thing!
As operations run leaner in these tough times employees don’t necessarily have to work longer hour but they do have to produce greater results in the time they do work.
There are five several keys things you can do to help them accomplish this:
1. Position agreements for every job that specifies RESULTS not just job duties! (Read Management Legend, Bob Devitz, very insightful article on this topic http://lmgmblog.com/2009/07/25/are-you-performance-driven.aspx )
2. Training, continued training that never stops!
3. The adoption of a sales culture at your club to compliment the “service culture” always quoted!
4. Set quantitative and qualitative improvements every quarter, in every department.
5. Fire the dead wood, the nay sayers, the partially committed and the just passing through. Good employees resent poor performing peers even more than management!
I will shortly be announcing a new service that will make training your club’s employees simple, easy and cheap!
Follow me on Twitter http://twitter.com/cunninglyclever to get the news first!
Regards,
Andrew Wood
Marketing Legend
P.S. Knowledge is Power, use it!
Andrew Wood is the world’s leading expert on golf, resort and real estate marketing, although his successes reach far beyond those industries. He is the author of over 20 books on sales and marketing including Cunningly Clever Marketing and The Golf Marketing Bible. Andrew speaks worldwide on sales and marketing topics and is in high demand as a copywriter and marketing consultant, while actively running his advertising agency, Legendary Marketing. He can be reached at (352) 266 2099 or andrew@LegendaryMarketing.com, http://www.LegendaryMarketing.com
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