Charting a path for the future of your chapter

As a leader of your chapter, how many times have you felt like Michigan Football Coach Jim Harbaugh coaching against The Ohio State University and wanting to throw something violently to the ground? Hopefully not too many times! As was the case for Coach Harbaugh, nothing good can come out of that type of reaction. He cost his team 15 yards and looked silly trying to replace the broken headset upon his head. As a chapter leader, nobody will call an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty against you but you would indeed look just as silly.

What if I told you that GCSAA offers a service that can help alleviate some of the frustrations of running a chapter and help you chart a path for the chapter's future? Well, indeed we do! By conducting a GCSAA strategic planning session, we can help develop goals and action items that will lead you to the fulfillment of your mission statement. What’s that? You don’t have a mission statement. We can work with you to identify why your chapter exists and capture that in a mission statement that should guide your activities moving forward.

The process proceeds like this: At the outset, we determine from the group what they hope to achieve during the session. Hopefully, by the end of the day, we will have achieved what the group has set out to accomplish. We will do a SCOR analysis of the chapter to determine Strengths, Challenges, Opportunities, and Risks that are impacting the chapter and how it is functioning. Once they have been identified the group prioritizes the top items under each of the SCOR sections.

From here it becomes a matter of formulating a few achievable goals and action items for the upcoming 12-18 months and perhaps a long-range vision for the chapter. Individual responsibilities and timelines are determined and then the work begins. GCSAA provides the documentation of the outcomes of the strategic planning session and this document serves as a guide to meeting the set objectives. The key is to set only enough goals that can be achieved yet still move the chapter in the right direction. This process can be revisited at the end of the 12-18 month time frame to determine successes that have been achieved and perhaps areas that came up short of the desired goals.

If the process is followed, I will state that the chapter will have moved forward and met their established goals. The icing on the cake for conducting a strategic planning session is that the service is free. Also, for those who participate in the process, GCSAA education points are awarded.

GCSAA Director of Chapter Outreach Steve Randall and I recently conducted a strategic planning session with the South Florida GCSA. In this session, we went through the process that I described and established a few key initiatives for 2017. I have offered my assistance to the group throughout the process, and I sensed that the group left the meeting charged up for the challenge and ready to meet the outcomes we established.

I would encourage you and your chapters to follow suit and plan to conduct a strategic planning session in the coming months. It is a great way to chart a path for the future of your chapter and eliminate some of the frustrations that exist in being a chapter leader. The Buckeye in me wants to make another Harbaugh analogy but I will leave that go for now as I am certain that next year will bring another opportunity to poke fun of the coach from up north. In all seriousness, please reach out to me if there is a desire to conduct a strategic planning session for your chapter and we will get it on the books and start the process moving.

Members of the South Florida GCSA board of directors working on formulating the future direction for the chapter through a GCSAA strategic planning session. From left to right: Roly Molina, Lissa Donald-Minus, Kevin Fipps, Ricky Reeves, Rod Zimmerman, Shane Warriner (PGA), and Billy Entwistle Jr.