Situations involving human failings can also require swift and well-measured crisis-management responses—and can spiral into disastrous consequences if not handled properly.
It usually doesn’t take long for anyone who gets into any aspect of the club business to learn pretty quickly how crisis management can be a make-or-break measure of their job performance. Often, the tests come in the form of facility-related challenges—and in his column in this issue (“That Sinking Feeling…,”), Jeffrey Kreafle provides an excellent description of how he and his team at Bellerive CC successfully handled an unexpected mishap that could have caused serious disruption to a very active day at that property.
Jeffrey’s article provides a valuable list of preparatory steps that every manager and department head should study in advance—and commit to memory for instant recall—to help ensure proper response for these “little surprises” that unfortunately will someday come everyone’s way. Of course, every well-managed property should also have formal, written crisis-response plans in place that the management team should regularly update and review, with the help of their insurers and other risk-management experts, and make part of their standard training procedures.
Usually, these plans and exercises focus on potential perils that come to mind most readily—fires, severe storms, illnesses, etc.—when thinking about crises that could occur at a club property. But unfortunately, there are also situations involving human failings that can require swift and well-measured response—and that can spiral into disastrous consequences if not handled properly.
In our daily searches for industry-related news to post on our website and include in our daily e-newsletter briefings, we frequently come across reports of fights that have broken out at weddings or events held at club or resort properties that ultimately require police intervention. In many cases, the reports on these incidents make it clear that they escalated to the point where they became local news (and damaging PR for the property) because the management staff was ill-prepared for how to intervene or handle the problem before it got out of hand.
We’re also struck by the number of reports that we regularly come across that involve internal conflicts among club memberships—a news report in the December 2014 issue, about how a confrontation over a club’s denim policy grew to be a story worthy of coverage in a major metropolitan newspaper, being just one of the latest examples.
This report got an especially high number of “hits” after we posted it online, and I don’t think it was only because so many clubs continue to struggle with the jeans issue, or that readers were attracted to the juicy-gossip aspects tied to the club President’s actions (and subsequent removal from office). I think—hope—the high interest was also because many managers saw this as another type of potential crisis to circulate to their staffs and have everyone discuss what they might need to do as part of their roles in similar situations.
Another item that we recently ran across (but did not re-post) involved two members at a well-established club in the South who got into a shouting match at the lunch buffet, leading to a news report with the headline, “Bizarre profanity-laden argument at [name of club] goes viral.” Sadly, in today’s world this is probably the kind of “crisis” that club managers are more likely to need to be prepared to deal with in their careers.
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