Executive Leadership

A club runs on its members and its staff. But not on them alone. Behind a flawless dinner service, an immaculate fairway, and an event that goes off without a hitch, there is a wide circle of people and companies the club relies on from the outside. The linen company and the equipment technician. The food and wine purveyors. The technology providers, the insurance broker, the auditor, the architect, the interior designer, and the search and consulting firms that help you find your talent. A club is a web of relationships, and a great many of the strands in that web reach beyond the people who collect a club paycheck.

Here is the first tell, before a single real sentence is spoken. Listen to the words a leader reaches for to describe those people. Some say, “our partners.” Some say, “our service providers.” Some say, “just a vendor.” Not everyone who serves a club is a partner in the truest sense of the word, and that is fine. But no one who does honest work for you is “just” anything. The word you choose, often without a second thought, already signals how the next conversation is going to go. Language reveals leadership, and it starts with the label.

Let me be fair before I am pointed, because the fairness is the whole point. A club deserves solid service, real responsiveness, and work that is worth the investment. The people who serve you owe you that, and the good ones hold themselves to it. If a delivery is late, a system fails, or the work misses the mark, you have every right to say so, and to expect better. Accountability is not the enemy of respect. It is part of it.

But things are not always perfect, and they never will be. A part fails on the hottest weekend of the year. A shipment arrives short. A new system stumbles during a busy service. None of that is a character flaw. It is the ordinary friction of real work done by real people under real pressure. The question is never whether something will go wrong. It will. The question is how a leader speaks when it does.

In a club, that question never clocks out. Leadership in this industry is always on display, from early in the morning until well past the last event, and at the many clubs where members live right on the property, it never truly goes dark. Members are watching and listening. Staff are watching and listening. So is everyone else, often in a quiet moment when no member happens to be nearby, and the polish comes off. That is when the real leader shows. The person you are when you think it does not count is the person the rest of us actually meet. It is not only the outside professionals who notice, either. The same voice carries to the department head two doors down and the newest hire in the kitchen. Consistency. The same respect no matter who is standing in front of you is one of the most honest things about you.

Let me get specific, because vague never helped anyone. Here are a few things that get said around a club, or things close to them, and what they tell the person standing there.

The Facilities Director to the outside repair company whose fix did not hold on a second visit: “This is the second time. I could find someone who actually knows what they are doing.” It is blame with no curiosity, the same game of gotcha this column has named before. A better version, with the appropriate tone, costs nothing: “This is the second time, and I am frustrated. Help me understand what is really going on so we can fix it for good.”

The Executive Chef to the food purveyor over an order that came up short: “This is a joke. Do you even know what kind of kitchen we run here?” Contempt does one thing well. It shuts down the very relationship that gets you taken care of when you are truly in a bind. Try instead, “This one really put me in a spot for service. Please walk me through what happened so we can avoid it in the future.” Same frustration, opposite result.

The Director of Golf to the company that leases and services the cart fleet, after a breakdown on a full tee sheet: “Just make it work, I do not care how. That is what we pay you for.” It reduces skilled people to a problem that should already be gone. A better approach: “This really hurt us this morning. Tell me what is realistic to keep it from repeating, and what you need from me to get there.”

The florist, who has serviced the club’s events for years, was let go without a word after one party that did not go perfectly. No conversation, no explanation, just silence and, a few months later, someone new. Silence is a sentence, too, and the people who serve you read it clearly. One honest conversation would have kept a good relationship, and very likely taught you something for next time.

Then there is the leader who reviews an outside professional’s work, the auditor, the insurance broker, the outside consultant, and lets the tone say what the words do not. The reply that takes two weeks. The call that gets bumped again. The unmistakable sense that their time matters less than everyone else’s. You may be entirely within your rights on the substance. But how you carry yourself while you handle it tells that professional exactly where they stand with you.

Now here is the part leaders forget, and it is the reason this is worth writing at all. The people you speak to do not just absorb your words. They carry them. Your equipment technician services a dozen other clubs. Your wine representative meets with food and beverage directors all across the region. The recruiter you retain talks all day to the very people you hope to attract someday. This industry is small, and word moves through it faster than any newsletter ever could. When you treat someone who serves you as a nuisance to be managed rather than a professional you chose, they remember. They are human. It shapes what they say, and what they do not say, when someone asks, “What is it like to work with that club?”

Here is how that plays out. Most of these professionals will never disparage a client. It is not good business, and it is not who the good ones are. They also will not manufacture warmth they do not feel. A recruiter will not tell a strong candidate that a club is a wonderful place to work after seeing otherwise, and the recruiter is not the only one talking. Before a strong candidate says yes, they do their own homework. They reach out to people who worked for you last year and five years ago. They ask the person who left what really happened, and whether they would go back. They compare notes with peers who have sat where they are about to sit. Any one honest read is a single voice in that chorus, and the chorus is singing whether you are in the room or not. So, the way a leader treats the people around them does not just bruise a feeling in the moment. It quietly shapes the story that gets told about the club, and how convincingly anyone can tell it. You may never know what you did not get.

So here is a test worth applying. Before you speak to someone who serves your club in a way you would never speak to a member, ask yourself what that person is likely to say about you when you are not in the room because they will say something. The only question is whether it helps you or costs you.

Watch your language. Not because these people are fragile, but because they are listening, remembering, and talking, often to the very people and clubs whose opinion you care about most. Members tend to see your best face. Everyone else tends to see your most honest one, and they are often the ones telling your story when you are not there to tell it yourself.

The BoardRoom Magazine – 2026

Michelle A. Riklan, ACRW, CPRW, CEIC, CJSS is a Career Strategist, Search & Consulting Executive at KOPPLIN KUEBLER & WALLACE (KK&W). KK&W is the leading executive search and consulting firm in the private club industry. Michelle can be reached at 833-KKW-HIRE (559-4473) ext. 717 and at michelle@kkandw.com.

Walk into almost any private club in America, and within a few weeks of working there, you will hear the phrase. From a manager, from the GM, from a board member making a town hall toast. “We’re a family here.” It’s meant kindly, almost always. It is one of the most common phrases in our industry and one of the most quietly damaging.

I want to make the case, in this column, that it is a phrase club leaders should retire.

Start with what the word family actually communicates underneath the warmth. Family is a relationship you do not choose and cannot easily leave. Family is governed by loyalty rather than performance. Family does not pay you and expects sacrifice without question, because that is what family does. Family conflict gets resolved at the dinner table, not through a process. Many of us grew up with a version of family where we take care of our own forever, no matter what. Many of us grew up with a much different version.

Translate each of those into a workplace and listen for the dissonance.

“We’re a family here” most often arrives in the orbit of a request. Cover the holiday shift. Stay an extra two hours “as a favor.” Come in on your day off because a coworker called out. Train the new hire during your lunch break. The phrase does the moral work of obligation without ever naming what it is asking for, and refusing the request becomes disloyalty to the family.

It also works in reverse when people try to leave.

• “After all the club and I have done for you.”
• “We thought you were one of us.”
• “I’m shocked you would leave us.”

A two-week notice gets reframed as a betrayal because the language framed the relationship as kinship in the first place. The same leader who would not bat an eye if a vendor moved on takes a staff member’s departure as a personal wound because the language taught everyone, leader included, that the relationship was something it was never legally, financially, or ethically meant to be.

There is a quieter version of this, too. The long-tenured housekeeper who becomes the team’s “grandma.” The veteran chef who becomes the kitchen’s “dad.” It’s warmth, on the surface, but can easily create a chill when action needs to be taken. Underneath, that housekeeper’s performance is now almost impossible to address because doing so feels like betraying family. The chef’s sharp tone toward the line cooks is excused as “just how he is” because pushing back on the chef means pushing back on a father figure. Family language protects dynamics that a professional vocabulary would let a leader correct cleanly.

Here is the part that matters most for retention.

The phrase lands differently depending on who is hearing it. The employee who grew up in a healthy family hears warmth and lights up. The employee who grew up in a dysfunctional family flinches at the word “obligation”. The employee who has previously worked at a toxic family-run business recognizes the script immediately, smiles politely, and starts looking for the exit within the month. The leader has no way of knowing which group is sitting at the table during the welcome speech, and the same words land as an embrace, as a warning, and as a red flag, all at once.

People stay in workplaces where the language matches the reality they live in. When family language is paired with genuinely respectful treatment, fair pay, and clean processes, it survives as quaint warmth. When family language is paired with overwork, blurred boundaries, and guilt-soaked asks, it accelerates exit. The corrosion is invisible until your best people are already gone.

So, what should we say instead?

There are honest alternatives that ask a leader to surrender nothing of substance. The simplest is team, which names the structure plainly and without pretense. Crew works, and it is a word that kitchens have used for a century.

Colleagues, staff, and the people who work here all do the same honest work, describing the relationship as what it actually is, which is a group of adults who have chosen, for now, to do work together in exchange for fair compensation and a sense of purpose and who are free to renegotiate that arrangement at any time without the renegotiation becoming a personal wound.

Specific changes a leader could make starting tomorrow: “We’re a family here” becomes “We’re a team that looks out for each other.” “We take care of our own” becomes “We back the people who work here.” “You’re part of the family” becomes “You’re part of this team now.” “After all this club has done for you” deserves no rewrite. That sentence has no place in a professional conversation. Cut it.

None of those substitutions is colder than what they replace. They are warmer, in a way, because they are honest. Respect is warmer than performative kinship. Naming someone as a valued colleague carries real weight precisely because it is not a word you would use for a stranger. Calling everyone family flattens the word until it means nothing.

The strongest cultures in this industry are not families. They are professional communities where people are paid fairly, treated like adults, given channels to raise concerns, and are free to leave when circumstances change, or an opportunity arises that aligns more closely with where their lives are headed, without that leaving being framed as a betrayal. The language has to match the reality, or the reality will eventually win, and your best people will be the ones to act on it first.

Watch your language. We are not a family. We are something better. We are a team of professionals who have chosen, for now, to do good work together. Say that, and mean it, and the people who hear it will know they are seen as adults rather than children, and they will stay longer for it.

BoardRoom Briefs – July 2026

Michelle A. Riklan, ACRW, CPRW, CEIC, CJSS is a Career Strategist, Search & Consulting Executive at KOPPLIN KUEBLER & WALLACE (KK&W). KK&W is the leading executive search and consulting firm in the private club industry. Michelle can be reached at 833-KKW-HIRE (559-4473) ext. 717 and at michelle@kkandw.com.