Archive for February, 2008

The situation –

Loosing too many shots weak to the right and having to hit two extra clubs compared to your buddies? Seen enough of those divots pointing way left of target and ever wondered how to cure this?

The Cause –

It could well be that the club is approaching the ball from what we term as an out to in swing path. If the club face remains open, then we tend to hit those weak shots that tail off to the right of target. Although the root cause of this problem can be varied to say the least, the end result through impact is the same out to in swing path.

The Solution –

A really simple, yet effective way of curing this out to in motion, is a practice drill using two old golf club shafts. Pop them on the ground as in the picture enclosed and then, hover the club head above the point where they cross. Simply make a back swing over the steel shaft and then return through your down swing swinging in the direction of the graphite shaft. This will give you a very new feel, with the club head approaching the ball very much from the inside path. Do this drill several times as a warm up and then at stages through your session on the range, so that you keep topping up the feel of the correct shape to your swing. The ball flight should change quickly with many shots starting more on target and the strike should feel more solid.

Always address the ball, by starting with your feet together and placing the club head behind the ball. Getting the club positioned behind the ball, helps you to consistently achieve the correct position to build your swing from. Once the club is in squarely positioned then place the correct grip on the club, left hand first if you’re a right hander, then the right hand snugly on top. Finally the feet into the correct position, making sure you’re the correct distance from the ball. So consistent golf starts with a consistent routine and set-up!

A simply yet effective tip for feeling the correct weight distribution and balance at address is to be able to tap your heels having addressed the ball. This will give you the feeling of positioning the weight more on the balls of the feet, giving you improved balance during the swing.

I know this sounds simple to some of you, but recently a client who reads a lot of golf books was using the phrases strong and weak in relation to his grip, but the wrong way round. This can obviously cause major problems so here are the correct definitions of those phrases, just in case you want to use them.

Strong Grip – Either the right or left hand placed too far to the right hand side of the grip. When looking down on the left hand in this situation you would be able to see 3 or 4 knuckles visible and the back of the left hand would almost be facing the sky. Your right hand might be very much under the club shaft, with the grip positioned more in the palm of the hand than it should be and the thumb and fleshy pad of the right hand on the right hand side of the grip. Termed as strong this grip would close the club face, take loft off the club and hit more powerful shots, normally lower and to the left. It also tends to feel very strong and powerful but that does not mean it helps your game!

Weak Grip – Either the right or left hand placed too far to the left hand side of the grip. When looking down at the left hand in this situation you would basically see maybe 1 knuckle visible, the back of the left hand almost facing down towards the ground. Your right hand will then have stretched over the top with the thumb too much towards the left hand side of the grip and the back of the right hand almost facing the sky. Termed as a weak grip, the club face would be very open, adding loft to the club and normally resulting in a high weak shot that slices off to the right of target. It also tends to feel very weak, which is another good reason for doing something about it!

Hopefully that sorts out the terms strong and weak in relation to your grip! Kind of important that we know, don’t you think?

A good percentage of golfers we see here at the academy picture a line down through their shirt buttons and you turn around this centered point. Unfortunately this can lead into a classic reverse pivot motion, with the weight normally moving to the left leg during the back swing and then having to lean back out of the way onto the right leg during the down swing. So if your hitting weak, high shots and falling back at the finish of the swing then this could be you!!

To get a true and dynamic range of motion during your swing, generating a powerful and repetitive ball flight then picture using the right leg as the pivot point on the back swing and the left leg as the pivot point for the down swing! (Based on you right handed golfers, opposite for you lefties) So feel like you are turning into that right leg, almost sitting into the knee is a sensation I like to have. Feeling like the right knee remains flexed and the weight is as much as 70 to 80% into that right leg at the top of the back swing. From here it’s a case of allowing the weight to shift back to the left side with a little bump of the left knee and hip and when you finish that follow through, your weight should be fully onto the left leg, with the tip toe of the right shoe, the only point of contact with the ground and your tummy facing the target. Hold this pose for several seconds as it brings your swing to a nice composed finish and is a good gauge as to your level of balance in your swing.

If you ever feel that your back swing lacks width, either the right hand gets too close to the right shoulder or the left arm collapses, then this width drill is for you. Grip down the club with your right hand, just above the shaft, then make a swing to the top of the back swing. Right elbow pointing down and arm relaxed, almost like a waiter holding a tray! Then gently stretch the left hand/arm across to reach the grip and place your hand on the club. You should feel a real stretch in the left shoulder/back muscle, due to the added width you feel. This drill not only gives you a fantastic feel of a wide and powerful back swing, but helps you get the correct sensation of a coiled turn behind the ball, with the shoulders very much through 90 degrees! Depending on your amount of turn normally and general range of motion, it might be that you wont be able to reach the club, but no worries, a little bit each day and you will soon loosen up!

The connection between golf and leadership

There’s a surprising similarity between playing the game of golf and leadership. Once the analogies are made clear to you, you’ll wonder perhaps why you didn’t see it before. By the time you’ve finished reading this, you’ll know the major connections and feel compelled to find out more.

35% of registered golfers in the UK are senior managers, professionals or executives , according to Mintel. This rises to 43.3% of London Golfers. And 12.8% of all golfers in the UK are senior managers, executives or professionals – that’s about 1.8 million golfers are senior managers, executives and professionals in the UK alone! (Source: GB TGI, BMRB Quarter 4 2006/Mintel) 44% of senior managers executives and professionals in the UK have played, do play or would like to play golf. (Source: BMRB/Mintel) Add another 1.4 million managers (Source: GB TGI, BMRB Quarter 4 2006/Mintel) and you realise just how big a sport golf has become – and it is predominantly ABC1 who play the game, and still predominantly male – 83%!

In part, business leaders, particularly those with some marketing or sales role – deliberately play golf to network with prospects and clients. In part there’s certainly some social status about being a golf club member, and for sure, in part there the ‘coincidence’ of playing golf and being a business leader.

What Mintel’s research doesn’t highlight though is that there’s more to it than that. The characteristics of those who play golf and those who are business leaders shows considerable similarities. Let’s take, for example, the desire to score well (even win) a round of golf. To be concerned about one’s personal performance and strive to improve it relates to a strong personal ‘Achievement Orientation’. I want to do well because I want to do well.

There are differences too, and important ones. On the golf course, the golfer is playing against the course. It is one of very few sports where the play of others has no effect on the golfer’s performance at all… unless he (and it is predominantly still ‘he’) allows it (the closest similar sport is downhill skiing). This is not the case for the majority of business leaders who’d personal performance can be impacted by the performance of others. So the golf course is the place where a player can assuredly adopt the attitude, it’s MY performance and only MY performance that matters and only their actions change the result. This suggests the desire for control – or Directiveness.

Some of the reasons golfers choose to play the game shows that 76% of them play for social reasons (Source: GMI/Mintel) – this demonstrates a desire, if not ability, in the competencies of influence and communication.

So why use golf to develop leadership?
It seems that the game of golf attracts business leaders more than other groups – & perhaps the conclusions above suggest why. So it became increasingly obvious to our team that golf could be both an attractive idea for development within this group, and that the game of golf itself could be deliberately used to develop the competencies and behaviours associated with great leadership.

Indeed, many of our clients confirm the attraction of golf for our senior management training programmes by requesting training to take place at golf clubs, so the team can play golf after the training course. Albeit, not everyone on the programmes did play golf, the senior managers and board members invariably did.

Our research into using simulations has shown that given a truly safe environment to practice the tools and techniques of leadership and management, participants not only learn more (23% greater learning) than using more traditional methods like case studies, they enjoy it more (17% greater) and demonstrate greater transfer of new behaviours to the workplace (26% greater transfer). Not only this, but studies in societies where females are considered disadvantaged in management showed a greater improvement in demonstrated management and leadership competencies after a simulation based programme than a traditional programme over their male counterparts – 16% greater improvement in demonstrated competencies. The key to the success of using simulations is that they provide a realistic, safe environment to practice the tools, techniques and behaviours of great leadership (Source: Kenworthy 2005)
Is golf a safe, realistic environment?

The great thing about golf is that it is one of the very few activities that provides a genuinely level-playing field – through the well-established handicapping system. It may not be perfect, but it’s very close. This means that a scratch golfer competes fairly with a complete beginner. There are also rules within which the game must be played – these represent the constraints of doing business. There are established game rules that encourage pairs or foursomes to work together, and there are rules to foster individual competition – sometimes in business we want our leaders to be entrepreneurial and ‘go-getters’ – leading by example, at other times, we want them to be team leaders, or team players. Caddies, provide a perfect metaphor for coaches and mentors. The course itself provides a varied environment, shifting according to things beyond the control of the player, but observable by them. The hole provides a target, the course provides for a strategic plan to achieve the real goal. The points scored can directly relate to revenue or profit. The clubs and balls are resources – even the golf pro can be a consultant resource.

The game of golf provides a fantastic platform to learn leadership – its safe and fair, it’s as realistic as you need it to be and it’s fun!

So what about the non-golfers?
So what about the non-golfers? Why would they participate – and let’s face it, in an organisation you don’t want to alienate the non-golfers by forcing them to participate in something they wouldn’t normally… or would you?

For our Leadership Golf Challenge programmes we always offer golfers and non-golfers technical lessons before the event. We arrange with our certified golf pro’s to put a special series of lessons for the new players – most often they perform better than those who’ve been playing for years because they don’t bring along so many bad habits. We’ve even designed a special programme exclusively for non-golfers – called ‘Hackers Days’ – which combine technical golf instruction with the Leadership Golf Challenge.

Can you just play golf to develop leadership?
There’s certainly something about the game of golf that shares characteristics of great leadership, but whether it’s the playing golf that develops the person as a leader or that the leadership capability makes for a golfer is an unanswered question. Like any powerful training programme, leadership development needs a supporting, robust model of development. Unfortunately it’s not much use telling someone to BE Jack Welch, or even to tell someone what it is that Jack Welch does – that doesn’t make you a leader. Nor, can we simply seek to develop the 10 principles, 7 habits, 12 big things etc. of the best leaders in the world – leadership is personal – the first step in becoming a leader is to take charge of yourself and align your personal values to achieving what you want to achieve. If it were that simple then there wouldn’t be a leadership issue anywhere in the world today.

Solid Foundations
Effective leadership development (indeed for adults to learn anything effectively) needs the learner to go through three learning processes according to Bloom – cognitive, affective and psychomotor learning. That we need to develop knowledge about leadership, associate a feeling or emotion with the desire to learn the knowledge and physically put that knowledge into practice.

Most business leaders have some knowledge about what constitutes ‘good’ leadership – though few practice it all the time. They may have seen ‘good’ leadership exemplified by others in their past or present. They may have read a book on leadership – such as the 7 Habits. Where these most often fail to become new behaviours is twofold – Firstly, most examples of ‘good’ leadership are often carried out ‘naturally’ by the person demonstrating them – we often refer to them as ‘born leaders’. They are ‘good’ leaders, but they don’t consciously know what it is that they do – and therefore they are unable to share with others what they should or could do. Most books, on the other hand, tend to focus on one of two aspects – how to be a leader – here is Mr Great CEO and this is what he did, you must do the same. or they distil ‘best’ behaviours and provide a checklist for you to do ‘good’ leadership.

In the former situation, the ‘born leader’ is unable (or unwilling) to give you the requisite knowledge to learn. In the latter (books), they often fail to make an emotional connection to implement the knowledge (other than you’ve bought the book therefore you must want to learn), or they provide simplistic implementation checklists, do this, then this then this at work. If the new ‘habit’ doesn’t work first time, the book provides little or no guidance as to what you should do now. GAINMORE Advantage changes all that.

The GAINMORE Model provides a synthesis of the tools, techniques, attitudes and attributes of ‘good’ leadership within a structured model supported with templates that enable you to physically learn the behaviours. We are using the game of golf as a metaphor and as an emotional learning hook, and golf provides a means for you to put your behaviours into physical practice for yourself first – i.e. self-leadership, then you can use the templates at work. All practised within a safe and realistic environment that is fun.

The GAINMORE Model is developed from three major areas of thought leadership in the fields of management learning, psychology and leadership. It is a personal development model that provides the solid foundations on which the Leadership Golf Challenge is built. Build on this foundation the safe and realistic learning environment of a business simulation on the golf course and you have a leadership development programme that actually does what it says on the box.

If you would like to know more about the GAINMORE Leadership Golf Challenge and how we can help you transform your leaders – whether your business issues are Strategy, Business Planning, Teamwork, Change, Marketing, Operations, Finance – we will work with you to design a solution that will address your ongoing needs. Call us on +44 (0)207 1935218 or visit the website at www.gainmoreleadership.co.uk
We look forward to hearing from you soon.

For full references, please contact the author

I first started this Blook on Gainmore Golf in the summer of 2007. With all good intention, progress was swift – after all, I had been researching and developing the ideas over several years. So why start over?

Well two main reasons. First my webserver was taken offline and whilst the material was still available it provided an opportunity for me to re-read what I’d written several months ago – and this leads to the second reasons: it was crap! That, I guess is the beauty of not holding onto something quite so dearly that you cannot leave it alone and then return to it later. Some of those fabulous bits of prose (so I thought at the time) were just not good enough. It was almost as if someone else had written it and now I was reading the work of an immature, dreary writer. Oh yes there was some good stuff in there, but it wasn’t necessarily easy for anyone to pick up and use for themselves. That is my new intention.

I hope that you enjoy what is here and I welcome your comments and feedback.

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