EPISODE 106

Tucker So what I want to talk about today is what we see when we talk to boards and what we see when we talk to general managers. Why did they struggle between the difference of a tradition that strengthens who they are and what they’re all about, or really just becomes a pattern or a habit that just helps them resist change? And so let’s talk about this and where we’re going, where I want to start is, when members say, we’ve always done it like this, or they invoke tradition as a resist to propose change, do you think that they’re protecting something essential within the club and the history of the club, or are they just uncomfortable with that evolution?

Derek I think it’s both, and we’ll talk about what some of these differences are. But in general, blanket statement, change is hard. And I think for the most part, and I would love to have some statistics on this. Maybe this is the next research study. I would love to have some statistics on what the average human being’s resistance to change versus embracing change is. Because at least in the private club industry, with most of the people we’ve worked with, it feels like the majority, whether that’s members or boards, are change-averse. And I don’t know why. I don’t know if it’s in part because they’re afraid of leaving something behind that was meaningful, or if it’s more just because changing implies the unknown. And we don’t know what that change looks like or where that’s going because it hasn’t happened yet. We can’t pick it or choose it or necessarily clearly define it. And defining it takes a lot of hard work.

Tucker When I look at change across memberships, a lot of it comes down to the emotional side of being a member, and all of your friends around you see the decisions that you make when you’re on the board. Making those decisions in front of all the people that you know and you trust, and you care about what they think, becomes even more difficult when we’re making hard decisions. You don’t want anything to come back and make me look bad. And so when we look at that, there are easy outs, I think, for people when you get to the word tradition. And I think of the word tradition as a very buzzword in boardrooms because it’s easy to shoot things down based on, well, that’s not our tradition here, and that’s not what that means. And so, where I think this all goes is defining what a tradition is, what a habit is, and what a rule is. And the way that I’m looking at that is rules are required, they are policies, they are mandates, you have to do them. Thinking about dress codes. We have a dress code. That is a rule. That is not necessarily a tradition. That is something that might change every single year and adapt and whatever, but we mandate those. Habits are things that our membership does just naturally. It is something they gravitate towards. It’s something that’s easy for them. They might say, Hey, I eat a steak dinner every Thursday night. Well, does it become a tradition because you eat it every Thursday night, or is that just a habit? Is that special to you? Does that define who you are? Or is that just a part of your natural cadence? And then a tradition to me is a symbolic philosophy. It’s something that drives belief. It is something that drives this is who we are. And when we understand those, I think it becomes easier to make decisions around what things need to stay and what things need to go based on whether we are following our traditions around who we are, or is that just a signal of the past that represents some kind of rule that doesn’t really matter anymore.

Derek Yeah, one of those that you talked about is one of the key differentiators between telling the difference between a habit and a tradition, something that’s meaningful versus something not that you just pointed out, is that personal comfort. Somebody’s going to defend a habit. When we talk about personal preference when it comes to subjective decisions, there’s the personal comfort in, well, I’ve always done it that way. We always have steak on Thursday nights. And I think that language right there is one of the cues to let you know whether that person is defending a habit or a tradition. If they say this matters because, then that might lead to defending the tradition. But if the language starts with Well, that’s how we’ve always done it, then that’s a hundred percent a habit. Like a good friend of mine in business says, those are the seven words of a dying organization because that’s the way we’ve always done it.

Tucker They can become things. Like your dress code or your steak dinner, for example, can become a tradition. If it starts as something that we just do, it’s operating as a habit for a really long time, but it becomes a tradition because everyone has a shared meaning around it. This is what a steak dinner means to us, versus just doing it. And that’s this huge shift between people thinking, well, we can’t change our dress code policy, because that’s just our tradition, versus we dress like this because we all agree this represents who we are as a type of person.

Derek I think that’s the most important piece of this first part of the conversation. A true tradition carries meaning and emotional weight. Whereas, like you said, it connects to the club’s values, it connects the club’s story, and to its culture. It’s more about the meaning than the age. So, we’ll work with clubs that are 125 years old that have certain traditions, and we work with clubs that are 30 or 25 years old. Well, they have traditions too. So does something that’s been going on for 115 years more important than something that’s been going on for 25 years? Well, it depends on what that thing is and how meaningful it is to that specific organization versus simply the number that you’re attaching to it, because we’ve been doing it for that long. There’s a club that we’re working with now where some questions came up about some changes that the club was making to a certain part of the club that a small faction of members were challenging, questioning, or protesting. And one of the analogies that the general manager came up with was saying, Well, what you’re asking to not be changed is the equivalent of not upgrading our clubhouse and saying that our 75-year-old plumbing and our 75-year-old HVAC is still relevant today because that’s the way it’s always been. So, I think there’s a leap to meaning. The other thing that signifies a tradition versus a habit is that traditions have the ability to evolve because if they are rooted in meaning, and that annual event, the member-member, if you look at it from 75 years ago to today, of course, it looks different if you. Look at the photographs, clothing has changed, styles have changed, and golf equipment has changed. But the tradition of getting together on that certain weekend to celebrate together, to do something, the meaning is what still holds true.

Tucker Right, and you can still have a tradition of being a great golf club – a great golf club that celebrates that by doing X, Y, and Z. Our members are approachable. They don’t necessarily compete on the court, whatever it is. It doesn’t really matter. But to say, tradition doesn’t mean we play golf this way, the way it’s always been played. That doesn’t necessarily mean that. So, where I get to is asking the question, if I changed this one thing, would we lose something about who we are, and does that change who we are as a club? Versus, why am I worried about what other clubs or people outside of the club will think about us? I keep picking on dress code because it’s the easiest one for me. Because I see it all the time where people have to adopt their dress code all the time, and it becomes a huge point of contention at clubs. And the question I would ask is, if we switched our dress code to allow denim, would that change who we are as people? Would that change the type of club that we really are? Or would that change how other people think of us and why? And to understand that and put it into that context, you can make those decisions, and you can make rules. I’m not saying that there’s not a place for rules. It’s just, you can’t hide them behind saying that this is a tradition.

Derek Yeah, I love that test. I think that’s perfect. If this thing – fill in the blank – if this thing disappeared, would the club lose part of who it is, part of its identity, or would it just lose something that’s been familiar? If we gave up our formal dining room, would that lose part of who we are, our belonging, our sense of emotional identity, or would we just lose that 16-table area that nobody sits in except once a year during the holidays, for example, but I think that’s a great litmus test.

Tucker When we shift to more practical questions, like so, what does it look like when a club successfully evolves when it honors its heritage? Can we describe opportunities? And one big one that comes up to me, your transition is really nice, you’re talking about dining rooms. I think food and beverage is a great example of clubs that honor their traditions and their heritage, but keep evolving their food and beverage to make it happen. We were at a club a couple of weeks ago, and they have a tradition of incredible, charismatic hospitality within their food and beverage. That doesn’t mean that they serve the same burger that was served in 1958. But they have a way of delivering it to you that says, this is what we’re all about. This is what makes us different, special, and important. And I think that’s a good example of saying, you can still do a Wagyu steak burger, whatever, whatever, with the modern everything. But deliver it in a way that speaks to who we are and what we are all about here in a way that says we’ve always been like this. So it’s about being inspired by the past.

Derek There’s a difference between the tactile object that we’re associating with tradition versus the experience of what that object provides me as a member. So, is it the hamburger that’s most important to you as a member, or is it the experience that you have when you sit down and order a meal and how it’s delivered and the moment that you’re sharing with your family and your friends in your club?

Tucker And that’s a great way of looking at it, too. I think that traditions span across those things. They span across all of the different touch points that you might have, or all the different policies that you have. Some clubs have too many traditions, if I’m going to be frank. They go, we have all these traditions, but they’re just disguising those as policies that they don’t want to change, versus having two or three. It’s like this is what this club is all about, and these are our core traditions, and we always do that. So, for example, there is a club that I was at, and they have a very strict no-phone policy. I was like, totally fine. We’ve done this before. I’ve seen clubs like that. Not a problem at all. But they have a sports bar that has more screens than any club I’ve ever seen in my entire life. And when you sit in that bar, all you do is look around, and people aren’t really talking. They’re just watching TV, and that’s totally fine too. But I think that their tradition of we don’t have cell phones here because we just don’t have a policy that recognizes them. But we’re going to put TVs everywhere throughout this one dining facility so that people are distracted anyway and not really talking to each other. Those are conflicting. Not that one is right, and one is wrong, but those don’t match. To me, I would say then those aren’t traditions. You don’t have a tradition of no phones in the clubhouse. You have a policy that you don’t think phones are available, versus having a tradition of sharing moments in person in real time together. That’s very different. You get some rules that don’t make sense with other rules, and that’s where I would say those aren’t traditions. Those are just rules because someone felt like they needed to have rules.

Derek When a club successfully evolves while continuing to honor and respect its heritage, that shows up in a handful of ways. And I think one that comes to mind is when the old and the new actually work together to reinforce each other, where certain historical elements can actually become elevated or celebrated rather than erased, while modern, current updates and evolution make that heritage that we’re leaning in actually even more relevant by saying but because this is who we are and this is still a very important part of who we are, that’s why we’re going to evolve and continue to do it this way. It actually invites a stewardship to carry that legacy or that heritage forward in a way that’s going to continue to engage and invite members to want to continue that heritage. I mean, we always say, your history is not your story. The new average age of 42-year-old joining members are not going to join your club because of what happened 110 years ago. They’ll respect it, but it’s the pride that they’re going to feel going forward that’s going to be incredibly important versus any sort of sense of loss that might happen because something that we used to do that’s no longer relevant today gets left behind and moved away from.

Tucker One of the clubs is down in Florida on the Gulf Coast, and it is an Audubon preserve. So, you know, wildlife habitat for birds. And to me, if I were to break down what the tradition is versus what is the policy and how do you move all this, well, the tradition there is to preserve wildlife and to be a sanctuary for wildlife. The habit that they form is all of the different groundskeeping techniques that they have to do that are non-toxic, and move through all of this. The tradition of doing that leads to the habit of not letting garbage go on the golf course because it’s a habitat. There are lots of different things that are anchored down from traditions. Instead of there being all these dozens of traditions, there’s one core tradition on who we are, and then all of these policies that lead up to it. And that builds so much rationale and so much reasoning and so much shared value across the membership that says, we don’t do these things because someone decided we do them. We do them because this is what represents us.

Derek It was about keeping the meaning, not the logo. It was about keeping what we’re about and what’s truly at the soul and the heart of our club, not in the artifact that represented us at that time. It became about protecting the elements that the members feel truly represent them, which is the wildlife, which is this Audubon society, which is the people that all come and gather there. And I think that for them, that progress comes in updating how that’s expressed in a new way while preserving that same intent, preserving that same meaning.

Tucker So how do you know if someone’s listening to this and going, absolutely. How do you know which parts of the history are worth looking at and saying that really defines who we are, versus there are parts of history for clubs that are just old habits? Like you said, the dining room. We always used to do Christmas in the dining room in this certain setup. How do we know? How do we know when is what?

Derek I think one way to tell a difference between what part of history defines us versus what are habits is considering what’s historical versus what’s part of our identity. Defining history and understanding our history gives us a sense of why the club exists in the first place and quite possibly what it may still stand for today. However, old habits simply go back to the actions of how things have been done, almost even operationally. Not who the club is.

Tucker When I look at the habits, if you tell a new member about that and they initially go, well, why do you do that, and you don’t have an answer, that probably means that it’s just something you’ve always done and there’s no real rationale behind it. If you look back at history and you say the same thing and you can’t explain why they do certain things, then they’re probably not traditions, and there’s probably not a core sense of this is how it is. It’s probably just what they felt during that time frame that was really important just for them.

Derek I agree. I think you can test that by just asking the question, is this thing that we’re talking about helping us become more of who we are? Does it strengthen us? Does it enhance our story? Or is it just something we’ve never challenged before? Because that’s the way we’ve always done it.

Tucker I’ll do one more example, and then we’ll wrap up. There’s a great club that we work with in the California desert, and they have a great history. They have a fantastic history of innovation and pioneering within golf. They did so much cool stuff in the past. And when you look at that history, today, it’s almost not the same club, because they have lost a little bit of understanding around what makes us special. It’s not the fact that we did those things that made us special. It is the fact that we wanted to do those things that made us special. And that’s this big shift in mindset with clubs to say the reason why you’re founded isn’t necessarily going to give you all of the answers, but it’s going to give you the emotional drivers to say, here’s the philosophical driver behind what this club is all about and why this club was founded. What they specifically did – Oh, well, they had a par five to lead off the first hole, and then they had a par five to finish the golf course. So we always have to do that. Well, that’s not a tradition. That was just something they decided to do. There’s no philosophy behind that – unless there is. There’s a difference between tactics and overall direction.

Derek I think the act of changing for a club like that gives them the opportunity to actually articulate what’s important there even more clearly, to evaluate those things, and to decide, to realize maybe what’s just always been that way versus what they’re being intentional about. So when they do any sort of change, I think the members actually end up understanding the club story even better than they ever have. The legacy didn’t weaken. It actually becomes more obvious as its role as part of that club’s brand is part of their story.

Tucker And when you get to shifting, change is hard. We started the whole conversation with this. Change is really hard. And that shift becomes so much easier when you say we’re going to reset a little bit around who we are, who we’ve always been, and start making decisions based on these core elements. When people at the board level break it down based on, here’s who we have always been and we’ve always tried to make decisions on this and we have gone away from that based on X, Y and Z, if we try to get back to that, there is a sense of appreciation that members have around saying, Okay, this isn’t your decision. This wasn’t Derek’s idea. This is the founding people’s idea. This is the idea of people who I used to look up to through generations. These are people’s ideas through a lot of our history, not just one person contributing to the club’s future.

Derek When you do the hard work of defining what that future is for your organization, what that looks like, what the next 10, 20 years looks like, and you have that sort of clarity, then you can look at the traditions that you have and determine which ones are going to help us get there and which ones are holding us back.

Tucker Key takeaways – what stood out to you today?

Derek I think the idea of meaning over age. Is this thing a tradition or a habit, and the identifying litmus test around is this a meaningful thing to us? Or is it something we just keep because we’ve had it for a whole bunch of years?

Tucker I think the idea of traditions inspiring lots of decisions across the club becomes really interesting to me. When you look at all the different policies and all the different rules and events and everything we build out, as a club to have something that anchors us, to have a tradition that anchors us, and that leads to answers across a lot of things that become much easier than trying to keep track of a list of things we’ve been doing for a long time and then just making sure we keep doing those things.

Derek It’s a great topic. It’s an important one, and it’s a tough one. It’s a challenging one. I know that the clubs that take it on and go through it, we’ve seen them come out of the other side successfully. We’ve seen the clubs that do this come out to where the older members feel respected, and the newer members also feel included and energized.

Tucker If you have another topic that you want us to talk about, or you’re saying, hey, here’s a great question that you would like Derek or me to talk about, send Derek an email. Don’t send me an email. Send him an email at derek@sussner.com. We’ll get it on the list. We’ll talk about it. We’ll try to solve problems with you.

Derek Awesome, till next time. Thanks for listening to Clubs Made Meaningful. At Sussner, we help private clubs build brands that create belonging. If this episode resonated with you, please share it with someone in your club world. And until next time, let’s create something worth celebrating.