Share the wealth

No matter how long a superintendent has been in the industry, it’s never too late to keep pushing for personal and career growth. But continuing education can only make a difference when the lessons learned are actually put into practice, or even better, shared with staff.

When Chris Vincent, superintendent at The Reserve at Lake Keowee in Sunset, South Carolina, came back from the Syngenta Business Institute last year, he had a lot more confidence in his personal communication and professional negotiations, thanks to what he had learned at the event.

“You’re negotiating with someone almost every day with someone on the course,” says Vincent. “When you improve that, you improve how you work with your employees and your golf pro. You feel like every conversation you have, you have a little more insight on how you can work things out and what you can say.”

When he made it a point to use his training, he saw a difference in how he was able to work with the golf pro to schedule aerification around tournaments so that the turf had time for cultural work between major club events. But he came back from SBI not only looking to improve his own career, but to share the principles he’d picked up with the crew and key management to better his entire team.

“The first thing I did at our next staff meeting after I got back, I brought that booklet [of seminar notes] in and did an overview of everything we took part in, went over or learned,” says Vincent. “Basically every month after, I would take a few minutes to explain a different part of what we learned.”

The monthly training sessions had focused on agronomy before, but now he trained his staff both in how to handle the turf and how to interact with players and the rest of the team on the course.

“I would use different topics that we brought up from the booklet, and we’d implement them in our training alongside the normal agronomic training we’d do,” says Vincent. “It helped them understand the importance of all this information as well.

“It’s one thing to train them about what they do and they all want to learn that because it’s their job, but it can get boring if you’re doing the same things over and over. It takes it to a whole different level to take the time to introduce this kind of education to the crew as well.”