The board president at a recent club we visited walked me through the club's leadership structure with real pride. The club still runs what we call the “three-legged stool”: the golf professional, the superintendent, and the clubhouse manager each report straight to the board, with no GM/COO consolidating operations underneath them. “We stay out of operations,” he told me. “Our managers are empowered. Whatever they need, they get. Within reason.”
He meant it. So did the tenured managers, who described real autonomy: budget authority, hiring authority, freedom to run their departments like professionals.
Then we sat in on the board meeting. Two hours, and eighty percent of the agenda was operational decisions already inside an approved budget: a mower lease, a menu change, a pro shop vendor switch, a staffing request for the pool. Nothing scandalous happened. It was a room of well-intentioned volunteers doing a job already done, one department update at a time and operational decision after the other, because nobody had built the structure that would let them stop.
This gap between a club's stated philosophy and its actual practice is still all too common. It's an established structure and behavior that's hard to break, and there's a real difference between educating and informing the board of these actions and asking for or requiring their approval. Nobody is the villain. The structure is.
What Micromanagement Actually Costs
It's tempting to treat board involvement in operations as a matter of style. The data says otherwise.
Start with the most visible symptom: general manager turnover. Industry tracking has put the average tenure of a private club GM at three to four years for decades, a stretch widely described as “epidemic” compared to other executive roles, and one that has barely moved despite the professionalization of the CCM credential and the GM/COO title. Boards often blame the departing manager, but the more consistent pattern runs the other way: good GMs don't stay where their authority is routinely second-guessed. The managers who remain in chronically micromanaged clubs tend to be the ones who've learned to tolerate dysfunction, a very different thing from managing well.
That turnover isn't cheap. The 2024 Club Leaders Perspective Report estimates the annual cost of staff turnover at a mid-sized, 100-employee club at $150,000 to $250,000, factoring recruiting, onboarding, lost institutional knowledge, and the ripple effect as departmental managers follow a departing GM out the door. A club that burns through a GM every three years is absorbing that cost repeatedly. The general managers who last, as one industry analysis put it, are the ones whose boards eventually stop second-guessing.
Capital planning takes a quieter hit. Boards that spend their meetings in the weeds tend to lose the strategic altitude a capital plan requires. Projects get funded because someone advocated loudest that month, not because the reserve study said it was next. There's a liability dimension too. Volunteer directors who insert themselves into hiring decisions or operational directives step outside the fiduciary role the law protects them for, and blurring that line can blur the protection that comes with staying inside it.
Why It Happens, and Why It's Nobody's Fault, Exactly
If the costs are this real, why does it keep happening at well-run clubs with good people on the board? A few structural reasons show up again and again.
The first is the chair (president, chairperson, commodore). Most club presidents are elected because they're well-liked, connected, or willing to serve, not because anyone evaluated their grasp of governance boundaries. When no one coaches a new chair on what the job actually is, a well-meaning leader either drifts into operations personally or doesn't stop others from doing so. When that seat is strong, the line between governance and operations holds. When it isn't, everything downstream becomes negotiable, including a two-hour meeting that should have taken forty minutes.
The second is what club consultants have started calling the member-governor paradox. Club board members are also club members. They eat in the dining room, play the course, stand at the bar, and other members bring them complaints directly. It's entirely natural for a well-meaning director to respond by walking the issue straight to a department head instead of routing it back through the GM/COO, not a failure of character, just what happens when the same person wears the owner hat and the customer hat most nights of the week.
The third is the title itself. In almost every other organizational context, a “president” runs day-to-day operations. In private clubs, the president heads a volunteer governing board. That mismatch sends the wrong signal, and a board is more likely to govern like a board when its leader is titled Chair rather than President.
None of this means clubs should apologize for being member-governed. It's a unique business model, fraught with conflict. Where else do you get a group of customers who are also owners, making decisions about a business they generally have no experience with beyond being customers? These best practices don't keep the board at arm's length from operations; they give it the input needed so professionals can meet and exceed expectations. The board needs to clarify exactly where strategy ends and operations begin, and needs the discipline to stay on its side of that line.
The Framework That Already Exists
This is precisely the ground CMAA and NCA cover in Private Club Governance: A Handbook of Principles and Best Practices, now in its second edition. The handbook's Club Governance Framework traces a clean chain of authority, from governing bodies and documents, to the members, to the board, to the GM/COO, to staff. Essential documents ensure alignment, clarity, roles, and accountability, including an operations manual, a board policy manual, articles of incorporation, and bylaws. Committees sit in a separate “Advisors” column, unless given specific authority to act, a committee's job is to advise, not decide, and should be chartered by the board and aligned with the strategic plan. Often we see committees driving personal agendas that misalign with leadership's direction, which is why a top-down framework matters.
That's the piece our three-legged-stool club never built. A Board Policies Manual, typically just twelve to fifteen pages, documents in writing exactly where the board's authority ends and the GM/COO's begins. The handbook's model BPM includes a section most clubs never think to formalize; Executive Limitations, the dollar thresholds and decision categories a GM/COO, or a leg of the stool, can act within without further board approval. So long as management stays inside those guardrails, the decision belongs to management, and the board's job shifts from re-approving every choice to monitoring outcomes.
Trust without a documented delegation of authority is a mood, not a policy. And a mood doesn't survive a two-hour agenda.
One board president we worked with, after separating operating decisions from capital decisions in the boardroom for the first time, described the shift simply…the board stopped arguing about details and started talking about priorities.
None of this argues for a board that's blind to operations. An equally dangerous failure is a board that only learns what happened after the fact. Boards retain every right to require whatever performance reporting they need; a report is simply not a request for approval. In practice, that means consent agendas for anything already inside the approved budget, pre-read updates so meeting time goes to real judgment calls, and committee charters that route strategic committees to the board and operational committees to the GM/COO.
The Same Trap: Contested vs. Uncontested Elections and the Nominating Process
The oversight-versus-operations trap shows up again, in a different costume, in how clubs choose their boards.
At another club we work with, a vocal group of long-tenured members is pushing to bring back contested elections. Multiple candidates competing for the same seat, decided by a popularity vote of the full membership. It's an understandable instinct; the choice feels democratic. But this same club nearly went insolvent more than a decade ago, in real part because its uncontested election process had quietly degraded the board to a group of unstructured people with strong opinions rather than any real qualifications to advance the club's needs. There was no real vetting, no documented standard, just whoever wanted the seat and had the votes to claim it.
The lesson isn't that contested elections are bad or uncontested elections are good. It's that process that determines whether either approach produces a well-governed club.
The data on contested elections is more sobering than most members assume. Industry estimates suggests that only about 15% of club bylaws explicitly require a contested process, and roughly 20% explicitly require an uncontested one; the remaining 65% leave it unspecified, and most default to uncontested slates in practice. That's not an accident. A club running true, popularity-driven elections is estimated to see its pool of qualified candidates shrink by 30% to 40% compared with a vetted, uncontested process, since most capable volunteers already giving the club their time on a committee have zero interest in campaigning against a friend for a board seat. Contested races also guarantee losers. In a club running five candidates for three open seats, two people who cared enough to run walk away publicly rejected.
It's worth pairing that with the opposite failure. Elections that reward popularity over governance competence are a direct structural cause of board overreach: a well-liked member with no fiduciary background can be voted onto a board overseeing a multimillion-dollar operation, then be surprised when the fiduciary part of the job doesn't come naturally. An uncontested process, done well, guards against exactly that, letting a club select for governance aptitude, relevant experience, and team fit, not just likability.
The CMAA/NCA handbook is direct. An uncontested election is only as legitimate as the process that produces the slate, and it names two components as non-negotiable.
The first is a genuinely trusted, independent nominating committee. The chair should be selected on documented criteria, including a reputation for integrity, independence, and objectivity, rather than defaulting automatically to the sitting or immediate past president, and the full board should approve that selection to blunt any claim of cronyism. That trusted chair builds a like-minded committee, also subject to board approval. Smaller is better. The handbook favors committees toward the lower end of what clubs typically use, as few as five members, largely for confidentiality. One-year renewable terms keep the committee accountable.
The second is a documented Board Profile. A written rubric the committee vets every candidate against, built around three tiers. The first is non-negotiable, a member in good standing, a demonstrated reputation for integrity, meaningful committee service, and a genuine team player rather than someone carrying a personal agenda. The second is about perspective, not representation, weighing the diversity of age, tenure, and interest a well-rounded board benefits from, without treating any candidate as a delegate for a faction. The third covers desirable skill sets, such as finance, law, real estate, or construction, whatever expertise the club's current challenges call for. Written down and applied consistently, that rubric lets members trust a slate they didn't vote on, since the board they've elected is taking fiduciary ownership of it.
Two further mechanics reinforce the process. Most club bylaws include a release valve, a petition process letting any member with enough signatures force their way onto the ballot, keeping an uncontested system from becoming unaccountable. Where a petition candidate qualifies, members vote for as many candidates as there are open seats rather than a single up-or-down choice, so a vetted slate isn't disadvantaged by one motivated challenger. Candidates should also know what they're signing up for before they're seated, a signed Consent to Serve form and a real post-election orientation turn “you're on the board now” into an informed commitment.
This is, not coincidentally, the standard corporate boards already apply. A corporate director candidate is evaluated against a skills matrix and, in effect, interviewed for the role. A club board seat carries fiduciary responsibility for member assets and often tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure, and deserves the same rigor, arguably more, since the people being governed are also the ones governing. Prior committee work becomes an essential proving ground for vetting board candidates.
When members start agitating for contested elections, the more useful question usually isn't “contested or uncontested?” It's “do we actually trust the process putting names on this ballot?” If the honest answer is no, the fix isn't necessarily to throw out uncontested elections. It's to rebuild the nominating committee's legitimacy and publish the criteria it uses.
When the “Coup” Starts to Look Necessary
There are moments in a club's history when a faction of members, frustrated with a board, moves to force change outside the normal process. A petition drive, an insurgent slate, a vote of no confidence or legal action. It can feel dramatic, and sometimes it even works.
But it's worth naming what that moment usually represents. Not a failure of members' patience, but a failure of governance discipline that came before it. A club with a genuinely independent nominating committee, a published Board Profile, a documented BPM, and a board that visibly stays in its strategic lane rarely produces the conditions that make an insurgency feel necessary. Members trust processes they can see, and lose patience with boards whose decision-making looks arbitrary or entrenched by default rather than earned on merit.
Sadly, we've also seen strong governance where a coup still starts to brew, typically driven by a small, vocal minority resisting change or a financial commitment they don't want to support. Either way, the antidote to a coup isn't a stronger incumbent defense. It's stronger governance, applied consistently, long before members feel like extraordinary measures are their only option. Strong governance should guide decisions, not emotions. If policy needs adjusting, follow the path to change it. If you have rules and don't follow them, you can't effectively govern.
The Common Thread
Whether it's a board spending ninety minutes approving a mower lease already in the budget, or members demanding a contested election because they don't trust how the current slate got built, the underlying issue is the same. A gap between the authority a governing body actually has and the process it's using to exercise it. Strong governance closes that gap on purpose, through a documented Board Policies Manual, a disciplined delegation of authority, a nominating process with real teeth, and a board that has decided which conversations belong to it and which belong to the people it hired to run the club.
None of this requires clubs to trust their managers less. It requires them to trust their process more, and to communicate that process to members so they can see the board and management are aligned and delivering a healthy club and an exceptional member experience.