Why Board Transitions Break Good Clubs (And How to Fix It)

Every private club has heard the horror stories. A board president serves their year, spends the club's money on their pet project, then rolls off leaving the next president to clean up the mess. Or maybe it's more subtle—the strategic momentum just seems to evaporate every January when new officers take their seats. Progress stalls. Priorities shift. And by the time everyone figures out what they're supposed to be doing, it's almost time to transition again.

Tom Wallace has seen this pattern play out hundreds of times. As a partner at executive search firm Kopplin, Kuebler and Wallace, he conducts a couple hundred board retreats a year and works with clubs across the country on governance challenges. Some clubs transition seamlessly, building momentum year after year regardless of who's in the president's chair. Others seem to start from scratch every twelve months.

The difference, Wallace says, usually comes down to whether clubs understand a fundamental truth: good governance is a process, not an event. And that process begins long before someone gets elected to the board.

Why Board Transitions Break Good Clubs (And How to Fix It)

Wallace tells a story from his time as general manager at Oakmont Country Club. Arnold Palmer pulled him aside one day and said something Wallace never forgot: "Tom, you're going to be a steward here. This club was here long before you got here, and it'll be here long after you leave. Remember why Mr. (Henry) Fownes built this place and leave it better than you found it."

That stewardship mindset should guide every board member's thinking. But it often doesn't. Wallace recently visited a club where every room was named after a past president. When he commented on the disjointed feel of the clubhouse, his tour guide explained that for about a decade, each president had wanted to build a room and put their name on it. "That's not stewardship, clearly," Wallace observed. "There's probably bad governance there."

It's a symptom of deeper problems. When clubs lack structure—things like strategic business plans, board policy manuals, formal orientations—there's nothing to prevent board members from pursuing projects that have nothing to do with where the club needs to go. And when the rest of the membership doesn't understand the club's strategy and direction, nobody's going to hold them accountable.

Wallace learned a valuable lesson during his time at the Ritz-Carlton early in his career. The general manager there told him: "If it's not written down, it doesn't exist." At the Ritz, if you have a question, they've already answered it and put it in a binder. Clubs rarely operate that way. But clubs without documented strategic plans, without clear job descriptions for committees and board members, without formal orientations for people stepping into leadership roles—these clubs are the ones that struggle through transitions year after year.

The general manager's job is to ensure that structure exists. Wallace uses a bowling analogy: "I'm not going to guarantee you're going to throw strikes every time, but I can't let my board president throw any gutter balls either." You need enough structure that presidents can't drive the club off a cliff, but enough flexibility that they can still lead effectively within a strategic framework.

When Wallace looks at board meeting agendas and minutes, he can tell immediately whether a club is high-functioning. If they're discussing soup and invitational prizes, that's operational stuff. Strategic boards talk about ten-year capital plans, reserve studies, future member demographics. "If they're talking about operations, this is not a cheetah," Wallace says. "This is a snail."

Who's on Deck?

One of the first questions general managers ask when Wallace interviews them for a position: Who are my next couple of presidents? If the answer is "we don't know," that's a problem. Great clubs know two or three years in advance who their future presidents will be. These succession candidates are already on the board, already sitting in strategic planning meetings, already learning how to work effectively with the general manager and staff.

Poor succession planning is what breaks board transitions. You can have everything dialed in—strong strategic plan, engaged membership, competent staff—but if your new president has never been on the board before, hasn't participated in committees, doesn't understand the club's direction, you're essentially starting over.

Wallace says clubs need to treat committees as training grounds. "We always used to say as a manager, anybody that wants to be on the board, you might want to double check." The test is simple: put them on a committee for a couple of years. If they show up to six meetings a year but only make two of them, not a good board member. If the committee had goals for the year and didn't accomplish any of them, probably not a good committee to recruit from.

Many clubs have moved away from nominating committees toward leadership development committees. These groups don't just populate the board slate—they select committee members too, recruiting across different ages, membership tenure, and backgrounds. Then they watch. Who's showing up? Who's getting work done? Who demonstrates they can build consensus and work well with others?

Because here's the thing: clubs are full of super smart, highly successful people. But being a Fortune 500 CEO doesn't automatically make someone a good board member. "Oftentimes you're not," Wallace says, "because you're used to things happening." If you don't have a board of your own in your professional life, if you're a business owner who hasn't had anyone question you in years, that first board meeting where eleven other people tell you they don't think you're right can create dysfunction fast.

The best clubs also understand they need to be thoughtful about diversity on committees and boards. Not just the usual suspects, not just the president's friends, not just people who think alike. You need newer members, younger members, long-tenure members, older members. A cross-section. Otherwise you end up with boards that don't represent the full membership, and members who don't feel connected to where the club is heading.

The Club Presidential Term Question

Wallace estimates that only about 25% of clubs have governance truly dialed in. Another 50% are working on it, and the remaining 25% are dysfunctional enough that the general manager is basically just trying to survive bad presidents and hope the next one's better.

One major factor in all of this is presidential term length. One-year presidencies create a constant retraining problem. "By the time they learn what they're supposed to do and how to do it and how to be a good steward, they're gone," Wallace explains. Clubs with two or three-year presidents build real momentum because the president and general manager develop a working relationship, find their rhythm, and actually execute against a plan.

For clubs locked into one-year terms by their bylaws—and getting a bylaw change through membership can be challenging—the solution is strong officer succession. Your vice president, treasurer, and secretary should represent your known pipeline. They're already in the room, already understand the strategic direction, already know what's expected of them when they step into the presidency.

Building a Board the Right Way

All the structure in the world doesn't help if clubs don't have the right people making decisions. Wallace tells every board the same thing at the start and end of retreats: "If you remember anything today, remember that your sole job, the most important thing you need to do, is make sure that anybody that gets on this board in the future are the best that your club has to offer."

You can have perfect governance structure, but bad people on the board create bad outcomes. And sometimes clubs sabotage themselves by trying to bring critics onto the board, thinking they'll bring them "under the tent." Wallace pushes back on that. If the majority of members support where you're heading, you don't need to accommodate the small percentage who resist everything. "Don't bring them under my tent," he says, "because all they're going to do is slow down our momentum."

Wallace and his partners do board retreats where they walk clubs through self-evaluation—25 different governance metrics that boards rank themselves against. "They give themselves six or sevens out of seven," Wallace says. Then he'll ask how they communicate with members. Usually the answer is just a newsletter. Meanwhile the best clubs in the country are doing five or six different communication activities every month. The gap between perception and reality opens up pretty quickly.

But these retreats aren't about gotcha moments. They're about showing boards where they are and where they could be, then providing a roadmap for getting there. Wallace always emphasizes that good governance takes three or four years to build. You can't implement everything at once. Some clubs, like Medinah Country Club, have done annual board retreats for fifteen straight years. Even board members who've sat through it before do it again. After four or five of those sessions, it's almost impossible not to understand your role as president.

Board transitions don't have to mean starting over. When clubs build the right structure, develop strong succession pipelines, and focus on stewardship rather than legacy projects, momentum continues regardless of who's sitting in the president's chair. That consistency is what separates clubs that thrive from clubs that lurch from year to year, always wondering why progress feels so hard.