DOING business on the golf course has long been part and parcel of the game. For both male and female executives, it’s a chance to abandon the stuffy confines of the office, get some exercise and fresh air and conduct the equivalent of a five-hour meeting over 18 holes.
Now these parallels have been taken a step further with the development of a unique corporate performance solution called ‘Mastering The Game: Leadership Effectiveness At Work, in Life and in Golf’, which integrates the power of golf and emotional intelligence (EQ) to maximise the potential of leaders and teams.
John Haime, a former golf professional who started playing in 1986 after being ranked the top amateur in Canada, has competed on various tours in the US, Asia, South Africa, Australia and Canada. He and global consulting firm the Hay Group came up with the idea of the programme.
‘With respect to EQ, in all of our programmes we use Tiger Woods as an example, because in my opinion he is the most emotionally intelligent golfer and there are reasons why he’s good,’ says Haime, who was in town recently to conduct a workshop. ‘One of the primary reasons is that when the heat is really turned up and the pressure gets intense, Woods is the most effective.’
This year Haime took 24 people to the US Masters to watch players in the practice rounds, and during that time it was hard to tell who would eventually win the tournament. ‘But when they tee off on Thursday, and when you start moving and intensifying the pressure until Sunday, that’s when you do separate the contenders from the pretenders,’ he says.
‘Tiger Woods did not play well and finished second in the tournament, but in my opinion and from the work we’ve done around this emotional intelligence, I think that with these particular competencies that he has, which a lot of the other players don’t have, Woods is just so superior.’
Woods appears to have developed EQ at an early stage. He meditates every day, has a quiet mind and he has a super high achievement drive, says Haime.
‘When Tiger was 10 years old, he put up Jack Nicklaus’ records on the wall in his room and he’d say to people that he was going to break those records, and in his heart he truly believed it. That’s how special he is.
‘The other way Woods is special is that he won the US Open in 2000 by 15 strokes, and all he talked about at the media conference following it was how he was going to change everything, and that he wasn’t good enough. So he has this extraordinary personal standard of excellence that nobody can come close to, and that’s how he measures himself.’
In 1994, Haime, who has an Economics degree, founded Corporate Golf Links Inc, which specialised in client golf events and producing major professional events. Four years later, this evolved into Learning Links, which offered team-building and golf leadership programs. ‘Mastering The Game’, inspired by Hay Group associate Daniel Goleman, teaches executives how to control emotional responses and channel them creatively to enhance workplace performance and leadership.
‘I realised, thinking back on my golf career, how I didn’t have that and how I could have used it,’ says Haime. ‘If I went back and played, knowing what I know now, it would make a huge difference.’
Haime recalls playing with Greg Norman in a tournament in Australia: ‘I said to myself, there’s no way I can beat this guy as he’s too good, which was a problem for my self-image, and I shouldn’t have been thinking like that when trying to compete against another professional.’
While Haime matched Norman’s score in the first two rounds, nerves got the better of him on the third day.
‘When I think back at that time I realise what I didn’t have – and that was self-awareness and a plan,’ he says. ‘I was afraid of success and failure and I just couldn’t control my emotions on the golf course, which were knocking my focus all over the place.’
With the ‘Mastering The Game’ programme, one doesn’t necessarily have to play golf – but it helps if you understand a little about the game, according to Haime: ‘We juxtapose the emotional states of golf and those in leadership and business and see that a lot of people who play golf spend a lot of time in the bottom part of this emotional spiral. They don’t know their capabilities, they hesitate and ask themselves what am I doing out here? And they get confused and frustrated, which then spirals into anger.’
The top of the emotional spiral concept developed by Haime includes social awareness, self-management, confidence and relationship management competencies, while frustration, anger, confusion and lack of relationship management are at the opposite end of the spectrum.
Haime has also developed an emotional caddy tool, similar to a professional golfer’s yardage book, which contains questions for participants to answer while on the course. It asks questions about your golf experience and relates that to your leadership experience. For example, how your emotions affect your golfing performance, and then how your emotions affect your leadership performance. ‘We do that for every competency,’ says Haime.
Workshop participant Benny Chong says there are strong links between golfing and leadership effectiveness. Mr Chong, from Sincere Watch, took a number of things away from the workshop, including understanding the need to be ahead of the pack and to distinguish through EQ.
‘Golf is a complex and challenging game, where you have to exhibit lots of determination and self-control either when you are on-form or off-form,’ he says. ‘But the challenge will be how to win during your off-form day, or how to fight back on the next hole when you have done badly at the previous one. And EQ plays a great role in that – developing skills to manage yourself.’
Haime says emotional intelligence is very progressive: ‘If you don’t have self-awareness, it’s very difficult to regulate yourself, and then it’s difficult to connect with other people. And if you can’t connect, then you can’t lead them and build these resonant teams. To be a leader you have to be smart and have those technical skills, but those are threshold competencies. What we’re talking about here is EQ, which takes leaders to the next level of performance.’
Soo Kam Tatt, from Hypertherm, also found the workshop beneficial. ‘The practice of management has always been a combination of science and art,’ he says. ‘The science part is thoroughly taught in college, sought after and elaborated in practice, while the art part, most of the time, is left to common sense, which can be disastrous in today’s competitive environment. This workshop showed a dimension in the art of management supported by a spectrum of competencies that could be developed and/or encouraged to enhance leadership effectiveness in management.’
Mun Kwok Kin, chief human resource officer at Jurong International, believes the golf element of the workshop helped him: ‘The programme gave me a good insight on how we can perform well under pressure by understanding our emotions, through self-awareness and being able to manage our expectations. Managing and leading people are similar to playing golf. We need to manage our expectations and emotions and work together with our team members.’ Essilor’s Stephen Shawler adds: ‘Golf is the game of life and if you’re a good golfer, you’ll understand emotional intelligence, self-awareness and self-management, which are so important in the execution of leadership.’
Source:
Paper: Business Times, The (Singapore)
Date: April 28, 2007
