How team golf ( and an epic win) is making me question how leadership works.

Over the past few years since leaving the corporate world, I have amongst other things embarked on a journey of self discovery. I have also got the golf bug. In the past few days, golf and personal development have surprisingly collided.??Our team has won the Wallis Trophy????after 5 rounds of knockouts wins. Beyond the pride and excitement, I am left wondering how me – a bit of a control freak (at time!), can find it so rewarding to captain a ladies’ golf team, when I have so very little control on what the outcome will be. How can the team be so happy, so proud of what we have done as a team, when actually there is so little team work involved? How can I enjoy winning so much, even when I lose my own match?

Golf has got me thinking!

For those who don’t know, in a team match knockout competition, each team member (5 in our case) goes out, one after the other, to try and win his/her own individual matches. The team scores are aggregated and whichever team has won more of the matches wins and moves forward.?

It is a strange team dynamic – nothing like the teams I have encountered at work. There is no brainstorming, no supporting through challenges along the way, no milestone review. We each have 18 holes to play, we play them the best we can, 100% on our own for the whole play time.

Unusually for me, I am completely satisfied that there is nothing I can do to help the team while they play. If they are in trouble, I cannot offer any support. Unlike at work, where I often thought I could help, learn, advise, here it is simply not happening. They are playing their game whilst I am playing mine.

In our final, the result all came down to the last putt on the 18th?hole. By then we had lost 2 games (including mine) and won 2. Rosemary won that last hole and won us the Trophy. The team elation was amazing.?

And that’s what surprised me. How could we be so happy, so proud of what we had done as a team, when actually there is so little team work involved? How could I enjoy winning so much, even when I had lost my match? How could I feel such trust in my team to do their best without support or interference from me?

I am still not sure. But here is my attempt to unpick this.

What do I bring as the captain if I cannot help with the ‘task’ itself ?

The first thing is organising the team – who is playing, where, what time, what order of play - all the basic infrastructure. In the end it takes away hassle for them, makes it simple and therefore hopefully more enjoyable on the day.

On the day, before the game, we sit together around a coffee and I always say the same – 'we do the best we can today, if we are losing we hang in there for as long as we can, because every hole we stay in the game might end up making a difference. Most importantly we want to have fun, because in the end this is only a game'. At then at end of the match, we congratulate each others whether we have won or lost. Because we did our best. And when we win, I do a little dance, probably a bit over the top – the French in me one might say! I let my excitement come out. I celebrate without restraint.

A few days later, I write a short report to go into our newsletter sharing our result, who was on the team, our success and tribulations.

I can see, writing this, that I do a lot! More than I thought. But I don’t do anything in the action of play. And that is very different to my previous leadership experiences. I never thought I could get such joy, inspire great performance and instil such loyalty from the team, by only doing the stuff that seems ‘at the periphery’. But clearly it does make a difference, so the team tells me. They don’t need me to help them play their game but they really appreciate what I do. It surprises me. In my corporate roles I felt I added most value 'in the action' and focussed my leadership on that. Clearly getting 'the periphery' right makes a big difference, and it can be enough.

Why do we bond even if we play individually?

All our matches are singles. And yet we are a team. We all have exactly the same task – win our match – and we all know it can be done. So we could resent the ones who lose. But we don’t. The team changed every time – 13 ladies played across the campaign – and yet they all felt a sense of belonging. So why do we bond?

First, we have a shared purpose – to win. It is clear, simple. We all get it.

Then we respect each other. Because we understand how hard it is to win, because we know that we all have some good golf days and some bad golf days and we trust each other to do our very best on the day, we respect the result and the person – always. There is no question asked about what you could/should have played better. You never fail. You never get judged.?

And finally, we celebrate together, we bring the win to the team. There are no losers or winners of their matches. By simply playing, you own the team result. It is difficult to know how this would have worked if we had lost a match along the way. In the event, we did not. But I sense it would still have been a team result. We would have owned the loss and moved on, focussed on winning the next leg.

Why can it be so rewarding even when I lose my match?

In the final, I lost my match. I gave it a big fight despite my driving having gone missing-in-action and took the game to the 17th?hole before I lost. I was frustrated with myself but mainly eager to know what the team had done. Had the others won their matches? At that point the team had lost 2 games and won 1, with 2 matches still going. We won those 2 games and won the final 3-2. So in the end, I did not need to win for the team to win. And that is new to me. At work, I have mainly assumed that for our team to deliver/ our project to be successful , I need to do more than ‘just’ participate, I need to 'win' too. But, in fact, I probably did not then and I did not yesterday. The team congratulated me for my resilience having heard about how long I stayed in the game. I enjoyed their recognition, I felt valued. I had done my best, and this is rewarding in itself. And then, the team had won, and that was a great reward!

I will take few days to come down from my high. We are going to have a team celebration, then start training for next year. Most likely we won't do as well, but you never know. And hopefully we will have more fun along the way.

In meantime, I feel a little wiser. I did not think that our Wallis adventure would help me along my personal journey. But I am glad it did. Gives me more reasons to keep playing!