Your Board Has Charters. Your Team Has Assumptions.

Private clubs have gotten serious about governance. Committee charters. Right-sized boards. Director orientation. Written role descriptions for every volunteer who serves. The discipline is real, and the results show.

Then the conversation stops at the general manager’s door.

Beyond that door is the team that actually runs the club: golf, grounds, culinary, membership, finance, facilities, and more. Yet in many clubs, that team has never been given the clarity the board now takes for granted. Accountability is understood but not documented. Decision rights are implied rather than defined. There is no shared reference that clearly says who owns what.

Every club has a formal org chart showing reporting relationships. But it also has a second, often unwritten chart: the one that determines who is accountable for each function and who has the authority to make the decisions that come with it.

Clubs define how their volunteer leaders govern. Too often, they rely on assumptions about how their professional teams lead.

Three symptoms appear when that second org chart goes undefined:

1. Two people own it. The wedding inquiry belongs to catering and to membership. The tee sheet policy belongs to golf and to the GM. Neither party is wrong, which is exactly why it never resolves on its own. It escalates.
2. Nobody owns it. Locker room standards. The member complaint that crosses departments. The line item no department claims at budget time. These do not fail loudly. They erode.
3. The GM owns everything. This is the most common version—and the most expensive. When accountability is undefined, it defaults upward. The general manager becomes the single point of resolution for decisions several levels below the role. That is not strong leadership. That is a structural failure wearing a cape.

The fix is not complicated. It is just rarely done.

Start with one page. List the functions of the club that matter. Next to each one, identify a single accountable leader—not simply a department. Where two leaders appear, the club may have found a conflict. Where no leader appears, a gap. Where the same leader appears again and again, a bottleneck.

Then define decision rights. For each function, what can that leader decide independently? What requires the GM’s involvement? What falls within authority reserved for the board? Many clubs have never written this down. A surprising number of staff and board disputes exist for no other reason.

This is more than an HR exercise. It is a management accountability document with important governance implications. The GM should own and maintain it, while the board should ensure that authority is clear at the boundary between governance and operations. A board that has clarified its own authority but has not ensured comparable clarity for the management team has done only part of the work.

Clubs that get this right notice it in ordinary things. Decisions get made where the information already lives. The general manager’s calendar opens up. Department heads stop waiting. Members stop hearing “let me check with the GM” about questions the person standing in front of them should be able to answer.

Governance is the discipline of knowing who decides.

That discipline should not stop at the general manager’s door. It should continue through it.