Golf is a sport that requires a great deal of skill, strategy, and determination. But those qualities take patience, focus, and hard work. Mastering the sport can take years of dedicated training, both physical and mental.
But learning to play can also teach valuable lessons in leadership. Whether you’re a newbie to the business world or a business professional looking to hone your leadership skills, golf can be a great aid.
Let’s explore the leadership skills you can learn from playing golf and how they can be applied to the business world. If you keep these things in mind when you’re swinging your clubs, you can take the lessons learned from the golf course over into work quite seamlessly.
Leadership Skills You Can Learn From Playing Golf
- Patience
Patience is an important skill in golf, business, and life! Golf is a game of strategy and precision and requires plenty of accuracies. Impatience only makes your game more erratic, and it’s easy to get frustrated when things don’t go as planned.
It’s important to remain calm and composed in order to make the best decisions. When golfer gets frustrated, they’re much more likely to make mistakes, get annoyed, and possibly even ruin the round of golf for everyone else.
The same principle applies to business leaders. Business isn’t easy, and patience is a valuable asset. Without it, you’re likely to react badly, make poor decisions, and perhaps even treat employees or colleagues unfairly.
The good news is that patience is a skill that can be cultivated rather than a quality that’s built-in. Take every opportunity you can on the golf course to practice being patient, and you should notice that it starts to show up in your business life as well.
- Goal-Setting
A successful leader must be able to set realistic goals and create plans for achieving them. This is true for both golf and business—in golf, players must assess the course and set realistic goals in order to make the best decisions during their rounds. Business leaders must be able to assess their environment and set goals for success.
You can’t set a single goal for your round and apply it to every hole. Each hole has unique hazards and a specific shape. When you stand on the tee of each hole, you need to scrap the plans you had for the previous hole and create new goals for this hole.
In business, you can’t treat every situation the same way. You need to assess the situation, see what the potential hazards might be, and choose a course of action based on that.
- Problem-Solving & Adaptability
Leadership requires problem-solving skills in order to make quick decisions in challenging situations. Adaptability is another part of problem-solving that many people forget about—you need to be quick to assess and make fast decisions if something changes.
On the golf course, players must think on their feet and adjust to different situations in order to succeed. If one shot doesn’t go as planned, how do you move forward from there? You need to adapt to the situation and change your plans to reflect your new position.
Likewise, business leaders must be able to identify problems and come up with solutions quickly. Business is an ever-changing landscape and you being unable to adapt and change plans quickly can lead to lost deals.
- Time Management
Have you ever been playing a relaxed round of golf and had an uptight group behind you pushing you to play faster? While some golfers can be unnecessarily pushy, it’s also important to manage your time correctly, so you aren’t holding others up.
This is a matter of courtesy, but it’s also an important life and leadership skill. Time management is an essential skill for any successful leader. The best business leaders know how to maximize their time to achieve high levels of success.
Another element to this is managing the time of your team. Delegating tasks and effective project management are sought-after skills in the business world.
- The Ability to Listen and Take Criticism
Leaders must be able to take criticism from their peers and coaches in order to improve. It’s easy to believe that leaders are the ones who give criticism, but the truth is that good leaders need to be able to take feedback and put it to work to improve.
You can learn a certain amount about playing golf on your own. But at some point, you’ll need the input of others to help take you to the next level. This could be hiring a coach or simply taking the advice of your other better-golfer friends. But the important part is being open to it and implementing it in your game.
The same is true for business leaders. They need to be open to constructive criticism and honest feedback from other leaders, their team, and those in positions above them. It’s unrealistic (and arrogant) to assume that as a leader, there’s no need for improvement and nobody can offer advice. Be teachable!
Conclusion
Golf is an amazing sport and provides a lot of opportunities for strategic thinking and precision. It’s also fun! But aside from the enjoyment and the strategy, it can also be a great learning aid for things off of the golf course—more specifically, for learning business skills that can boost your own company.
These are just a few of the leadership skills you can learn from playing golf. The key is to play mindfully and catch yourself in moments where you can practice that patience or adapt your goals, and you should notice that those skills eventually transfer to the office as well.
Don’t expect change to happen overnight, of course. But if you do want to improve your leadership skills, getting out on the golf course more often is the ideal way to do so!
About the Author
Jordan Fuller is a retired golfer and businessman. When he’s not on the course working on his own game or mentoring young golfers, he writes in-depth articles for his website, Golf Influence.