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We had the opportunity to catch up with Joel Lander, Corporate Gen-eral Manager of Golf Operations at Unitech Group in Gurgaon, India. He has had significant golf & club management experience in the USA prior to taking his unique skills to Unitech, India’s second largest real estate developer. We are pleased he spent time with our team to share his thoughts with Hotelier Indone-sia:[HIC] Unitech is the second largest real estate developer in India. As their Corporate General Manager of Golf Operations, you are their “face of golf”. What are your professional responsibilities with Unitech?

[JL] My professional responsibilities here are many and varied. Gener-ally, I am responsible for oversee-ing design/redesign, construction/reconstruction and operations of 9 private country clubs located around the country. I have a small corporate staff that I work with, as well as interacting with other departments as the needs arise. Specifically, I am charged with the strategic planning for all of our golf projects – to make sure we deliver

a great product to our clients, and make sure the primary amenity (the golf facilities) measure-up well to the high-end Real Estate offering which they are promot-ing.

My current projects include: creating membership offerings for each club; rules and regulations for each club, hiring and training the manage-ment staff and overseeing the same for the support team at each property. I am also charged with IT requirements and over-all financial planning and management at each facility.

My week is spent traveling among our operational clubs, meeting with clients and my team – working to continually improve our service levels to bring the most value to our customers. The measure of our success together will be how soon we are able to create waiting lists for memberships at these clubs, and how long those lists grow to be! Obviously, I also watch over all golf operations and maintenance operations. As I see it, my job is to remove the team’s obstacles and

provide the tools for them to be successful.

We are well on our way to establish-ing several great clubs here in India. Finally, I partner with our Head of Events in business development endeavors to help position our Real Estate projects for sale. I am cur-rently very close to closing a $40M institutional sales deal – by far the largest single deal in the history of the company!

[HIC] Since golf is not very well established in India, you’ve had to adopt a vision by bringing many of the positive elements of successful private clubs in the Americas and Europe to Unitech clubs. Can you share a couple successful efforts?

[JL] Not only is golf not very well

Joel LanderCorporate General Manager of Golf Operations at Unitech Group Gurgaon, India

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established in India, but as you would observe and might guess, best practices are a long way off as well. While a number of Indians have gained training elsewhere in the world and have brought that back with them to India, most are trained or learn their jobs from people without formal training. A challenge here is convincing any ownership group that true talent and experience are required in order to produce a club that turns a profit. A leader is required (GM) as well as a Director of Golf, a F&B Director and a Superintendent that can each train and build a solid team based on best practices and understanding of the needs and requirements of the society, the target audience or the environment.

In our clubs now operating, we have brought expats in as a Director of

Golf, and fortunately, I have located a small number of young, very smart Indian candidates that I can train to run our first few clubs as GM’s. Creating a culture of service is also very challenging, and we work hard on that each day. The bottom line is: you must invest in your people (first) and your facilities (second) if you want to attract high-net-worth individuals to invest in your Real Estate projects. I make sure we have “the right people on the bus and the right people in the right seats on the bus” (Jim Collins). I teach them to “first seek to understand (listen to your customers and your col-leagues) and then be understood” (Steven Covey).

[HIC] In other countries, many of the clubs are converting to a public golf, pay-for-play struc-ture. How does that vary from

Unitech’s golf operations? With the global economic difficulties in recent years, are there difficulties in building a membership?

India, and Unitech in specific, has a unique spin on how to do this right. We have no intention of build-ing pay-for-play golf facilities, or converting our private facilities to that format. Unitech understands the high-end market very well, and we are building things that cater to those needs, wants and desires. For-tunately, this matches up extremely well with my belief system in how clubs should be designed.

We are building private societies that feature the golf (and other) amenities that our clients want, and surrounding those amenities with high-quality, upscale apartment towers and villas that meet our

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client’s needs. We only allow clients who purchase a home or plot in our golf societies to have the option for golf membership.

Golf membership is NOT included in the purchase price of our Real Estate. This creates an amazing demand for the memberships. In our society in Sectors 96-98 in Noida, as an example, we plan to have approximately 6000 families living there when the entire project is built out. The total number of golf memberships will be limited to 800-1000; hence a waiting list will be naturally created as the project evolves. This facility will not only have a stellar golf course, but also a Jack Nicklaus Studio Academy and potentially, a multi-million dollar TaylorMade club fitting facility – the only facilities of their kind in all of India! We still continue to work on the membership offering to make sure it is the best we can offer our clients, as the initial offering has changed somewhat over the past 4 years and we need to bring it in line so all members are treated equally, and, provided a very high service level.

By design, we should not only NOT have any trouble building membership, but should actually create a workable waiting list for each private club, with avail-able memberships being auctioned in a transparent manner to insure fairness.

[HIC] Explain your management philosophy and whether you’ve needed to adapt your practices to the Indian market?

[JL] My management philosophy is uniquely simple: surround yourself with the best people you can find, people smarter than you are, and encourage them to participate in the “process” daily. They are the ones with the most face time with your customers, and they are the ones with the “data” that you can use together to continually strive to improve each other, as well as your processes. Encourage them to use their ears 80% of the time, and their mouths 20% of the time – re-minding them that you can only learn with your mouth closed .

I position myself at the bottom of the “corporate totem pole” – I serve the staff, not the other way around. My ears are always open, and I make sure they know they have a voice and a hand in how things work and in ideas to improve. I position my team to grow and real-ize their true potential through positive reinforcement, as well as detailed examination of our failures and shortcomings. I also understand that some are happy in certain roles, and take care never to promote to the level of incompetence .

As for adapting to the Indian market – many of the wealthy folks we build for are educated abroad, or have

gone to the best schools here, and understand very well what we are trying to do. We have a reputation as one of the highest quality builders in the country, and I am ensuring that this perception carries over to our reputation for golf properties as well. Great service gets noticed; having a strategic plan, goals and a road-map to achieve success also gets noticed. This is how we operate.

[HIC] With significant experience in Golf Club management in California and Texas prior to your position in India, how does filling vacancies around the clubhouse vary between India & the US?

[JL] India is filled with young people that want to learn from experienced foreigners, as long as we make our best efforts to communicate with them. To be honest, in the almost 18 months I have been here under con-tract, I have not learned Hindi. I have however learned a number of words that I interject in conversations to put people at ease or to give them a laugh. In my view, there are two types of folks you can hire: those with experience or those that come from a good family and are very eager to learn. If you occasionally find a hybrid candidate (some of both attributes), you better make sure they come work for you!

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I don’t worry too much about experi-ence, except for the key TEACHING roles of GM, Director of Golf, F&B Director and Superintendent. These folks must be proven in talent, skill and above all, the ability to TEACH – and actually extract a great deal of joy from the process. The balance of the team can be taught the skill sets they will require, if they are good people. Good interviewing skills are the key to hiring good people. Hiring “warm bodies” will not get the job done, as attrition is painful to any organiza-tion and is always a couple of steps backwards before you can move in a positive direction again.

[HIC] Has international experience been beneficial to you as a multi-unit club manager? If so, will your time in India add to your skill-set should you return to USA or another country?

[JL] One of my greatest attributes, as well as probably my biggest weak-

ness, is that I always have a sense of urgency, and I want things done NOW. There is no room for procrastinators on my team, and I definitely “walk that walk”. Working internationally has taught me that not only is “patience a virtue”, but without a lot of it here, you may go crazy.

I have become a much more patient person living and working here in In-dia than I was in the States. Things de-velop at a slower pace here, and it has honestly been quite difficult for me to get used to the pace. I am learning to work within their framework and cus-toms, and believe it will greatly benefit me in my future work and interactions with my fellow executives here, and if/when I choose to leave and work in another part of the world.

Running and planning for multiple clubs is a dream-come-true for me – I believe it is the one true thing I’m here to do – a marriage of what I do with what I love. Patience is a requirement of not only running multiple proper-ties, but working in a new culture – and working with multiple depart-ments that operate differently than they would in the States. I learned quickly that I cannot change them; but rather need to adapt to the way things are done here, and then subtly sug-gest positive, non-fear-based reasons to change things that we can change together over time.

[HIC] What have you learned about the current state of the golf industry there during your time in India?

Observation, learning and then doing something positive with that informa-tion is what I do best. Unfortunately, the state of the golf industry in India is far behind that of more established, westernized countries. Most golf course owners employ barely-trained or “trained-as-you-go” type folks in the key positions mentioned above, generally with a “trial by fire” mentality. Golf operations and golf maintenance operations are things that take a great deal of time and mentoring to learn

and do well.

Owners in India must be willing to bring in the talent necessary from the US, Europe or Australia to make sure each department and team is estab-lished and trained properly. They can always offer a 2-3 year contract to “ex-pensive expats” (as many view them) and have them mentor the next group of Indian leaders and support staff to take over as they exit. That does not seem to happen here, and the results are quite predictable, unfortunately.

Unitech is one of the few that have been willing to invest some significant capital in their golf businesses – and will ultimately profit both financially and otherwise from their shrewd investments. The more Unitech lever-ages these investments, the more positive results they will attain (and retain!).

[HIC] Now that you have solid inter-national experience under your belt, what do you want do next?

[JL] I certainly want to see these projects through for Unitech, and that will take several more years. To be honest, I miss living in westernized society, and at some point, want to move back to the US or to Europe or Australia and run either a large group of clubs, or, one single amazing club. It has been a very unique experience here and a wild ride to say the least – I will be here until something presents itself elsewhere that also appears to be a win-win – and of course the time is right.

Hotelier Indonesia would like to thank Joel Lander for sharing his global golf & club management experiences with us. He’s a proven leader in the indus-try, and one committed to helping educate and promote those who he works with.

Joel can be contacted at: jedward-lander@gmail.com and joel.lander@unitechgroup.com