News

11/01/2011 - GMAB Director De Maertelaere attends Leadership Conference in the Algarve

In April this year, the CMAE will be celebrating the 10th anniversary of the meeting of club managers where it was decided to form an association that focused on providing education for club managers throughout Europe.

On 24th April 2001, the visionary group of club managers that committed themselves to this aim could only have imagined the day when club managers from all over Europe would be gathered in one place to collaborate in the establishment of a structured education programme for future generations of club managers. This first “Leadership in Education” conference was such an event, and so the dream has become a reality.

The European Leadership in Education Conference is, as the name suggests, an educational conference organised by the CMAE. The conference objective is to bring together the leaders of the 20 national club managers’ associations from all over Europe (national Presidents, Chairmen etc) together with their Board members and committee members to meet in an international conference and learn from educators and colleagues about future trends and developments in the European club industry, and to debate options for the establishment of a pan-European educational framework for club management education programmes.

Over the past few years, European Club Managers Associations have met together once a year in a very informal gathering, the larger countries taking it in turns to host the meeting. These annual meetings started in Liverpool, England in 2006 and then we visited Munich, Germany in 2007; London, England in 2008 and last year, Stockholm, Sweden.

The venue for the first ‘formal’ conference of European club managers associations was held in the Algarve region of southern Portugal. Fifty delegates from 17 countries attended the three-day event, and unlike other conferences, the CMAE board decided to stage a series of ‘debates’ rather than have presentations by various speakers. CMAE President John Hunt chaired the conference, and each debate was ‘moderated’ by a different delegate, who stared the debate session with a short summary, and then the debate was opened to comment and questions from the other delegates. The CMAE was keen to hear the views and opinions of the national club managers associations represented, and the experiences and challenges in each different European country.

Six major European Universities and Colleges were represented, to ensure that the educational framework being debated was potentially structured in such a way to allow academic institutions to participate in the delivery of club management education programmes in the future.

The conference learned about the Swedish four-level management training programme that has been established for over 20 years, taking receptionists, administrators and secretarial staff all the way through to general management.

We also heard about comprehensive training programmes for club managers in Germany, Netherlands, Finland, Denmark, Italy (where a potential golf club manager must attend a four-week training course run by the Italian Golf Federation) and France, and also about the extensive programmes of seminars and workshops for club managers being organised by the CMAE in the UK and Ireland, and by Club Managers Spain.

Other countries are at the beginning of the development of education programmes, so it was very pleasing to learn of the formative plans for education programmes in Portugal, Hungary, Slovakia, Ukraine and the Czech Republic

One of the key objectives of the conference was to discuss and debate options for the creation of a European ‘pathway’ which a lead a club managers through to CCM certification, and I am pleased to be able to report that it was the unanimous wish of all countries represented that the CMAE Education Policy Board (who were present at the conference) draft proposals for such a framework that would a) match the standards and requirements of the CMAA and other International Club Managers Associations, and b) would enable them to develop programmes in their own country that would match these standards.

The challenge will be in Europe to ensure that there is some flexibility in any European framework, as it is important, for example, for each country to be able to deliver programmes to club managers in their own language.

In the future, the CMAE and our national club management partners see this conference as a place where best practice is shared across our industry, and where decisions are made on pan-European issues such as education programmes, surveys and industry reports, employment issues and the environmental and social impact of clubs within our communities. Planning is already underway for the 2011 conference !