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Summit Promotion

Join us at the Leadership on the Links Summit on Monday, October 12, 2026 at Toftrees Resort in State College, Pennsylvania. This one day gathering brings together golf course superintendents, assistant superintendents, directors of agronomy, equipment managers, and club leaders for a day focused on leadership development, personal branding, and building high performing teams. Keynote speakers include Cael Sanderson, Olympic gold medalist and head wrestling coach at Penn State University, and AJ Vaden, New York Times bestselling author and CEO of Brand Builders Group. Registration is 197 dollars and seating is limited to 100 attendees. Register at https://bloomgolfpartners.com/our-events/.

Episode Introduction

Zach King believes the isolation that many leaders accept as a condition of the job is neither necessary nor permanent. King spent more than a decade in international media training and nonprofit leadership, working with leaders across six continents, before serving as board president and later Executive Director of the Columbiana Area Chamber of Commerce in northeast Ohio, and his guiding conviction is that the fastest route out of professional isolation is to serve one person in front of you. He discusses why leaders with a clear vision often stall between what they can see and what they can explain, how to build genuine buy in inside institutions that have operated the same way for a century, and why the daily inputs a leader controls matter more than the outcomes they fixate on. This conversation on Leadership on the Links with host Tyler Bloom examines leadership habits that carry across industries, including the private club environment where general managers and directors of agronomy answer to a board, a membership, and a staff at the same time.

Leadership on the Links is hosted by Tyler Bloom of Bloom Golf Partners.

What You’ll Learn in this Episode:

• King identifies four forms of decision paralysis that stall leaders, which he defines as perfection paralysis, language paralysis, overwhelm paralysis, and shiny object paralysis.
• He explains the difference between lag measures, which leaders often control very little of, and lead measures, which are the daily and weekly inputs that compound into results over time.
• Leaders stepping into century old institutions are advised to treat the first ninety days as a listening tour that studies the history of the organization, not only the stakeholders currently in the building.
• King describes a wet cement approach to strategic planning, in which a plan is developed to roughly seventy five percent and then shaped as it is tested in practice rather than finalized before launch.
• The conversation addresses the isolation reported by leaders who sit between a board above them and a staff below them, and King explains why he views shifting focus outward as the practical remedy.
• Bloom and King discuss the seasonal nature of workload in the golf industry and make the case for scheduling personal and family time with the same intention applied to agronomic and operational planning.
• King outlines the five pillars of his leadership framework, which are growth, unity, influence, legacy, and drive, and his position that organizations perform better when leaders stop competing and start collaborating.

Links and Resources

Bloom Golf Partners: https://bloomgolfpartners.com/

Leadership on the Links Summit registration: https://bloomgolfpartners.com/our-events/

Zach King on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zach-king/

Zach P. King website: https://zachpking.com

Columbiana Area Chamber of Commerce: https://columbianachamber.com/

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