Just about every sport has been claimed as a metaphor for management at one time or another. Golf might be one of the more unexpected parallels. Usually it is soccer (“Leadership the Sven-Göran Eriksson way”), American football (“The marketing playbook”) or even cricket (“The art of captaincy”) that people like to invoke.

But when you step out on to the tee of the next demanding hole you are in fact facing a similar challenge to the one that confronts managers every day. For – and not a lot of people know this – there are only four different types of golf shot you can play, just as there are essentially only four types of management response to the people you are working with.