On social access, the Good Ol’ Boys Club, and the relationship between authenticity and expansion 
By Julie Helms for A. PUTNAM

As a CEO in the oil and gas industry, I have felt the "Good Ol' Boys Club" from day one.

Sometimes with frustration. Sometimes with resentment. Sometimes as though it were an impenetrable system, perfectly designed to keep everyone else out. And while there is some validity to those feelings, frustration wasn't helping me get in. 

The good ol' boys club is not a uniquely exclusionary phenomenon. It's how all social groups work. People bond over certain things, develop shared language, and self-select into communities. But what can be particularly challenging about the boys club is that some of the common things they bond over are hobbies with very high barriers to entry. If you didn’t grow up playing golf, it’s a tough game to just step into. If you didn’t grow up with a father who enjoyed restoring old cars, speaking the language simply isn’t in your vernacular. 

There was one particular conversation that made this crystal clear to me. I had spent two years trying to get in front of a particular customer. I had invited him to lunch, offered meetings, seminars, proposed lunch-and-learns, touted referrals, called, emailed, and followed up. 

For. Two. Years. 

I got nowhere. I was talking to a male colleague about this, who I knew worked closely with him. He looked at me and said simply, “he does business with people he shoots with.”

There was an entire layer of relationship-building happening somewhere I wasn't. 

Most people think business access is granted because of credentials. But sometimes social access is what opens the door to business access, and social access is granted behind hobby walls. 

Golf. Tennis. Hunting. Fishing. Wine. College football. Cars. Country clubs. Industry associations. Charity boards.

A hobby wall is a shared interest that creates unique opportunities for repeated interaction. Repeated interaction creates trust. And trust is the currency of deeper conversations and business access. In many industries, business relationships aren't built through meetings. Meetings might facilitate business. But relationships facilitate meetings. Business is often the outcome of relationships rather than the beginning of them.

This isn't just about women.

I have a friend in middle management who routinely gets invited to a high-profile college football weekend by senior company executives. His own boss doesn't get invited.

Why? Because he follows the team, speaks the language, and participates in the culture surrounding it. Those weekends aren't about work. But they create access, familiarity, and rapport with the leadership team that extend way beyond his job title.

That's how hobby walls work.

There was a period in my career when I traveled about thirty weeks a year on business. Nearly every one of those trips included a round or two of golf. Customers golfed. Distributors golfed. My competitors golfed. Everyone golfed.

I wasn't very good, and if I'm being honest, I didn't enjoy it. Mainly because I wasn’t very good. I drug my feet around beautiful golf courses all over the world. Making myself (and others) miserable, by participating without really being into it. 

After a couple excruciating back-to-back miserable golf trips in Africa and the Middle east (one of which I wrote about in last month’s Well Played), I realized something needed to change. Should I just stop? I looked in the mirror decided to ask myself a new question.  Instead of “why should I have to do this?” I asked “are the relationships on the other side of this wall worth it?” For me, the answer was yes.

So I signed up for golf lessons. Not because I was trying to become one of the guys or because golf suddenly became my life's passion. I took lessons because there was an exclusive layer of relationship-building happening on the course, and if I wanted access to those relationships, I needed to stop treating golf as their hobby and start treating it as a skill available to me too.

This is where I think many women get stuck. The conversation revolves a lot around whether the system is “fair.” Sometimes it isn't. The more useful focus is whether the opportunity on the other side is worth pursuing.

If it is, the next step is investing in yourself.

You don’t need to be a pro, but competence creates confidence, and confidence creates enjoyment. Golf lessons made me a marginally better golfer. More importantly, they made me appreciate the game. Like most pursuits, golf becomes more interesting once you understand it. The strategy becomes more nuanced. The challenge becomes more engaging. The small victories become more satisfying. If you’re going to spend your time taking up a hobby, investing in yourself enough to be good at it makes it a lot more enjoyable. 

One of the biggest mistakes people make is treating these hobby walls as someone else's territory. They're not. Golf is not male territory. Neither is wine. Neither are industry associations. They're simply communities built around shared interests, and communities tend to reward participation.

You can’t wait for an engraved invitation. It isn’t coming. 

Despite the commonly held etiquette of being invited versus inviting yourself.  In business, some of the most successful people I've met became insiders because they decided to walk in. Without an invitation. "I'd love to get out on the course with you sometime." "Invite me next time." "Let me know when you're playing again."

These aren't demands. They're signals. They tell people you'd like to participate.

And if you want to accelerate the process even further, become the host. You can’t by your way into relationships, but you can buy access. Sometimes throwing a little money at a problem actually does fix it.  Golf lessons, a club membership, buying a foursome in a charity tournament and inviting people to join you. The fastest way to stop waiting for invitations is to become the person giving them.

Many women encounter male-dominated environments and arrive at one of two conclusions. Either:

"I need to become one of the guys."

Or:

"I shouldn't have to."

Neither is particularly useful. The women who navigate these environments most successfully are not the ones performing masculinity. They're the ones who understand how relationships are built and are willing to participate in those environments without losing themselves in the process. That is the difference between conformity and expansion. Conformity asks you to become someone else. Expansion asks you to become more than you were before.

I wasn’t “a golfer.” But I took golf lessons, and took an interest, for years. And that interest took me to some of the most beautiful public and private courses all over the world. To business relationships that ended up 20xing my business. And eventually I got to the point of enjoying (and being able to hold my own on) the course.  I wasn’t great, but I was good enough to have a great shot every now and then. Which is a kind of magic that only golfers understand. It’s amazing how frustrating the game can be, you can spend 4 hours angry at everything - the ball, the club, the wind, yourself - and then you have a couple great shots, and you’re flying inside and ready to play another 18.

Learning golf didn't make me less myself. It expanded my range. It gave me another language to speak, another environment to navigate, and another way to connect with people. It is a sport that has served both my career and my life. 

You don't need to become someone else. But refusing to learn the culture around you is refusing access to the relationships inside it. That doesn't only apply to golf. It applies to every social environment, every industry, every community, every culture. 

Golf wasn’t really the lesson.

Golf was the invitation.

The lesson was learning that authenticity and adaptation are not opposites. Sometimes the most authentic thing you can do is being confident enough in who you are to expand into a new space.