Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 29, 1994 TAG: 9405310118
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: TAWN NHAN KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Brown drove the beer cart and kept score while watching male colleagues schmooze customers between putts.
"That was the women's role," said Brown, 27, an account executive at Sea-Land Service Inc., a shipping company.
It was until last spring.
Tired of watching the action from the sidelines and nudged gently by her boss, an avid golfer, Brown last June decided to invest in golf lessons. Her boss signed her up with his golf teacher and helped her pick out a set of clubs.
Brown played her first corporate game five months later at Sea-Land's annual outing. She took advantage of the game to mingle with customers.
"Golf is one of the few times when the networking isn't so formal," said Brown. "It's where you feel relaxed, and [customers] feel relaxed. ... It does make a difference in dealing with them in the future."
Brown is part of a growing number of businesswomen who are using golf to increase their business contacts and strengthen relationships with colleagues and clients.
Networking on the golf course isn't new. Men have been doing it for years. But now businesswomen, who for years have worked hard to get ahead, are learning how to play hard to achieve the same goal.
Membership in the 3-year-old national Executive Women's Golf League, a nonprofit businesswomen's group that organizes lessons and games, is growing 10 percent a month. In 1993, the group more than tripled its members. To date, it has 4,200 in 65 chapters.
"Women are graduating into some key positions in corporate America," said Nancy Oliver, co-founder of the Palm Beach, Fla., group. "And the one thing they are finding is that men schmooze on the golf course."
A growing number of women "want to add golf to their corporate repertoire" as a marketing tool, Oliver said. "So much of the marketing seems to have a base on the golf course."
Spending half a day hitting little white balls around several hundred acres mysteriously bonds participants in a way that few other business activities can, golfers say.
"You start to see a person as a human being as opposed to a business person," said Alice Lehman, First Union Corp.'s managing director and senior vice president of syndications.
"You develop a different level of comfort with them. They may tell you their problems or their aspirations," Lehman said.
Family and other personal interests often pop up in conversation, Lehman said.
"If you go into a [chief financial officer's] or a chairman's office, the most time they can give you is 45 minutes to an hour. When you are playing golf, you are with these people for four hours," Lehman said. "You start talking about things that they might not bring up when they are under the pressures of an office."
Lehman began playing golf as a teen-ager, encouraged by her mother, who said golf would help Lehman get ahead.
"Women could aspire to be nurses or teachers then. My mother thought golf was a ticket out of what I faced at the time," Lehman said.
Although Lehman didn't follow her mother's dream and play professional golf, she did take her mother's advice about using golf to get ahead.
Lehman, who quit golfing in college, took up the game again two years ago. She said it has helped launch, nurture and seal deals.
At a recent investment industry gathering in Florida, Lehman took advantage of an opportunity to play golf on the same team with investors who were prospective partners on a large loan project.
"After playing 18 holes of golf with these people and developing a relationship with them, I was then able to pick up the phone later and talk to them about a project I had been working on," Lehman said.
"It facilitated my business- and we won, too," she recalled.
If you're in a male-dominated industry, golf can help you be one of the guys- or at least, be with the guys.
Female executives are also finding golf to be a useful management tool to develop more personal relationships with subordinates on corporate outings.
But the game remains segregated by gender and predominantly male.
From 1987 to 1992, the latest year for which the National Golf Foundation has statistics, the number of female golfers rose from 4.8 million to 5.4 million; but women made up only 21.8 percent of all golfers in 1992, about the same percentage as five years earlier.
Women make up 37 percent of new golfers. But they leave the sport in large numbers, too.
Impatient husbands and intimidating male players discourage some women. Scott Kramer, a writer for the trade magazine Golf Pro, said some leave because some golf courses don't treat them as equals, reserving prime tee times and clubhouse space for the men.
But now, groups such as the Executive Women's Golf League are helping women take down some of those barriers.
``EWG gives them a vehicle to learn the game and gain confidence,'' said Chaytor Chandler, co-founder of the Charlotte chapter and administrative assistant at Carolinas Capital Investment Corp. ``We want to get them to a comfortable position so they can use it for business.''
Charlotte EWG co-founder Erika Reynolds, 30, said women overcome their fear and feel less intimidated once they start playing.
by CNB