I Shouldn't Be Telling You This: Success Secrets Every Gutsy Girl Should Know (23 page)

But I’ve also met women with power who seem a little wussy. A few years ago, I was asked to join a meeting with several people from an outside company who were going to be doing business with us. I was in a rush and hadn’t reviewed the list of names and titles that had been e-mailed earlier, but it didn’t matter. As soon as I sat down, I was able to determine who was the woman running the show. She talked in a strong, deep voice and seemed to own the table.

But I was wrong. That woman turned out to be the PR director. The head of the company was the woman next to her—whom I’d barely noticed. Her body language and voice paled next to her subordinate’s. Though I now knew whom to direct most of my questions to, the top woman had lost ground with me. I could never rid myself of the notion that she wasn’t as strong as she should be—and that made me wonder about the quality of work I could expect from her.

“In order to be a powerful woman, you have to present yourself powerfully,” says body language and communication expert Dr. Lillian Glass.

When you radiate power through your physical actions, such as your body language and your voice, you immediately signal to those around you that you are the person in charge and you deserve respect.

There’s another reason you need to develop a powerful aura: it can act like a force field that repels anyone around you who is prone to backstabbing, idea stealing, or other kinds of nasty behavior.

As you gain confidence over time, you’ll naturally begin to come across with more authority. But you may still need to work on your aura, as many powerful women have. For instance, before Margaret Thatcher entered politics, she submitted to a substantial makeover of not only her style but also her voice, and she felt no need to apologize about it. “It may sound grittily honorable to refuse to make any concessions,” she once said, “but such an attitude in a public figure is most likely to betray a lack of seriousness about winning power.”

Here are some aura-creating strategies:

1. Watch your posture.
Sit up straight, and stand up straight. “Slouching, whether you’re sitting or standing, gives the impression that you’re weak and insecure,” says Glass.

2. When you’re having a conversation with someone, point your toes directly at the other person.
It shows that you aren’t intimidated.

3. When you’re talking to someone, hold the other person’s gaze.
Glass points out that most powerful people make you feel as though you are the only person in the room.

4. Go deep with your voice.
“Deeper voices just seem more powerful,” says Dr. Glass. “Squeeze down on your abs when you speak to assure your pitch is low.” Thatcher’s voice was considered too shrill, and it got worse when her vocal cords were overused. She took voice and elocution lessons to lower her pitch and even drank hot water with lemon and honey to help.

Glass recommends that you modulate your voice so that it’s not too soft (you’ll seem weak) or too loud (you’ll seem desperate for attention). You don’t want to speak in a monotone, though. Also stress adjectives or descriptive words so that there’s plenty of life and enthusiasm when you’re speaking.

5. Lose the uptalk.
That’s where your pitch goes up at the end of sentences. The inflection pattern of powerful people goes down at the end so it sounds like they are making an emphatic statement. If it goes up, you sound uncertain of what you’re saying. Also avoid fillers such as “um” and “you know.” Tape yourself in conversation and note how many fillers you use.

6. Smile less, nod less.
These are ways we connect with others and display attentiveness to a speaker. Both sexes smile and nod to people more powerful than them, but studies show that women tend to smile and nod more to peers. It’s nice that we connect so well to others, but smiling or nodding too much can make you seem needy to please.

7. Don’t touch your hair or your face.
Watch powerful women on YouTube. They rarely play with their hair or touch their face out of nervousness.

8. Never let them see you sweat.
No matter how rattled you feel in a particular situation, do your best to keep your cool around your subordinates. Let’s say one of your big projects has gone bust. Or you’ve just been chewed out by
your
boss. Instead of venting to a subordinate, take a walk around the block or meditate for fifteen minutes with your door closed. Sympathy from a subordinate may feel good at the moment, but what he’s probably thinking is “What does this mean for me?” or “How soon can I tell someone about this?” Sharing only encourages worry and gossip. Also, be careful of what you share with peers.

9. Go against the grain.
Have you ever noticed how people who are very powerful sometimes operate differently from the rest of us in social situations? According to the “approach/inhibition theory of power,” the powerful experience fewer social constraints than others, and it shows in their behavior. Individuals who feel powerful are more likely to act in “goal-congruent” ways—by switching off an annoying fan in a meeting, for instance. In a 2011 study called “Breaking the Rules to Rise to Power,” the authors say that “given that power is associated with lack of constraint, individuals whose behavior appears unconstrained by normative pressures may be perceived as powerful.”

I saw a fabulous example of this once. A company I worked for had invited representatives of a major food company to chat with editors about their business. The organizers of the meeting laid out food from the company for people to snack on. At one point when the person in charge was speaking, she got up, walked over to the table, picked up a cookie, returned to her seat, and then ate the cookie as she spoke. Trust me, no one else in the room would have dared to do that.

Another example, one of my favorites: When I had lunch with Helen Gurley Brown after I received the
Cosmo
job, I noticed she ate her salad with her hands. She told me she always did that because she thought it just looked sexier!

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Drain the Swamp as You Slay the Alligators, or Possibly the Best Work Advice I Have Ever Been Given
 
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T
ake a sec to think about what that phrase means. The first time I heard it—from a management guru whom we interviewed when I was running
Working Woman
magazine—I was momentarily confused, but after a minute I got it. The advice was simple and brilliant; yet I also could see how tough it might be to adhere to it.

The phrase is a derivation from what’s supposedly an old southern expression: “When you’re up to your ass in gnats and alligators, it’s easy to forget that the initial objective was to drain the swamp.” It means that when you’re working toward a long-term goal (draining the swamp), your time and energy can be eaten up by urgent, daily tasks (slaying alligators) that don’t necessarily aid you in achieving more important future objectives.

If you’re in sales, for instance, your daily, slaying-the-alligator tasks would include meeting with prospective clients and drumming up business. Draining the swamp, however, might include doing major research on emerging opportunities or creating a totally new presentation to use while pitching.

Unfortunately, draining-the-swamp stuff often gets sidelined when you’re forced to slay a whole lot of alligators. The guru’s point was that somehow, no matter how insane things are, you have to
learn to do both.

I started trying to follow this advice as soon as I heard it. But I didn’t go to town with the strategy until I started running
Cosmopolitan.
From the moment I arrived, I saw that
Cosmo
was a wonderful but crazy place to work at. It ran far more editorial pages than most other magazines, had a bigger staff, supported lots of international editions, had just launched a website, and was actively creating brand extensions. My books editor at the time, John Searles, told me a story that seemed to sum it all up. After he’d edited one of the sexy thrillers
Cosmo
often excerpts, his assistant brought the copy back in and pointed out a mistake. He’d written, “With one hand Jack sipped his wine. And with the other hand, he stroked her thigh. And with the other hand he dimmed the lights.” That seemed to sum up
Cosmo
: three hands required at all times.

I quickly realized how easy it would be to become mired in all the day-to-day duties and drama of running the magazine and never get around to focusing on what was necessary to
evolve
it. So I systematically set up an hour or so every single week to drain the swamp. At that time, no matter how much I needed to be looking at photos, editing articles, or trying to convince Hollywood publicists to let their clients be on the cover in a particular month, I stepped away and brainstormed about the future.

Sometimes I’d spend the time digesting e-mails from readers about what they were looking for in the magazine; sometimes I’d have editors present an analysis of ratings to acquire a sense of which features were working and which weren’t. And sometimes—oh, and this is the part I loved the most—I’d sit at a restaurant counter with a glass of wine and a notepad and dream up ideas.

No matter how nutty your job gets, you have to drain the swamp.
Book
the time. Because if you don’t, the big-picture stuff will slip away from you. And in the end you will be swallowed up by alligators.

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11 Things I’ve Learned About Choices, Decisions, and Risk
 
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A
s your career takes off, you’ll have to make lots of decisions—some easy, others, perhaps, enough to make your stomach churn and bring on sleepless nights. No matter how talented and skilled you are, not all of your decisions are going to be correct, and let me forgive you for that right now. You can’t always make the perfect call. But you need to figure out how to increase the number of smart decisions you make and reduce the number of duds. Should you hire that person? Should you go with that deal? Should you send that e-mail? Should you take that job? Here are a few pointers I’ve picked up.

1. Having too many things to choose from is not a good thing.
I learned this from Barry Schwartz, a professor of social theory and social action at Swarthmore College and the author of the fascinating book
The Paradox of Choice
. Schwartz believes that because of the excessive number of choices available today, you can end up with “choice overload.” This can make you agonize over decisions and even lead to decision-making paralysis. So do your best to limit your choices. Dr. Schwartz’s strategy: “Identify one or two aspects of the decision that are most important to you and use them to filter out all the options that are not good enough with respect to those aspects. You can then use less significant aspects of the decision to choose among the much smaller set of options remaining that survive your first screening.”

2. Good enough is almost always good enough.
That’s what Dr. Schwartz told me when I asked him for the single most important advice he could give people on making decisions. “If people can accept this,” he said, “then having to choose from large sets of possibilities becomes much easier.”

3. If you are making a choice based on the success or failure of a previous decision, be as sure as you can be why the other choice worked.
In August 2002, I ran Keira Knightley on the cover of
Cosmo
. She was wearing a pink-and-black top, posed against a pink background, and her hair was long, shiny, and gorgeous. The issue ended up selling more than 2 million copies on the newsstand. So of course I wanted another Keira Knightley cover.

But when I did focus groups on covers a few months later, a fascinating fact emerged: It appeared that only a small percentage of women who’d bought the issue had realized who the cover girl was that month (it was still early in Keira’s career). They had just loved the luscious look of the cover. I’d made a decision to try to do Keira again based on the wrong info. What I really needed was another
pink
cover!

4. Review your decision-making guidelines.
I believe it’s beneficial to develop certain principles that direct your decision making. Some of mine: never hire an assistant candidate who shows up late for the interview; never share a confidence with someone who blabs about other people; never use green as a background color on a cover. But periodically you have to examine these principles and ask if they still (or really) make sense. When I recently met Nicole Lapin, the feisty personal finance expert who created the website Recessionista.com, we talked about bad money decisions. I mentioned the fact that many young women spend at least three bucks every day on a morning latte and that financial experts often point out what a stupid choice this is. A smarter one would be to make coffee at home. “Maybe not,” Lapin said, shaking her head. “What if buying the latte gets you revved up about your work and going in every morning, and because of that energy you get promoted and then you’re making far more than the thousand dollars you spent on the lattes? Sometimes you need to challenge the cliché.”

5. Use the phrase “I’ll get back to you” as seldom as possible.
Employees hate these five words. To them it’s often code for “It may be days or weeks—or even never—before I get around to telling you what you want to know.” When someone uses this expression, he isn’t generally buying time to mull something over; rather, he’s putting off having to make the decision—because he’s unsure of what to do. Even if your intentions are good when you make this “promise,” it ends up translating as indecisiveness. So learn to make instant decisions on things that aren’t major issues. Let your gut guide you to an answer, and then spit it out. “I’ll go with the red one” or “How about the fifteenth, then?” or “Unfortunately, I have to say no.”

6. When you can’t decide, it may simply be because you don’t have enough information.
So get
more
information. Trendera founder Jane Buckingham reinforced this concept for me. When I was once torn between two job candidates from the outside, I heeded Jane’s advice and gave them each an additional project to do. The results told me what I needed to know.