I Shouldn't Be Telling You This: Success Secrets Every Gutsy Girl Should Know (24 page)

7. Unfortunately, it’s easy to talk yourself into a bad decision.
Let’s say you’re right out of school and a friend of your parents has offered you an entry-level job in her special events company. What you’re really interested in is being a journalist, so you graciously turn down the offer—though the friend tells you the door will be kept open. A month passes. Then several more weeks. You don’t receive any other offers. You begin to wonder if you should take the job after all. The job even starts to sound better to you. There’s even some writing involved.

Try to always strip away what might be coloring a decision—like a desperate feeling or a need to do something quickly. When deciding to go with a choice you initially didn’t like, ask yourself: has anything really changed?

Over the years, I did covers on more than a couple of actresses whom I’d originally decided weren’t the right fit. The only times it paid off were when something suddenly changed about the actress’s profile—she’d done a new movie that people were buzzing about. It never worked when I simply “came around” to the idea.

8. Practice decision making.
When I won a Woman of Excellence Award from the radio station Magic 106.7, WMJX, in Boston several years ago, I discovered that one of the other awardees, the Los Angeles cardiac surgeon Kathy Magliato, had graduated from my college. It was fascinating to learn about her awesome career—which has included doing heart transplants—and I asked her to write an essay about determining the right decisions when the heat is on. Dr. Magliato said that in order to learn to be better at trusting her gut and making smart, split-second decisions, she repeatedly threw herself into tough situations so that thinking under pressure would become second nature. “As a resident, I’d run to get there first when the hospital called a code blue,” she said. “I deliberately put myself in those crazy moments to learn how to think on my feet and be sure I knew what I was doing.”

Making instant decisions on routine matters is great practice for not being intimidated by bigger decisions. If your job doesn’t require much decision making, do committee or volunteer work that gives you more opportunity.

9. If you are making a risky decision, you need to calculate the worst-case scenario.
I’m often amazed when I hear people talk about risks they’ve taken without ever considering the downside. Do the math. How bad could the ramifications be? My brother Jim, a hedge fund professional, says that in finance they call this evaluating “the risk of ruin.” Let’s say you want to ask your boss for more money or for the chance to take on a new project. He’s been testy lately, and you worry he’ll get ticked off. Is it worth the risk? When you do the math you realize that nothing bad is really going to happen. There’s surely about a zero chance your boss is going to want to fire you. And though there may be a 60 percent chance he’ll be irritated, that’s bound to blow over. Jim told me that in his business you put guardrails or hedges around any risk to protect yourself. In the above instance, the guardrail might be not letting yourself become all bent out of shape visibly if your boss adamantly says no—which could work his last nerve.

10. Read
10-10-10
by Suzy Welch.
This concise book outlines a really cool concept for making decisions.

11. Then let it go.
Don’t allow yourself to agonize or second-guess. Many decisions can be course-corrected if they turn out not to be perfect. Try literally washing your hands. A University of Michigan study found that when people did so after making a decision, they were less likely to second-guess.

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It Pays to Be a Little Paranoid
 
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O
ver my many years in the magazine business, I’ve had to fire dozens and dozens of people—some for cause, others as part of downsizing during rough economic times. And regardless of the reason for the termination, I
always
feel lousy. I know that the dismissal will turn the person’s entire world topsy-turvy for at least a while.

But I’ve often walked away from these situations with something more than an awful feeling. I’ve been struck by how utterly clueless many of the people were about what was going to transpire. Their eyes widened, their jaws dropped, and frequently the first words out of their mouths were “Omigod, I never saw this coming.”

Yet in so many of the situations, they
should
have seen it coming. The people I’ve let go for cause had always had several warning conversations and follow-up memos. And in cases of downsizing, employees might not have been provided with direct clues internally, but they should certainly have picked up—via company and/or industry buzz and possibly even from news headlines—that times were tough and that if layoffs were required, their names might very well be on the list.

No one enjoys living in a state of constant worry, but I think it’s smart to be a
little
bit paranoid—and I feel my own career paranoia has served me well. I have never thought my phones were tapped or someone had put a transmitter under my skin. But (maybe because I’m always at work on a murder mystery) I tend to be on the alert for danger, spot it early, and, when possible, act on it before things turn ugly. I recommend that you do the same.

I’m not saying you should make mountains out of molehills. Sometimes random things happen that appear worrisome but aren’t. I once accepted a terrific job that unfortunately involved reporting to a hyper, mercurial editor in chief. When I asked a friend who’d worked in the company for advice, she offered this guidance: “If she looks at you weirdly one day, give it twenty-four hours. She might just be having a bad-hair day.” In other words, sometimes a weird look is just that and nothing to get agitated about.

What’s key is to do what I suggested in “Develop a Golden Gut”: play connect the dots. One situation may not matter, but when something similar or related occurs, allow it to pique your curiosity. Let me give you an example from my own career. After connecting the dots, I learned what I needed to know about handling a hairy situation, and then took a few steps that saved my butt.

I was in the final year of my contract as the editor of a magazine (December would be my last month), and though I felt there was a decent chance my contract would be renewed, I was also conscious that the magazine was in a tough field and there was a fair amount of turmoil going on.

In June, my boss—let’s call this person B for boss—called to invite me to lunch. Though I’d heard through the grapevine that B was renewing contracts only late in the year, I wondered if an exception was going to be made in my case. But all B wanted to do at lunch was chat. Hmmmm. It was a dot that I made note of, but since there were no other dots to connect it to, I chilled for a while.

Two months later B asked me to lunch again, in a super nice restaurant this time, and I figured, okay, today the talk would turn to the future. But not a word was said that day either. Two lunches within six months of my contract ending, and no mention of my staying. Two dots to connect. And that aroused a little paranoia. The next day I began reviewing my financial situation, just to be sure I knew where I stood—and reassured myself that fortunately I would be fine if things unraveled. I also met with a couple of headhunters to discuss what was happening out in the world. And I set up some tentative freelance gigs.

In late October, still not having heard anything, I e-mailed B and suggested we get together to discuss the situation since my contract was up in less than two months. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you” was the response. B arranged for us to meet in a week and a half for breakfast. No fancy restaurant this time. Another dot to connect.

I’ll spare you the gory details of what happened over tasteless quiche and coffee that morning. The bottom line was that B wanted to renew my contract but under really shabby terms. Because it was now so terribly late in the game, B must have thought I was stuck, that I’d have no choice but to accept the deal, and even told me, “Of course, you can take your severance package instead, but I suspect you’ll want to renew.” I smiled and said I’d like a few days to think everything over.

What B didn’t know was that my paranoia had helped me prepare for that moment. All my ducks were in a row. I wrote a letter to B a few days later saying thank you for the great time together but I was resigning and taking the severance package. Immediately after receiving the resignation letter, B asked to meet with me, begged me to ignore the previous conversation, asked me what I wanted, and then gave it to me.

Okay, I was particularly lucky in that situation—I’d had months to ready things. Sometimes you spot a sign of trouble but you don’t have the time to deal with it as adequately as you’d like, or there’s no easy Plan B. But still, in most cases, paranoia allows you to jump-start your thinking and begin to put a plan into play. Don’t ignore odd little moments that make your tummy queasy. And don’t tell yourself, “Oh, it’s just a rumor.” When I was a young writer, I interviewed a PhD candidate who was studying rumors, and he told me something I’ve never forgotten:
rumors are both sloppy and precise.
They may not be a hundred percent accurate, but there’s often a grain of truth in them. You need to investigate further to get to the bottom of them.

14 Things to Be Paranoid About

• Being called in by your boss and reprimanded more than once about the same issue

• Being called in by your boss and reprimanded with someone else from the department in the same room (this person is known as a witness)

• Being called in by your boss and reprimanded with someone from HR (eek!) in the room

• A written follow-up from your boss after a reprimand

• Suddenly being excluded from important meetings

• Being given the cold shoulder by your boss

• A large decrease in praise from your boss

• Coworkers avoiding eye contact or conversation with you (or whispering after you’ve walked by)

• One of your subordinates suddenly being included by your boss in meetings you should be attending on your own

• A recession

• An economic downturn

• Any news or rumors that your field is in trouble

• Any news that your company or organization is in trouble

• Consultants in suits suddenly appearing in your workplace (they have more than likely been hired to find ways to cut costs and encourage your company to work with a trimmed-down staff)

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Go Big or Go Home, 2: You’re Going to Have to Break the Rules
 
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D
uring the summer when I was seventeen and working as a counter waitress at a Howard Johnson’s restaurant in upstate New York, I learned one of the best work lessons of my life.

Waitressing at HoJo’s wasn’t what you’d call a fun job, except for the drop-dead gorgeous short-order cook, a college senior, and the fact that employees were entitled to all the ice cream they wanted during their meals there. There was a hitch, however, attached to the ice cream bonus: You weren’t allowed to indulge in any of the sundae toppings—no hot fudge, for instance, or butterscotch or whipped cream. Not even a few nuts and cherries! I was complaining about this one day to another counter waitress, a cute, devilish girl named Tracy who loved to regale me with tales of driving her parents’ car really fast down backcountry roads and dating brazen bad boys. Tracy and I happened to have our lunch break at the same time that day, and as we carried our trays down to the employee dining room, I noticed that, like me, she’d helped herself to a few scoops of vanilla ice cream.

“Isn’t it mean of them not to let us have any toppings?” I said.

Tracy smiled mischievously. “Oh, I can fix that,” she whispered.

A few minutes later, after we’d gobbled down our grilled cheese sandwiches, Tracy slid a spoon through her scoops of ice cream, all the way to the bottom of the dish. An interesting cross section appeared: at the bottom of the bowl was a layer of nuts and cherries, topped by whipped cream, then hot fudge, and then finally the ice cream.

“It’s an
upside-down
sundae,” she said, smirking.

Brilliant, I remember thinking. I had an upside-down sundae nearly every day for the rest of the summer.

It took a little while, though, for me to see that the upside-down sundae lesson I learned that day could be applied to many other areas of life. If you want the cherry in life, to say nothing of the hot fudge and whipped cream, you have to be brave enough to break the rules sometimes. You have to take what you’ve been told to do and twist it, toss it, or turn it upside down so that you end up with something brilliant and delicious.

Maybe you’re a natural rule breaker and it’s served you well so far. Congratulations. But there’s also a decent chance that you’ve managed to get pretty far in your career by being sort of a Goody Two-shoes. You’ve listened to your boss, worked hard, and been promoted for it. The problem is that being a good girl, as I wrote in my first career book,
Why Good Girls Don’t Get Ahead . . . but Gutsy Girls Do
, gets you only so far. If you want to supersize your career, you need to bend and break some rules and even make a few new ones of your own.

By breaking the rules, I don’t mean calling in fake sick on Friday or dancing drunk on the bar at the office Christmas party. I mean implementing things in a fresh and daring way. Here’s how to think about it.

Breaking the rules means
ignoring the phrase “That’s the way we’ve always done it here” and instead trying a brand-new, possibly mind-blowing approach. There are plenty of rules that are out of date or never made sense to begin with and deserve to be challenged. Kate Spade once told me that the night before she was going to take her first handbags to a trade show, she sat with them in her living room and realized that there was a problem. The bags were black nylon, simple, clean, and fresh-looking (her goal had been to create a product in which fashion met function), but she suddenly felt there was no place for the eye to go to when you looked at them. So she grabbed a pair of nail scissors, clipped out the label from inside the bag (the one that said
KATE
SPADE
NEW
YORK
), and sewed it onto the front of the bag. Then she did the same thing to the rest of the bags. By ignoring the rule at the time that said that labels are supposed to go on the inside of handbags, Kate Spade created her phenomenally successful signature look.