Why Good Girls Don't Get Ahead... But Gutsy Girls Do (7 page)

Earlier in Merrie Spaeth's career, a colleague arranged for her to meet the laic William Paley, founder and retired CEO of CBS, who was looking for someone to write his speeches. She was warned, however. Paley could be difficult and stubborn, and he had already gone through a bunch of male speech-writers, even though they had been deferential and eager to please. And by the way, she was told, you never called him anything but Mr. Paley.

Merrie listened and realized that if she was going to win him over, she would have to seem in command, unlike the yes-men When she walked through the door to meet Paley for the first time, she stuck out her hand and said. “Hi. Bill, I'm Merrie Spaeth ” He chuckled and it was the beginning of a great relationship.

CHAPTER
FOUR

Strategy #2: A Gutsy Girl Has One Clear Goal for the Future

A
couple of weeks after I signed the contract to write this book, there was a brief moment when I wondered if the publisher was going to call me and say that they still loved the idea for the book, but would I mind if Janet Reno actually wrote it. She'd just taken the heat for the FBI's Waco, Texas, fiasco, even though she wasn't really to blame. It was a refreshingly different tactic for a politician and the media loved it. A newspaper ran her picture with just the word
GUTS
over it. Janet Reno seemed to be the epitome of the gutsy girl.

A year later, however, the media wasn't being so flattering. In fact, the
New York Times
published a story with
this
headline:
DRIFT AND TURMOIL IN JUSTICE DEPT: AURA OF CONFUSION LINKED TO ATTORNEY GENERAL'S PERFORMANCE
.

Here's a highlight from the article:

These officials say the Attorney General has seemed indecisive, losing focus by taking on too many issues, hop-scotching from project to project… . The officials, including some who say they hope she succeeds, insist the public impression of Ms. Reno as the gutsy Florida prosecutor who took responsibility for the tear gas assault in April is at odds with the Attorney General they see every day.

What had gone wrong? How had the original gutsy girl ended up in such a big fat mess?

It's quite simple. No matter how gutsy Reno was about tackling individual situations, she had failed to come up with a strong, succinct vision for her “company”—or if she had, she hadn't articulated it clearly to those who worked for her. With a vision in place at the Justice Department, it would have been possible for Reno to pick projects without the appearance of hopscotching around—because any project that didn't fit the plan wouldn't be awarded priority. And it would have been easier to stick to decisions if there was a well-defined mission.

The moral of this story is that it's not enough to have a gutsy personality, to be someone who can take risks, create her own rules, and accept responsibility for any mistakes her staff makes with firearms. You have to have a vision, which becomes the
context
for any kind of gutsy moves you make or rule breaking you do.

Several years ago, R. N. Kanungo and Jay A. Conger, professor and assistant professor respectively of organizational behavior at Faculty of Management, McGill University, in Canada, look a look at leadership within organizations in order to strip the aura of mysticism from it. They found several behavioral components of charismatic leaders that distinguished them from noncharismatic ones. The charismatic leaders, they concluded, tend to “possess a sense of strategic vision, or … some idealized goal which the executive wants the organization to achieve in the future.” In other words: A gutsy girl must have a gutsy goal.

WHY GOOD GIRLS DON'T FOCUS

Focusing on one clear goal or mission is hard for a good girl. She's been programmed to “do it all.” to try to please everybody, and so she's reluctant to limit the dimensions of her vision. If she sacrifices certain projects or products, she worries that she won't be viewed as the wonder girl who can handle ten things at a time Or she believes that she'll be letting down people whose needs don't get included in the plan.

Fear can also keep a good girl from developing a big plan for the future. Recently a friend complained to me about a good girl on her staff who had failed to form a vision for her area. “At first I thought she was overworked, that she didn't have time, so I gave her an extra two staff members,” she said. “When that didn't work, I thought it was my fault—that I'd led her to believe that all the big-picture stuff had to come from me So I told her she had complete freedom to chart the course for her area. And she still didn't do it. I've finally come to believe that the idea of creating a mission scared her. She'd be accountable for it. A lot less risky approach was to force me to lake that responsibility.”

I feel that's been true for some of the good girls who've worked for me. If you've got your head lowered and your nose close to the grindstone, where you focus on the minutiae of every day, there's less chance you'll be hit by one of the SCUDs whizzing by. It feels safer that way.

And yet that's an illusion. Without a goal, you won't know where you're going. The people who work for you will feel adrift, confused, and quite possibly angry (and though they aren't likely to run squealing to the
New York
Times, they might do equally mutinous things). Your boss will sense that while you may be putting in the hours, you don't have much to show for it.

WHY YOU NEED A BIG VISION EVEN IF YOU HAVE A LITTLE JOB

Now, if you're fairly low on the company totem pole, you may be thinking that this chapter isn't for you. A vision is something for someone who oversees an entire operation, or at the very least, a department But no matter how small your domain— even if you are only in charge of managing
yourself
—you need a vision, a goal for your area and an awareness of how the steps you take can make that goal achievable. Your vision, of course, must directly relate to the overall vision of your company.

When I was in my twenties, I was stupidly reluctant to do this because I thought a vision was something my bosses were supposed to come up with, whereas I was supposed to follow their lead.

Looking back, however, I realize how much more effective I would have been in my job if I'd created a “big picture” in my mind, plus how much more focused I would have appeared to my bosses.

Of course, creating a vision is best done when you arrive in a new job. If you've been in your job and don't yet have one, you need to get your head out of the file drawer and start looking toward the sky.

HOW TO CREATE YOUR VISION

Words like vision and mission have a tendency to sound very grand and idealistic, like something starring Glenn Close on the
Hallmark Hall of Fame
Yet a good mission should be grounded by reality, even while it's smart and innovative. Ian Wilson, a senior management consultant at SRI International, says that a vision is a “coherent and powerful statement of what the business tan and should be… .”
Can
and should are the key words The word
can
has to do with your resources and capabilities. A vision is meaningless if n calls for funding or skills or peoplepower your department doesn't possess or can't
ever
possess. The word
should
relates to the values and aspirations of management.

When you create your vision, it should be as specific as possible Name your destination and also spell out the directions for getting there And the more criteria you can offer for measuring success the better.

How do you figure out what the destination should be?

Probably the smartest thing I've learned about visions is that you should always begin by looking at what you've got. What's been the plan for your area or department up until now, the goals everybody has been asked to work toward? Within that framework, what's good, what's bad, and what's turned seriously ugly? That sounds like a pretty basic approach and yet it's amazing how often in business people choose not to follow it. They come in with a kind of snooty attitude and develop a plan based purely on how things “ought” to be or how they were done at the last place they worked They ignore the strengths or even trample on them They cither fail to deal with the weaknesses or end up perpetuating them.

In the magazine industry there have been editors-in-chief who take over an existing magazine with a vision that sounds dazzling when described in the trade publications or the
New York
Times media column but shows no respect for what was working about the magazine to begin with The new editor will then use the letter-from-the-editor page to explain how weak the previous magazine was The reader is left thinking he or she must have been a real doofus to have been reading it.

FIND THE STRENGTHS—NO MATTER WHERE THEY'RE BURIED

If you've inherited a real dud of an area, there may not be many strengths to speak of. But chances are there's something worthwhile to examine—it just may be buried under layers of dust or discontent.

I had the opportunity to talk not long ago to Dr. Clyda Rent, the extraordinary president of Mississippi University for Women, a school she has totally revitalized and put on the map in five years. Though the college had lost the reputation of its golden years, when she was being recruited for the job she could see, just walking around the campus, that there were fabulous assets. The campus was absolutely gorgeous, with twenty-four historic landmark buildings. There was an excellent faculty. Dr. Rent eventually learned that there were also many distinguished alumnae, including Pulitzer Prize–winning author Eudora Welty. One other major plus: The school was very affordable.

Over time, however, people had lost sight of these strengths. “Everyone was so beaten up by politics of closure threats that they didn't see what a fabulous jewel they were sitting on,” Rent says. The buildings, for instance, had become run down. There was no mention in any of the campus promotion pieces of the great alumnae.

Rent's vision began to emerge, and it was all about using the strengths she saw, rather than creating something brand-new. She decided to refurbish the buildings and promote the alumnae and publicize the affordable cost even more. She would build MUW's reputation as a school with a beautiful setting, terrific faculty, a distinguished history, and low tuition. During the past five years “the W” has grown at a rate that is twenty-five times the average of the other Mississippi universities and four times the national average. The National Wingspread Conference named MUW one of the “Twenty Model Colleges” in America for “exemplary undergraduate education.”

In probing for the strengths, you have to be open to any source that can offer clues. That means the people you work with, including subordinates, and those on the outside, too. There's a legendary editor-in-chief in women's magazine publishing who recently took over a new magazine. Every person I know who went to interview for a position there told me that she asked them, “What would you do if you were me?” How shrewd she was. She pumped everybody, gathering, for free, people's ideas and insights.

And remember that the strengths you develop should be those that will work in the marketplace in the future as well as today. “The strengths I saw at MUW were ones that I thought would serve students well in the twenty-first century,” says Dr. Rent.

THE AMAZING BENEFIT OF REALLY BAD NEWS

It's one thing to probe for the good. Probing for the bad can be tougher, especially if you're just now creating a vision for a job you've had for a while. Good girls don't like discovering that everything isn't perfect, because they take bad news personally. One of the observations I've made about gutsy women I know is how unintimidated they are about disastrous facts. They don't try to rationalize them or scoot them under the rug.

And that's because hiding in the midst of bad news are often the seeds for a brilliant plan. The Kanungo and Conger study found that charismatic executives, unlike noncharismatic ones, “recognize deficiencies in the present system, actively searching out existing or potential shortcomings in the status quo.” From there they determine how weaknesses can be transformed into opportunities.

When Laurie Ward, president of the interior design company Use-What-You-Have Interiors, started her very successful business, it was based completely on what she saw as the weaknesses in her old business.

She'd been a classic interior designer who went into people's homes and did a total overhaul. But there were several aspects of the job that began to bother her. “As a traditional decorator, you make your money on a percentage of everything the clients buy,” says Ward. “It's in your interest, therefore, to get them to purchase as much as possible. But I didn't like telling a client to start over when they had a really good foundation. I'd often realize that a certain piece of furniture that didn't seem to work in one room would actually look terrific in another, and I'd almost have to tie my hands together not to move it.”

So Ward chucked the old way of doing things and started a business that calls for clients to pay her a flat fee for an overall consultation about their home. She makes suggestions about what, purchases they might make but also encourages people to keep any furniture and accessories that actually
work.

In my early weeks at
Child
magazine, when I was trying to develop my goals for the magazine, I got handed two pieces of really bad news that made me feel like sitting at my desk with my head in my hands, muttering
“oy vey”
for an hour or two. But both of these killer facts ended up helping me find my way.

Up until my arrival, the one-year-old
Child
had been positioned as a parenting magazine for very, very upscale mothers and fathers, featuring articles on how to find a camp with a good reputation, plan a perfect birthday party, teach “good table manners,” and enable your child to achieve his career goals. There was nothing on the down-and-dirty basics of parenting, like what to do when your kid screams that you're a poo-poohead in front of a restaurant full of people or insists you lie on the floor outside his door until he falls asleep at night. That type of advice was usually left to
Parents
magazine, a publication geared more for middle-class mothers, to dispense.

Was this a good vision for
Child?
It was almost impossible to tell. The magazine certainly looked beautiful and vibrant, but there was no data yet available on readers or how they responded to the magazine.

The first piece of bad news I got was a demographic study on parents that had been initiated before I arrived. According to the study, if you counted up the number of parents who made over $75,000 a year and had kids under five, parents for whom
Child
was marketed, the total was about 126 in the entire United States. Great, I thought, no audience. The study also showed, however, that once you looked at families with income around $50,000, suddenly the audience got much bigger.