Why Good Girls Don't Get Ahead... But Gutsy Girls Do (9 page)

To provide safe, reliable, convenient and cost-effective transit services with a skilled team of employees dedicated to our customer's needs and committed to excellence.

That's a fabulous idea to get everyone noticing, but in the age of information overload, sometimes a better way to do it is to …

… SAY IT IN A SOUND BITE

As I read profile after profile of very successful women while I was editing
Working Woman,
I saw that one of the gutsy moves many of them made was to sum up their vision in a sound bite, much the way politicians and generals have been doing for centuries. Their goal becomes crystallized into one powerful line that is easy to grasp and remember.

How do you do that if you haven't been trained as an advertising copywriter?

Well, don't worry about it being cute and clever. In fact, it's far better to have people get what you mean instantly rather than have to spend time thinking about it. When Laurie Ward started her business, she ran the name Use-What-You-Have Interior Design by a number of friends, most of whom told her it was too wordy. And yet she felt that because her business was unique, it would be tremendously beneficial if people knew the moment they heard the name what it was all about. She went with it and feels that the name has played a powerful role in her success.

Jay Conger says that you shouldn't be afraid to be emotional with your vision statements. Touch people's need to belong, to feel like winners, to make a difference. Also, an unusual grammatical construction can stick in people's minds (“Ask not what your country …”). And it really helps if you can give them something to visualize.

When Nancy Brinker founded the Komen Foundation in 1982, it was around the time when the Vietnam War Memorial was being erected in Washington. Brinker discovered that a powerful sound bite and motivator was to tell people, “In a 10 year period, 58,000 lives were lost in Vietnam. In the same 10 year period, 330,000 women died of breast cancer. But there is no wall dedicated to them.”

One of my favorite sound bite creators is Tina Brown, editor-in-chief of the
New Yorker
and formerly editor-in-chief of
Vanity Fair.
When she took over
Vanity Fair,
she said she wanted to go after “the disparate themes and elements that bind together a best-selling book—love, money, sex, dreams, death.” That's not only visual, it's about as juicy as you can get. Who wouldn't want to execute a vision like that? When she went on to the
New Yorker,
she said she was creating a magazine for people who would “come for the relevance and stay for the daydream.” Sound bite creators-in-training please take note: The word
dream
obviously has lots of impact.

PUSHING THE RIGHT BUTTONS

A sound bite captures people's imagination. But in order for your employees to feel motivated to
fulfill
the mission, they have to have some kind of personal investment in it.

Nancy Brinker believes you need to appeal to the right brain, not the left brain. “Make people feel your mission personally. Often it helps to tell a story. I told the story of my sister over and over.”

Certainly it will help if people feel there's something in it for them. That doesn't necessarily mean bonuses and perks, however. It may just be the thrill or prestige of being involved in working on a terrific project. In magazines, editors love to work on projects and articles that have stature, that have the potential for impact, because ultimately that stature rubs off on them.

BEWARE OF THE NAYSAYERS

Practically the moment you get your vision out of your mouth, there will be a naysayer waiting eagerly to bully it and possibly knock it to the ground. Don't take it personally. Naysayers and doomsayers exist and thrive everywhere. Some of their favorite expressions are:

•  “We tried that and it didn't work.”

•  “It will never fly.”

•  “Management hates that sort of stuff.”

A good girl has a hard time handling naysayers. Her natural instinct is to foster cooperation and consensus and so she is likely to be bothered by their comments and let them influence her thinking and her actions. Of course, when you're developing your mission, it's critical to listen to people's concerns and reservations, but once you're sure of where you have to go, you can't let the sourpusses hamper you.

Your first goal with a naysayer is to try to convert her, to get her personally invested.

If you can't convert, then you must dilute the strength of the naysayer's grousing—otherwise it will plant doubts in the minds of your other employees. A terrific editor-in-chief once told me that she noticed at her magazine that over time a few of the people in each department developed a cynical attitude about what was possible in their areas. To combat this she often invited editors from other areas to certain departmental meetings, to give a breath of fresh air and offer up ideas that people in the department had long ago convinced themselves would “never work.”

If a naysayer won't give up, you will have to get rid of her. It's not that she simply puts a damper on your meetings—or even on your day. She may, without your realizing it, be undermining all your efforts.

Not long after I got to
McCall's,
I hired an entertainment editor whose primary experience had been working at artsy publications, but she had lots of contacts in the entertainment business and seemed game to make a go of it at a more commercial publication like
McCall's.
Over time it became clear that she favored the more “intellectual” celebrities and looked down her nose at those best-selling crowd pleasers like Diana, Princess of Wales. She also began to develop the point of view that most celebrities didn't want to pose for
McCall's.
I'd say, “Why don't we see if we can get so-and-so,” and she'd reply, “I'm sure she'd never do it.” I'd just laugh and say, “Well, let's try, shall we?” Eventually, it seemed that more and more celebrities were turning us down. The excuse this editor usually gave was that celebrities thought our covers were too busy or “junky,” because of the large cover lines and the photo insets we occasionally relied on. It was clear by the way she spoke that
she
wasn't so wild about the covers herself.

After she left, she was replaced by two editors working in tandem, and you know what? Gradually more and more celebrities seemed to want to be on the cover and no one complained about the look of our covers. Maybe it was pure coincidence, but I couldn't help but wonder if this editor's dislike of our covers and belief that no one would want to appear on them had come through in her conversations with agents. It was as if she had said, “We'd love Melanie for a cover, though I can't imagine she'd want to do it because there will be a photo of a pork roast and peach chutney right by her nose.”

WHEN IN DOUBT…

No matter how good your vision is, there will be times when you question it. Perhaps a setback forces you to doubt whether your plan is truly realistic. Or everything appears to be going smoothly but one day you whip your vision out of the folder and realize it sounds grandiose or worse, hokey. The best course is to sit for a couple of days and not make any decision to throw it away. You may simply be on a bumpy patch. If your doubts seem justified, there is only one step to take: Go back to the homework phase exploring strengths and weaknesses. Get input—and be willing to listen to what people say.

What you shouldn't do is share your raw doubts with anyone you work with. Certainly not your boss and not even your most trusted number-two person. You can indicate that you're doing some fact finding, but never show that you're worried about the course you've set.

One time I found myself wrestling with the vision I'd created at a magazine and I decided to share my doubts with several of the top people who worked for me. I told myself I needed their valuable input and the best way to get it was to be perfectly candid, but in hindsight I think that some residual good-girlism was directing me to find someone to agonize with. The trouble with baring your soul is that the people who work for you don't want to see you in any doubt because it automatically threatens their security. The women I confided in looked like children who had just finished watching the forest-fire scene in
Bambi.
In other words, you're on your own, girl.

HOW A GUTSY GIRL STAGES A TURNAROUND

Sometimes developing a vision is about taking a good operation and making ii relevant for the next ten years. Sometimes it's about giving a sluggish operation a jump start. And sometimes it's about taking a disaster and giving it CPR.

This is called doing a turnaround. It's an exhilarating experience and one of the fastest ways to make your mark. But it does mean being even gutsier in your approach than simply doing a jump start.

The basic trouble with having to do a turnaround is that all eyes are on you. Plus, though higher-ups realize on an intellectual level that you must get in there and study the situation before you make any moves, they seem to develop a terrible case of ants in the pants as you are finding your way. They want something to happen and they want it to happen fast.

There are three little tips I've learned over the years from watching women who have done turnarounds.

1. Do Something Quickly That You Can Quantify

And better yet, something that improves the bottom line. When Shirley DeLibero started at New Jersey Transit, she picked three areas she could “deliver” on fairly quickly and announced them to the board of directors. One was operations and maintenance. When the service and on-time record improved quickly, those were factors everyone could
see,
plus, of course, they began to draw more riders.

2. Try Something Stunning That Gets Everyone Talking

I first heard this advice articulated by Pat Fili, now head of daytime programming for ABC, when we interviewed her for
Working Woman.
At the time she was head of programming for Lifetime and she'd been given the job of turning the cable network “for women” around. When she'd arrived at Lifetime, the channel carried reruns of long-forgotten network TV series like
MacGruder & Loud
and
Partners in Crime,
and plain drivel, including the insufferable
Attitudes.
The heat was on to do a quick turnaround. Fili, however, decided against making a lot of immediate changes because she needed to take the time to watch and study. But she also knew she had to do something to make it look like she was making a major impact. So she bought the rights to
The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd.
It generated lots of excitement, created the feeling that “Hey,, this isn't the same old Lifetime anymore,” but it didn't detract from her plan to watch and study.

One of the most dazzling buy-yourself-some-time moves is the one Christie Whitman, the governor of New Jersey, made on the day she took office. A few minutes into her inaugural speech she mentioned that during her campaign she had promised to put $1.4 billion of people's tax dollars back into their pockets by cutting taxes over the next three years, with the first cut coming in July. Then to everyone's shock she announced, “Why wait until the next fiscal year starts in July?” She asked her “partners in the legislature” to “enact a 5 percent income tax cut for every family in New Jersey effective January 1, 1994—17 days ago.”

3. Call a Turnaround a Turnaround

Studies show that women tend to attribute their success to outside forces, and if
you
don't, other people will be quick to do that for you. If they can, they'll take the credit themselves, or they'll chalk it up to the marketplace, upper management, or luck. A friend of mine who turned around a magazine with an inventive change in the editorial learned that the circulation department was taking credit for the increase in renewals. Okay, maybe the clock radio sent to new subscribers played a role, but it wasn't the only factor. And yet the editor's efforts were overshadowed by the circulation department's forceful championing of its own efforts.

To prevent this you have to frame your turnaround in people's minds. Send out memos that keep people posted on the changes and their impact. When you talk to co-workers, use phrases like, “Thanks to our turnaround, we can …” And let the numbers get out there, too. If there's an 11 percent increase in customer sales, let everyone know.

As soon as DeLibero took over New Jersey Transit she began issuing quarterly reports to employees that she called
Vital Signs.
She gave plenty of facts and figures detailing the progress she was making.

CHAPTER
FIVE

Strategy #3: A Gutsy Girl Does Only What's Essential

I
f you're a good girl, it goes without saying that you work hard for your money. After all, you want to prove yourself, get an A-plus on important projects, and please those who matter. The sure way to do that seems to be to work your tail off. Chances are there are plenty of lunch hours when you find yourself at your desk with a tuna salad and melba toast and plenty of evenings when you're the one who turns out the lights. You feel a lot of satisfaction (and yes, admit it, even a little smugness) in working harder than many of your colleagues, though sometimes that satisfaction turns to irritation when you realize that often you seem to get stuck with all the work. Just once you'd like to be heading out the door early on a Friday. But you know that in the long run you will be well rewarded for all your hard, hard work.

Well, I've got bad news. Despite what you've been encouraged to believe, all your hard work is no guarantee of rewards or success.

Okay, okay, just like me you've read all those profiles of top executives in
Fortune,
in which they play that one-upmanship game about the hours they put in—there's the 60-hour workweek and the 80-hour workweek and the 100-plus-hour workweek. Sure, some jobs do involve a mind-boggling number of hours, but I've come to see that many good girls get caught up in working long hours purely for work's sake, not because it's really necessary. They devote more attention to some projects than they have to, or handle certain assignments that they should actually give to someone else.

The trouble with working your tail off this way isn't simply that you end up without clean panty hose, a decent social life, a knowledge of twentieth-century fiction, or anything in your fridge other than expired low-fat yogurt. If you're creating endless make-work for yourself, you don't have time to focus on your gutsy-girl plan, on making something happen that's all yours—and that will make you a star.

A gutsy girl knows that the hours she clocks are no reflection of how good a job she's done. The secret is to stop trying to do
everything
and start concentrating only on the essential steps that will allow you to achieve your goal. Anything more is a waste of valuable time and energy.

WHY GOOD GIRLS WORK HARDER THAN THEY SHOULD

At one of the magazines I edited, a department head hired a good girl who didn't know when to stop working. Whenever I asked to see a proposal she was putting together, the standard reply was, “I'm just finishing it up.”

She might have been smart, she might have been talented, but it was almost impossible to tell because she suffered from can't-let-go-of-it-itis. Her case was fairly extreme and yet I've seen so many good girls experiencing varying degrees of this problem. Management consultant Nancy Hamlin, who specializes in gender issues, calls it the good girl “spin.” Hamlin explains: “Women tend to work harder, do more research. They're always getting
one more
statistic.”

Why do we work harder and longer than we have to? I once asked this question of a guy on my staff, who was often the first to hand in an assignment as the good girls in the department buffed theirs to death. “Men, by definition, are lazy,” he said. “Women are trained to iron out wrinkles—every single inch of them.”

According to psychologist Robin Post, it's a good girl's need for perfection that makes her overcook her projects or inhibits her from getting out of the gate with what matters most. A good girl was encouraged all through school to do things perfectly, and she saw that, unlike boys, she wasn't given any kind of dispensation for handing something in that was a little rough around the edges. She might have written a glorious, insightful book report, but if there was a hole in the paper from a pen eraser, she wouldn't get a perfect grade. To this day, she's afraid there will be a penalty if it isn't
just
right.

That's not to say that the work you hand in should be sloppy or incomplete, but if you spend too long on it, you could undermine yourself. Many ideas lose their freshness and energy if you overknead them. And, of course, bosses get supremely irritated if you are late with a project or never step out of your office with something to show for your efforts.

Another reason good girls work too hard on some tasks: there's a feeling of safety working with what's familiar. If it's a choice between snuggling up to a cozy, dog-eared report you've had in your possession for six weeks or tackling something new, you may choose to snuggle.

And last but hardly least, good girls work too hard simply because they think they ought to.

The warning sign that you're working longer than you should on projects: You frequently hear yourself say:

•  “I'm putting the finishing touches on it.”

•  “I want to get it just right.”

•  “This is going to be really comprehensive.”

WHY GOOD GIRLS WORK ON WHAT THEY SHOULDN'T BE WORKING ON AT ALL

Perhaps an even greater sin than working too hard on something you
should
be working on is working for a single minute on something you should have given to someone else.

Delegation doesn't come naturally to many people, even the best of managers, but as a good girl you have your own unique reasons for resisting it.

First, there's that perfection thing happening again. You're fearful that if you turn part of a key assignment over to someone, he or she may screw up and make you look bad.

Your good-girl nature also wants you to be perceived as a nice, thoughtful person. You're afraid that people will be annoyed with you if you dump too much work on them, particularly grunt work. I know several good girls who empower their workers by delegating special projects to them but feel guilty turning over the crummy stuff, and thus end up doing
that
themselves.

And let's face it. You want to be thought of as Superwoman. If you delegate part of the work, you may no longer be viewed as the girl who can do it all.

Warning sign that you are wording on projects that you should be giving to someone else: You frequently hear yourself say:

•  “I was here all night.”

THE GUTSY GIRL'S THREE-STEP SYSTEM FOR DOING ONLY WHAT'S ESSENTIAL

Now that you have a sense of why you may fuss too much over your work or hang on to inappropriate tasks, it's time to move into action.

I don't want to sound braggy, but one of my best skills is the ability to concentrate only on what's essential. People sometimes ask me, “How do you do it all?” When I hear this question I occasionally feel a little surge of panic, wondering if the reason I have so much “extra” time is that there is a significant task that I'm not taking care of. Will I discover one day that all other human beings spend two hours a day doing something like draining their veins, and that my not doing so will result in the failure of my circulation at forty-five? But as the years go by and it becomes clearer that I'm not ignoring anything urgent, I see that the secret is dismissing the nonessential.

I can brag because once I was queen of the extraneous. I wanted to do it all so I could say I'd done it all. The first hint I had that this was a stupid approach was the summer before I went to work at
Glamour.
I had gotten a short-term job working in a political campaign, with responsibilities that included everything from doing advance work to spreading the word to the college crowd. One night some posters for a rally had to be painted and I got down on my hands and knees to do it myself. When I heard one of the higher-ups coming down the hall, I was sure he was going to walk into my office and canonize me. Instead he asked, “Can't you find some high school kids who can do that?”

I made gradual progress paring down my work, but it wasn't until I had a child that I was forced to be a master at it. Here are the three strategies that have worked for me.

1. Discover the Double To-Do List

There's not a woman alive who hasn't heard that she needs a to-do list. In fact, we became so obsessed with the concept that we turned the people who made Filofax into billionaires.

But simply having a daily to-do list won't get you anywhere. It will fill up with lots of housekeeping activities that good girls feel an obligation to stay on top of, like “order new computers” and “complete performance reviews.” What you must have as well is a
master
to-do list that describes all the gutsy steps for executing your major goal. You then use this list to feed the daily one, making certain you always block off time for the important stuff.

In these crazy times, just taking care of the basics can consume all your time, but you absolutely have to make room for your big goals. Rebecca Matthias, president of Mother's Work, a chain of stores selling maternity clothing (which is estimated to do close to $60 million in sales this year) puts it a wonderful way: “You must drain the swamp at the same time you're fighting the alligators. That's the mark of a successful executive rather than just a manager.”

2. Make It Snappy

Management consultant Nancy Austin likes to tell the story of a famous Canadian oil and gas wildcatter who on the eve of his retirement said, “It's so simple, it sounds stupid. It's amazing how few oil people really understand that you only find oil and gas when you drill wells.” As Austin points out, “You can pray, plan, prospect, prepare, Filofax to the max, but the only way to make things happen, particularly big things, is to pick a starting point and drill. You know—Just Do It.”

How do you train yourself to make it snappy if your instinct is continuously to cogitate, review, and be absolutely positively sure?

First, you need to recognize the myth that may be holding you back. Good girls try to make things perfect before releasing them because they think they
have
to be perfect. Wrong. In most instances, that's just not the case. You need to adopt the “half-baked cake approach” to ideas. I stole that phrase from Shirley DeLibero, executive director of New Jersey Transit. This is her philosophy: “I don't believe you always have to have a totally baked cake to go out there with. That doesn't mean I shoot from the hip, but much of the time it's important to just get started. You can always massage an idea along the way.”

Rebecca Matthias says the same thing a slightly different way: “In our company, our approach is ‘Don't tell us you're studying it, don't tell us you're working on it.’ If the customer likes it, do it
now.
Find the middle ground between getting it right and letting it go. There's always room for refinement.”

Her company motto:
Speed is life.

One little electric cattle-prod trick you can use if you're in a stall is to schedule deadlines for yourself. And if you really want to be gutsy, send a memo to your boss saying when you expect to get a project in. Or—and this really takes nerve — schedule a meeting at which you'll
present
it in person.

3. Give Away the Grunt Work

I'm a ruthless delegator today, but it didn't come naturally to me. I often found myself buried under work that could easily have been done by others simply because I felt uncomfortable about telling another person to do it. I'm ashamed to admit that years ago I even took on certain secretarial jobs myself because I wanted to avoid seeing my assistant roll her eyes and sigh when I handed them to her.

Today I give away absolutely every bit of grunt work I can and save for myself the fun and important stuff of putting out the magazine. Maybe that's not “nice.” But the twenty minutes it would take me to fill out the
Writer's Digest
questionnaire about what
Redbook
is looking for from writers is twenty minutes I can't devote to planning the August issue.

The way I got over my paralysis was to begin delegating a little bit at a time. As soon as I discovered the exhilarating sense of freedom and power it offered, the more I began to unload. It's not unlike hiring a weekly cleaning person for the first time. For years you tell yourself it really wouldn't be right to pay someone to do your own cleaning and, besides, housework gives you a chance to gather your thoughts. Once you finally get beyond that line of thinking and hire someone who makes your stove gleam and folds your underwear into little packets, you realize that you will never again be so stupid as to do it yourself.

The first step in delegating is figuring out what you should give away. It's basically quite simple: You give away anything you possibly can that doesn't necessitate your expertise and judgment. But don't go through the process once. Many of the most successful women I know say they
regularly
reflect on their responsibilities and determine what else they might be able to turn over to someone else. (If you haven't done a delegating review in more than a month, chances are you're doing something you shouldn't be.) When in doubt, ask yourself these questions:

•  Will this activity really get me closer to my goal?

•  Is this something someone else could do just as well?

•  Would my boss mind if I gave this to someone else?

•  Will anything really bad happen if the person screws up?

Even once you know there's work you can delegate, you may still feel uncomfortable letting go because of how people will react to being given “your” work, particularly the unpleasant stuff. The twenty-something generation, in particular, has a tendency to look miffed at being handed anything that doesn't seem to advance their careers. You may be wondering, in fact, how people react to
my
“dumping” techniques. There are two little strategies I use that appear to work for my staff (they're here, aren't they?):

•  Always tell a subordinate that you have something for him to do rather than ask him if he can take it on. Asking not only allows the person to wiggle out of the task with one of those “Gee, I don't know. … I'm really swamped” comments, but it makes the task seem like something you're simply trying to ditch rather than a duty that's perfectly appropriate for this person.