Why Good Girls Don't Get Ahead... But Gutsy Girls Do (22 page)

RUMORS, GOSSIP, AND LIES, OH MY!

There is one other big way you can get sabotaged at work and it's getting worse these days. People will break your confidence or they will spread rumors about you, both true and untrue.

Everything about the state of discretion in the workplace can be summed up in this remark an acquaintance made to me. She had just had an interview with a woman recently named editor of a magazine. My acquaintance mentioned that the new editor planned to fire many of the employees at the magazine.

“I'm surprised she would confide that to you,” I remarked. “Isn't she worried that you would tell people?”

“Well, she asked me to keep it confidential,” she said. “And other than you, my two roommates, and my boyfriend, I haven't told a soul.”

That is exactly how you can expect people to respond if you ask them to keep a secret.

A good girl trusts people. A gutsy girl knows that you can never, ever completely trust anyone. Never tell a secret to anyone without knowing that there is every chance it will be betrayed.

And what if people simply choose to start a rumor about you?

Frankie Sue del Pappa, the attorney general of Nevada, who is known as one of the gutsiest women in politics, says that you must shut a rumor down. “There was a time when it might have been best to leave it alone. If you drew too much attention to it, you might make it worse. But those days are over. It will snowball until you address it and say that it's wrong.”

CHAPTER
TEN

Strategy #8: A Gutsy Girl Trusts Her Instincts

T
hough I had been the editor-in-chief of two magazines before I went to
McCall's,
in many respects I'd been playing in the minor leagues and was now moving up to the majors.
Child
and
Working Woman
had 250,000 and 900,000 readers respectively;
McCall's
had 5 million. On the newsstand
Child
and
Working Woman
each sold considerably under 100,000 each month, whereas
McCall's
average sale was about 400,000.

One of the scariest pieces of information thrown my way the first week on the job at
McCall's
was that the newsstand sales could fluctuate by several hundred thousand copies each month, depending on who and what was on the cover. The wrong instinct about a celebrity could cost thousands of dollars. It seemed hard to believe, but women like Dolly Parton and Princess Di were now in a position to make or break my career.

My job started in March and commitments had already been made about the July and August covers (Sally Field and Andie MacDowell, respectively). For September I was on my own. I stared at a long list of women provided by the entertainment editor. There were the usual suspects: women of substance, women of substance abuse, those whose hearts had just been broken, and those who were triumphantly on the mend. Absolutely no one excited me.

Sometime over the next day or two, I had a brainstorm: what about Demi Moore? She was absolutely gorgeous, a mother-to-be, and she had just starred in the runaway hit
Ghost.
In fact, I was surprised to discover that none of the major women's magazines had yet featured her on the cover.

Well, I soon found out why. Demi Moore didn't pose for magazines like
McCall's,
thank you very much. I'd had my heart set on her, however, and I didn't want to give up the idea. I suggested to the photo editor that we call in as many recent paparazzi shots as possible because we didn't need the star's permission to use one of those. Though there were often slim pickings among these kinds of photos, occasionally you'd stumble upon a shot good enough for a cover. Two days later the photo editor called me down to look at a selection on the light box, and there, among the various shots of Demi as a brat-packer and Demi as a sexpot, was a drop-dead picture of her in a low-cut black evening dress with husband Bruce Willis, partially in the picture, whispering in her ear. Her eyes were moist, her skin dewy, and she had the slightest of smiles, almost like the Mona Lisa. It practically took my breath away and I decided in that instant, “This is the cover.”

Over the next few days, we retouched the photo slightly, evening out the skin tone, removing both Brace's three-day beard and a clunky necklace on Demi. As I showed the blown-up photo around the office to staff members, people began to raise concerns. Demi didn't have the typical big, “buy-me” smile our cover subjects usually wore—was that a turn-off? Besides, the background of the photo was black, more like an old
Modern Screen
cover than one for
McCall's.
Then a wrench got thrown into the works. A gossip columnist announced that a pregnant Demi would appear nearly naked on the cover of
Vanity Fair
in August, just one month ahead of our issue. I began to wonder if Demi might be too controversial and the picture too “different.” I took the photo into my office, closed the door, and just stared at it. All I could remember was the “oooooh” reaction I'd fell the first moment I'd set eyes on it. I decided to go ahead.

Well, the issue sold 300,000 more copies on the newsstand than the September issue had sold the year before. I think it was in large part due to the pure beauty and appeal of Demi, but we probably also rode the tailwind of curiosity and desire created by
Vanity
Fair's now-legendary shot of the pregnant star. There were probably people who mistakenly bought
McCall's
thinking they would find nude photos of Moore inside.

The Demi cover experience was a great lesson for me. Though I'd certainly relied on my gut in making creative decisions before, this was the first time it had such a quantifiable impact. But I learned something else as well: how easy it is to get talked out of going with your gut when the pressure is on—and that's especially true if you're a good girl.

WHY GOOD GIRLS ARE SCARED TO TRUST THEIR INSTINCTS

Good girls feel uncomfortable going with their gut or trusting their instincts because often it means going against what other people think. What a good girl wants is consensus. When she gets consensus, it not only means that she's managed to please everybody—a high priority—but that she's guaranteed herself safely in numbers. That's exactly what I was hoping for with the Demi Moore cover, and I felt disconcerted when I didn't get it.

Also, a gut reaction by its very definition is something that comes from someplace other than your brain, involving intuition rather than lots of analyzing. Good girls have been trained to believe that they must always do their homework. They may have a hard time trusting a reaction that isn't obviously based on lots of facts and figures—or, even worse, is
counter
to the facts and figures.

“As females grow up, they're not encouraged I0 believe in their perceptions or observations,” says social psychologist Allana Elovson. “People talk about women's intuition, but we're often ridiculed for it. When we do use our intuition and we're right, it's attributed to luck or hard work instead.”

And yet learning to trust your gut is essential for anyone in business. The gutsy women I know all say they rely on their gut to guide them. A New Jersey Institute of Technology survey found that 80 percent of those company leaders who had doubled their company profits in a five-year period had above-average powers of intuition.

Why is it so important? Because if you allow yourself to be overwhelmed by constant analysis, lots and lots of rules, and the negative vibes of people who react to a great idea as if it's a bad smell, you may never pursue the boldest, most creative, rule-bending way of doing something.

More and more research shows that women may actually be capable of greater accuracy in their gut reactions than men Anne Moir, Ph.D., and David Jessel, authors of
Brain Sex, The Real Difference Between Men & Woman,
point out that women have superiority in many of the senses, which makes them better equipped at picking up social cues, such as important nuances of meaning from a person's tone of voice or intensity of expression. According to the authors, women also can store, for short periods at least, more irrelevant and random information than men And that's not all. In one study it was discovered that the two sides of the brain, connected by the corpus callosum, have a larger number of connections in women. This means that more information is being exchanged between the left and right sides of the female brain The
Brain Sex
authors conclude that since women are in general better at recognizing the emotional nuances in voice, gestures, and facial expressions, they can deduce more from such information than men because they have a greater capacity to integrate and cross-relate it.

This may be how the notion of women's intuition developed, although, as psychologist Dr. Allana Elovson says, that “asset” is often ridiculed or considered operative only in silly matters, such as knowing that your long lost cousin is about to call from Phoenix.

A gutsy girl recognizes, however, that her gut is a powerful tool and she learns to listen to it. How does she know when it's talking to her? She may feel a rumble or knot in her stomach if something isn't “quite right.” When she's got a winning idea, there's a rush of adrenaline or a buzzing in the brain, or perhaps even a weird “sixth sense.” In an article about Tina Brown,
Vanity fair
contributing editor Kevin Sessums says that Brown knows that an article is right if her nipples get hard when she reads it.

HOW TO DEVELOP A GOLDEN GUT

You probably feel nervous about letting go of your data sheets and operating on gut instinct. Here, then, is a beginner's approach. It will allow you to learn gradually to develop your gut—with a safety net in place.

Go Ahead, Do Your Homework

As a good girl, one of the reasons you probably feel anxious about relying on instinct is that for years you've been told to do the opposite. You've always been instructed to study hard, get all the facts, and be prepared. Using your gut seems like winging it—or even cheating.

Well, the truth is that a good gut reaction often comes from having done your homework, from having enough information at hand that an idea feels right for a reason.

“A lot of the time, intuition is actually a groundswell of the experience you've had and the information you've learned over the years,” says Mother's Work president Rebecca Matthias.

Take the Demi cover. My initial reaction to that photograph was influenced by information I'd already learned. I had recently read several articles about what was happening to
Ghost
at the box office. It was an unexpected megahit, one that was attracting almost double the number of women than men— and many of them were seeing it more than once. Several “experts” had hypothesized that its success reflected a desire for romance in films as well as a need on the part of many people to be reassured that there might be some form of immortality. Based on the success and the theme of the movie, it would make sense that a tender, almost mysterious shot of Demi could work—perhaps even better than one with a glamorous, megawatt smile.

When Claire Brinker first suggested to management at Red Cross Shoes that they ought to create and market a walking shoe, her gut feeling about it was backed up with plenty of research from places like the U.S. Park Service showing that walking was booming as an activity. And unlike many leisure activities, it appeared to have staying power. “I had demographics on my side,” says Brinker. “As women aged, they would be even more likely to want to walk because it's kinder to an older body. Plus, research showed that people like to walk not only because it's good for their hearts and their cholesterol levels, but it's mentally relaxing.” That fact seemed to promise that many women would be walking long after they had sold off their Thighmasters and Abdomonizers at tag sales.

The best gut instinct is always an educated one. When I first got to
McCall's,
I thought I could use my gut instinct “as a woman” to judge every idea, but I soon realized that in some ways I was different from the
McCall's
reader and a pure gut reaction didn't work I have a real irreverent streak and an appreciation for saucy women—if it were up to me. Sharon Stone would be on the cover at least once a year. But it soon became clear that
McCall's
readers didn't have much appetite for sauciness. They liked a straightforward approach and women who were loaded with integrity. When I put Priscilla Presley on the cover with lots of exquisite cleavage, several readers complained, including one who said she was horrified that her mailman now assumed she was the kind of risqué person who subscribed to dirty magazines. I had to educate myself about the reader.

So go ahead, bone up, get the numbers, make the analysis. The trouble good girls have with homework is that they can do too much and end up in a
paralysis of analysis.
Or the homework offers contradictory information and they're not sure which road to head down. It's at this point that you have to go into your office, close the door, and listen to your instincts.

“You can't overanalyze,” says Matthias. “At some point you have to step back and ask, ‘Would I and my friends, as consumers, want to buy this?”

After launching and running a highly successful chain of maternity clothing stores, Matthias wanted to open another chain that also sold maternity clothes, but more upscale outfits. Not everybody thought it was a good idea. And Matthias knew there were plenty of case studies around demonstrating how a second business can cannibalize the main one. “But I always felt that there were two kinds of shoppers for maternity clothes,” says Matthias. “There was the Talbot's shopper, whom we were attracting with Mother's Work. But there was also the upscale Barney's shopper, whom we
weren't
yet marketing to.”

Matthias went with her instincts and Mimi's was born, geared to upscale mothers-to-be. Matthias says it has been a ringing success and has not hurt the original chain.

Note, by the way, the use of the word
felt
on Matthias's part. For me, this has always been a way to son out what my gut is really telling me. If I'm considering a step that sounds good “on paper,” I ask myself how I
feel
about it rather than what I think of it. In other words, if it makes me feel energized and excited, that's a much better sign than merely thinking it would be “important” to do. If I'm still in doubt, I ask myself. How will I feel if I
don't
do it?

I've always wished I'd done this with my Warren Beatty cover. After I'd been at
McCall's
for a few months, someone on my staff suggested him for a cover and I said yes because I thought it would make us look sophisticated and trendy. But if I'd asked myself how I
felt
about Beatty I probably would have answered, “The guy's a dirty old man.” That cover was my all-time biggest dog as far as sales.

Beware the Good Girl's Favorite Circuit lamer

There are plenty of impediments to intuition, but a good girl often gets sidetracked by one in particular:
what everybody else thinks.

Because a good girl likes pleasing people and not causing any controversy, she may allow herself to be talked out of a good idea just to create consensus (or talked into a bad idea for the same reason). She may even talk herself out of a good idea because she doesn't want to fight the tide.