Why Good Girls Don't Get Ahead... But Gutsy Girls Do (4 page)

8)
You hear through the office grapevine that a colleague has called an important resource of yours, ostensibly just to checkout a lead. You

a. step into your colleague's office and say that you expect him to check with you before he contacts a source that you have cultivated.

b. bide your time, deciding that you
will
challenge him, but when you have actual evidence that he's been poaching on your territory.

9)
On two separate occasions you find several of the people who work for you whispering behind partially closed doors. After asking yourself if something could be up, you

a. tell yourself you're being paranoid.

b. tell yourself something is definitely brewing and try to find out what it is.

10)
You accept a new job that you sound perfectly suited for. Three weeks after starting, however, you realize that you've got far more to learn than you realized. As you lie in bed at night you think

a. I can do this, I can do this.

b. Oh, no. I'm in over my head.

SCORING YOURSELF

Give yourself 1 point for every
b
answer to questions 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9, and none for
a
answers to those questions. Give yourself one point for every
a
answer for questions 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10, and none for
b
answers to those questions.

If you scored 9 or 10 points, you're gutsy as hell, and I'm tempted to say give this book to a more needy friend. But since the title of the book intrigued you, there's a chance a good girl is lurking inside, and you may need reinforcement on your gutsiness (or some of your answers may have reflected how you would
like
to behave rather than how you generally do).

If you scored between 5 and 8, you've already developed some gutsy instincts, but you've got much more to learn.

If you scored under 5, your good-girlism is pretty seriously ingrained. You need help, but trust me, there's hope.

NO, YOU ABSOLUTELY DO NOT HAVE TO ACT LIKE A MAN

As I've talked about some of the ways gutsy girls do business, you may have begun to wonder whether acting gutsy really comes down to acting like a man.

That, after all, was the advice offered to women when they first poured into the workforce in the seventies. You may have read or at least heard of the mega best-selling book
Games Mother Never Taught You
by Betty Harragan. It burst on the scene in 1977, advising women that the key to making it in a man's world was to use the militaristic thinking and team-sport strategies that had worked so successfully for men. Much of the advice that appeared in the years afterwards stressed similar principles.

The trouble with that approach, as so many of us discovered Women don't feel
comfortable
acting or dressing like men. “When a woman tries to behave like a man,” says Barbara Berg, “she feels phony and alienated—even amputated.”

Gutsiness, to me, doesn't mean acting tough or macho or using phrases like “Let's hit ‘em where it hurts” or “Are they ready to play ball yet?” (though if you feel like it, by all means go ahead) It means trusting your instincts, going after what you want, and not being worried about what other people will think—in other words rediscovering the original gumption you felt at ten or eleven, before people did their best to derail it.

Acting like men did seem to pay off for some of the women who were in the vanguard of successful career women. Many of them probably felt it was a necessity, so they didn't seem like alien creatures. But I think a couple of factors have greatly diluted the necessity for being one of the guys. First, there's less of an emphasis in business these days on the military model. The buzzwords (and who knows if the gurus will be talking this way in ten years) are
team work, empowerment, sharing the wealth
. Also, as more women in higher positions have dared to act like women rather than men, it's made it far easier for the next generation of women to go in there and be themselves.
New York Times
reporter Maureen Dowd said in a speech last year that more and more professional women are discovering the “inner girl” and are not afraid to reveal her at the office.

That said, there's a helluva lot (excuse the macho talk) to be learned from men. I don't mean
all
men. Interestingly, there are plenty of
guys
who are good girls (someone wrote not long ago that At Gore might be “too good” to be President, too much of a pleaser), and they end up stuck in middle-management jobs for decades.

The ones you
should
pay attention to are the gutsy ones. Watch them talk, plan, move into action. I'm not suggesting you imitate exactly
how
they get what they want. Rather, simply be inspired by how they trust their instincts and do what
they
think is best.

Sometimes being gutsy is actually a matter of taking a good-girl tendency and restructuring it just a little. Good girls, for instance, worry a lot about pleasing people, often sacrificing their own needs in the process. But pleasing the right people in the right way is one of the best skills in business. When IBM announced that it was consolidating all its advertising under the Ogilvy and Mather Agency, the
Wall Street Journal
attributed the mega-coup to the agency's North American operations president Rochelle Lazarus, who sources indicated was brilliant at making “a client feel understood.”

THE TRUE SECRET OF BEING A GUTSY GIRL

This book is filled with strategies on how to uncover your natural gumption and be a gutsy girl. You may be wondering how you can possibly incorporate so many changes into the way you handle yourself. Keep this in mind: There's a wonderful dynamic at work when it comes to gutsiness. As soon as you try just one little gutsy thing, you will find it so effective and intoxicating you will be eager to try another. It is the M&M's approach to self-improvement.

Marjorie Lapp, a psychotherapist in Walnut Creek, California, who treats many women with classic good-girl tendencies, says she's found that they start out feeling very reluctant to try something new or adventurous because they worry that there will be dire consequences. “But when they do finally make a move, they discover that instead of something bad happening, it is often something very good,” she said. “And that realization is totally liberating.”

The fact is that unlike at home and in school, your gutsy efforts will sooner or later be rewarded.

A friend of mine, Mary Jo Sherman, who is president of Levit and Sherman advertising agency, puts it this way: “When you're growing up and you don't act like a good girl, your mother sends you to your room. But at work, being gutsier wins you a major client or some other kind of prize. As you see what it nets you, you become braver and braver.”

Let's start with the very first strategy of a gutsy girl.

CHAPTER
THREE

Strategy #1: A Gutsy Girl Breaks the Rules

W
hen I set out to write this book, I spent a lot of time thinking back on the best lessons I'd learned during my career. Initially, everything I considered automatically came from the years after I graduated from college and went into magazine publishing. And yet one day I realized that I'd gotten one of the most enlightening lessons the summer I was seventeen and employed as a fountain girl at Howard Johnson's on Route 9 in upstate New York.

I was a terrible waitress, with timing so bad that I served people their soup with their main course and their bill as they were pulling out of the parking lot. I'd go home at night feeling exhausted and drained, stung by the insults hurled in my direction (“She must be
new
” was a frequent one). Even the cook seemed to dislike me. At Hojo's you had to use certain abbreviations when you put an order through, such as OR for an order of two eggs. A few days after I started, someone asked for eggs sunny-side up, and I improvised by writing on the dupe sheet:
OR SSU.
No sooner had I put it through when I heard the cook bellow from the sizzling kitchen. “What the hell do you think this is—the navy?”

There was only one consolation: as a Howard Johnson employee, I was allowed to eat all the ice cream I wanted—though much to my chagrin, not with any of the toppings available to customers, like hot fudge or Reddi Wip. It was absolutely taboo for a waitress to help herself to the extras.

Three weeks into my summer there, a girl named Tracey joined the fountain-girl contingent and things started to improve for me. She was spunky and fun, completely unfazed by people who barked complaints about the one-quarter-inch-thick steaks or shouted for extra packets of wet wipes. During slow times she talked about the wild guys she dated or her favorite hobby, racing her parents’ car down back country roads. When she worked the night shift and didn't feel like waiting on people, she would stick up a sign, visible only to people coming in the front door, that said
COUNTER CLOSED
.

One day our lunch breaks coincided, and as we headed downstairs to the employee lounge together, walking by the manager who always checked out the employee lunch selections, I mentioned how bummed out I felt having to eat my ice cream without any toppings. Tracey gave me a devious laugh. “Oh, we can fix that,” she said. As soon as we were alone in the basement, she dug her spoon deep into her ice cream, revealing an amazing cross section. At the bottom of the bowl was a layer of nuts and cherries, topped by whipped cream, then hot fudge and finally the ice cream.

“It's an upside-down sundae,” she announced with a smirk.

I was stunned by both her nerve and her ingeniousness. From then on I ate an upside-down sundae every day for lunch, and going into work stopped being so onerous.

Only now, however, have I come to see that there are much broader applications to what Tracey showed me. Here's the real lesson: If you want to eat the cherry in life, to say nothing of the hot fudge and whipped cream, you've got to break the rules.

And that's the very first strategy of a gutsy girl. If you hope to be a star in your company and a standout in your field, you must, at times, make your own set of rules for what you're doing. You must listen to what they tell you to do and then you must twist it, toss it, or turn it upside down so that the result is brilliantly bold and different.

In many ways it's the foundation of every strategy in this book because in each case you're going against the grain of what you've always been told to do. You shouldn't, of course, just break the rules helter-skelter. Your rule breaking should be in the context of your overall mission (see Chapter 4), but the reason I'm going to talk about rule breaking first is that it will loosen you up to think about the most imaginative mission for yourself and your department.

THE RULES OF RULE BREAKING

The idea of breaking rules makes you nervous, doesn't it? After all, you've always been told that those who follow the rules are rewarded and those who break them are punished—sometimes very, very badly.

This is a “truth” that some experts say is reinforced for girls far more than for boys. Dr. Allana Elovson, a developmental and social psychologist in Santa Monica who is an expert on gender bias and has done workshops with many parents, says that the messages boys and girls get about rule breaking are very different. “The unspoken message is that ‘Boys will be boys,’” she explains. “It's okay for them to be bad. On the other hand, we expect little girls to be more civilized. If they break the rules, we come down much more heavily on them.”

In their research on sexism in schools, Myra and David Sadker found that girls are often rewarded for passivity whereas boys receive encouragement for challenging the status quo. For example, in instance after instance they saw teachers stress to students that they needed to raise their hands before responding to a question. When the discussion became fast-paced, the rule was often swept away. Boys, the researchers found, called out eight times more often than girls. Whether boys’ comments were insightful or irrelevant, teachers responded to them. However, when girls called out, there was a fascinating occurrence. “Suddenly,” say the Sadkers, “the teacher remembers the rule about raising your hand before you talk. And then the girl, who is usually not as assertive as the male students, is deftly and swiftly put back in her place.”

The women who get ahead are those who learn to ignore the warnings they've been given about breaking the rules. If you look at the work history of a gutsy girl, you see that she has made her mark by ignoring “orders” and taking some bold, innovative step that wowed her bosses and left her peers grumbling in exasperation, “I can't believe they let her get away with that” or “I would have done that but I didn't think you were supposed to.”

If you're going to be a gutsy girl, it's time to think about creating your own upside-down sundae.

One of the gutsiest rule benders I know is Nancy Glass, the anchor of one of the top-rated syndicated TV news magazine shows,
American journal,
and a former senior correspondent for
Inside Edition.
Over the years, she's landed exclusive interviews with a rogues’ gallery of contemporary antiheroes that includes Jeffrey Dahmer, Amy Fisher, Imelda Marcos, and Roseanne's parents. Nancy has always told me that in her career she lives by the principle,
There are no rules.

“People love to tell you the rules,” she says. “When I first started as a reporter, I was always told that to set up an interview with someone, you had to go through the standard channels, like the person's publicist or lawyer. But that's often a dead end because they really don't want the person to be interviewed. They'll just tell you, ‘No, Mr. So-and-So isn't available for interviews.’ So over time I found the one way to guarantee getting an interview was to just show up unannounced on the person's lawn. You can't imagine their shock when they first see you, but after a few minutes, after they've gotten to talk to you, they begin to trust you and feel receptive to the idea of being interviewed. I've come to believe that every opportunity is a vacuum waiting for you to fill it with your
own
rules.”

NO, I'M NOT SUGGESTING YOU NEED TO LIE, CHEAT, OR STEAL

It may sound as if I'm suggesting you land a chopper on someone's lawn. Not at all. In fact, it's probably best to leave that to renegade TV reporters with big blond hair. Nor am I suggesting that you lie on your resumé, cheat on your expense account, ignore company guidelines, or call your boss a butthead.

To understand what I mean by rule breaking and why it's an essential strategy, you have to consider where rules comes from—and their fallibility. Many rules are in existence because they once worked quite nicely, but there's every chance that they have become meaningless over time. People follow them out of habit, because “that's the way we've always done things here.” Other rules or directions have been set up by well-meaning people who unfortunately lack skill, talent, or creativity. These rules are supposed to offer guidance, but they only serve to hinder you.

Often, the only way to get substantial results and break out of the pack is to bend one of these rules or ignore it completely. Won't this get you into trouble? It
might.
But it's best to worry about that later. U.S. Senator Barbara Mikulski, a human dynamo who got her start as an activist by preventing the construction of a sixteen-lane highway through her town, told me that the motto that sums up so much of what she's done is,
It's always better to ask for forgiveness than permission.
And trust me, if they like what they see, you won't be on your knees.

The first chance I had to discover the benefit of a little rule bending was when I entered
Glamour
magazine's Top Ten College Women Contest as a college senior. My school had chosen me to be their candidate and I wanted more than anything to win—partly because the prize was a ten-day trip to Great Britain, but also because I saw it as a way to break into the magazine business. The application called for a photo, a description of your campus activities and awards, and an essay on the goals you had for the future. I spent two days trying to figure out what kind of essay would help me stand out from the pack of wildly popular, rich, and beautiful girls from colleges like Wellesley and Smith. Finally I decided that I would break the rules of the contest and write an essay on why, at twenty-two, I had no goals. I stated that in the chaotic seventies it seemed inappropriate to have some definitive road map for the future. Six months later I was having tea and scones at the Churchill Hotel in London.

Unfortunately, like many good girls, instead of recognizing how much the rule breaking had paid off for me, I assumed that I'd managed to get away with something. It took many years for me to see that all my big successes had resulted from not doing what I was told.

There are several variations on rule breaking and at a given time one will work better for you than another.

#1: DO SOMETHING THAT NO ONE HAS THOUGHT OF OR DARED TO DO BEFORE

Perhaps the gutsiest form of rule breaking is to go out there and do something that's never been done before, even something that's considered taboo for your field. That's what Andrea Robinson, president of department-store marketing at Revlon, did when she took over Ultima II several years ago and launched a makeup line called “The Nakeds.” It was makeup that had only a hint of color and made you look like you weren't actually
wearing
any. Robinson was one of the first women we profiled after I took over
Working Woman
and I've always admired the sheer, so to speak, gutsiness of what she did. Until then makeup had always been about color, of course, and more than a few people told her that The Nakeds were bound to fail.

But Robinson felt women were ready for something quite new. “I saw a different attitude taking hold in the nineties,” she recalls. “We had just come out of a decade where everyone was very coiffed and manicured and luxuried to death. I thought women didn't want to look like they spent all that time on themselves anymore. The philosophy behind The Nakeds was,
Look like yourself, only better.
”

The Nakeds was a major hit. The company even had to run ads apologizing to customers for not being able to get the product to them as fast as they wanted it.

#2: DO WHAT YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO DO—BUT IN A TOTALLY DIFFERENT WAY

In certain situations what's called for isn't something spanking new, but rather a bold variation on what you've been doing all along.

After Cheryl Deaton became principal of West Forest Elementary school in Opelika, Alabama, a school at which the majority of students were poor, she soon came to realize that the standard approach to running a school and helping kids learn just wasn't working there. Test scores were the lowest in the district and many students eventually dropped out of school. Gradually, Deaton and the team of people she worked with began altering the way they imparted knowledge and managed students.

“We got rid of textbooks in certain classes, like English, and replaced them with contemporary books that we knew kids would be attracted to.” says Deaton. “Textbooks have a canned representation of things. In libraries kids don't take out books that are old. They read what's attractive and fun and has a nice from cover. In the age of Nintendo, kids want things with sex appeal, for lack of a better word.”

Though Deaton's step of “throwing out the books” generated lots of press, her innovative strategies went far beyond that. The curriculum was changed to offer more music and art classes than schools traditionally offer, in order to have an “easy way for kids to communicate and be successful.” She even changed the way kids were disciplined in school. “Instead of punishing kids in the punitive, pruned-up mouth way that schools are known for, we began helping a child model appropriate behavior.”

Today, test scores have improved dramatically and the school has won major awards, including the $750,000 Next Century Schools Award. Deaton is now chief officer for Educational Improvement for Montgomery Public Schools.

#3: DO SOMETHING THAT DOESN'T APPEAR ANYWHERE IN YOUR JOB DESCRIPTION

And sometimes rule breaking is a matter of rule
extending
or
expanding,
going outside the parameters of your job description to make the kind of impact you can't make
within
those parameters.

Now, your first reaction might be. “Hey, I don't want to overstep my bounds.” But today that's become a necessity. There was a time when getting promoted was a result of doing a fabulous job within the framework you'd been given. But those were in fatter years. Now, you must do that just to
keep
your job. To move up, you have to lake on some of your boss's responsibilities or contribute something of value that may not have been requested of you but is nonetheless viewed as beneficial to the company.