I Shouldn't Be Telling You This: Success Secrets Every Gutsy Girl Should Know (27 page)

Of course, if you have a
particular
job in the company in sight, you want to prove that you would be ready for it by taking on responsibilities and projects that will be required in that position. And
looking
the part.

Plus, let them know you want it. “Women don’t make their wishes known as much as men do,” says MetricStream CEO Shellye Archambeau.

Have a flex plan.
To me, it’s pointless to have a five-year career plan. There’s just so much potential for change in our lives and our career fields—why get locked into a rigid plan? In 2005, I gave a young writer the chance to create a blog for Cosmopolitan.com called—well, what else, The Bedroom Blog. Blogs had just emerged, and I felt we should have one on our site. The writer did a terrific job, and she soon had a huge following and a new “career.” But think about it: if a few years earlier the writer had made a five-year career plan for herself, “writing a popular blog” would never have been on it.

Better, I think, is to have a more relaxed plan that has several
possible
targets but also allows for serendipity, changes in the landscape, and your own evolution. Aim high, but be flexible and open. If someone tells you about an exciting opportunity that you feel is the wrong fit for you, step back and ask, “Why not?”

Make sure you’re ready.
If you don’t have all the right skills—whether it’s public speaking, Web design, app development, whatever—for the next big job, get them. If you can’t learn them on the job, take classes.

Sharpen your specialty.
At several points, I’ve talked about how important it is to develop a special expertise that helps set you apart from the pack. If you haven’t yet, start. Think about what keenly interests you, your expertise, and also what’s missing in your job or field. When Archambeau, joined IBM early in her career, she found that the big emphasis there was on sales. She looked for any chance to develop an expertise in marketing—“there were small pockets where you could do that”—and when the company shifted its focus under new leadership, she had an edge.

Do at least one thing a week that’s totally career focused.
It’s the draining-of-the-swamp concept, applied to your career rather than your job. Attend a speech or lecture, take a class, go on YouTube to hear a motivational speech by someone really successful, such as Susan Taylor, a former editor in chief of
Essence
, or an interview with a high-earning businesswoman such as Safra Catz, president and CFO of Oracle. The TED Conference videos are also good to check out, especially the powerful speech by Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg. I always feel jazzed after hearing a successful woman speak.

Check in regularly with your Personal Board of Directors (PBOD) (see “What You Need Even More Than a Mentor”).
As your career advances, you’re going to want to garner their wisdom, insight, and objective take on matters involving your goals.

Do the math.
Have you stayed where you are too long? Look at the careers of women above you, and consider how much time they invested in each phase of their career. One way to tell if you’ve overstayed is by noting how you feel when someone in your company leaves to go elsewhere. If you’re still growing in your job, you will probably not be bothered by their departure. But if you’ve been where you are too long, it may bug you or you may find yourself making excuses about the person, such as “Why would she want to go
there
?” or “I wouldn’t want to make a change now—not in
this
economy.” That kind of defensiveness should be your wake-up call. So should any flagging of your energy and enthusiasm for your work. That can be a big clue that it’s time for a new challenge.

Here’s an interesting thought to consider: sometimes the best time to leave a job is when you feel happiest. That’s because it could mean you’ve worked your way into a nice comfort zone. And you’ve stopped stretching!

Kathleen Rice, the dynamic DA of Nassau County, Long Island, told me that her career has always been about going after projects and jobs even if being in them would make her feel initially vulnerable.

Take your pulse.
Before you prepare to make your next move, take time to think about how engaged you are in your field. Do you still love what you’re doing and feel excited about the logical next step? Or are there rumblings of discontent in your tummy? Whose career have you been envying lately? What responsibilities light your fire? When do you feel most in the zone at work? You might be ready for a real change or just a shift to the left or right.

Several years ago, as Dr. Holly Phillips, the medical contributor for
CBS This Morning
, began making more and more TV appearances on medical issues, she realized how much it appealed to her. “I didn’t want to be a TV
personality
,” she says. “What I wanted was to be a
doctor on
TV. People rely on TV. This is a way to educate them. I also like the narrative it opens up in the medical community.” She set out to find a career in TV that would allow her to still work as a physician one day a week.

Review the chapters “Advanced Networking (Never Say You’re Too Busy to Do It)” and “12 Ways to Get Buzzed About.”
You want to be meeting people who can help you and making sure people hear the right things about you.

With each job opportunity that comes up, ask, “What will it do for me?”
Will it advance your career? Will it give you a whole new set of skills? Is it as good as it looks on paper? Would you be choosing it just to make a change or because it’s a smart choice? When you tell the story of your career one day, will this move make sense? At
Family Weekly
I was promoted from senior editor to executive editor, the number two spot, and then left to run the articles department at
Mademoiselle
for just a small increase in pay. But I was going to a much classier magazine and one far more in the public eye. Plus, I’d be back in a field (women’s magazines) where I’d probably be able to rise faster.

Then go big or go home.
When the right job comes up, you mustn’t wait for them to come after you. You must go after that job ferociously. Use whatever contacts and sponsors you have to get in the door. Tell your prospective employers you want it and what you will do for them. I know of a talented magazine executive editor who heard about an editor in chief job when the company was in the final round of interviews. She called the contact person and was told that the company president was leaving that day for an overseas trip and would be unable to squeeze in an interview with her. The editor said she would be willing to accompany the president to the airport in the limo and make her pitch on the drive. She did—and she won the job.

If the right job doesn’t exist, consider creating it. I approached a company once and suggested a job I thought would be great for them and that I’d like to have. They actually said yes to my idea. Though in the end I decided not to do it, experience made me see how open people can be to the right idea. Sometimes they don’t know what they’re missing.

If you are offered a job that’s almost perfect but is lacking something you need, ask if the employer will work with you to make it closer to what you want.
Sometimes all it takes is a little crafting. One thing that bugged me about the
Mademoiselle
job I was being offered was that the title was articles editor, not nearly as nice as my current title, executive editor. I asked the editor in chief to consider changing the title to “executive editor, articles,” and she did.

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What to Do When Things Change (and They Will!)
 
}

O
ne day not long ago when I was riding the elevator at work, I overheard a comment by a woman that was so naive, it startled me that it was coming out of the mouth of someone who was clearly in her thirties. She was complaining to a colleague that a photo shoot that was supposed to happen in two weeks had been moved up to the following Tuesday.

“I can’t believe they changed it,” she said. “I was counting on next week being a slow week.”

I guess she hadn’t gotten the message: things today are in a near-constant state of change, and there probably won’t be any slow weeks anymore. A
Fast Company
article pointed out that we are in the middle of a “next-two-hour era,” meaning that things are changing so quickly, we don’t even know what the next two hours will bring.

All this change can be disconcerting. Not only must we deal with the alteration in schedules and procedures and work habits, but there’s the ripple effect that so often follows. Change often leads to not only more work but a whole different kind of work. Over the course of my time in magazines, I have seen editors in chief shift from producing magazines to becoming brand managers and even TV personalities.

Though change can be scary, it’s essential to learn to deal with it well. To succeed, you must not only handle change effectively but also be a change
agent
, someone who both acts as a catalyst for change and then manages the process successfully.

I first started thinking a lot about handling change when I was the editor of
Working Woman.
We’d interviewed a management guru who’d told us that the work world was being transformed and we’d no longer have down periods when we’d be able to grab a breath, the way people had done in previous years when, for instance, a budget was finally completed or a project put to bed. We had entered, the guru said, a period where work was always going to be like white-water rafting.

That statement caused me to gulp when I read it. I had a demanding job and young kids, and the idea that things were going to become even more chaotic had zero appeal. But as I thought about the analogy, I began to find it relaxing. Up until then, I’d been resistant to the notion of rapid change. Accepting change rather than fighting it made it easier.

Acceptance, though, can take you only so far. You then have to learn to navigate the rapids.

See the sexy side of change.
When Dr. Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist whose specialty is romantic love, spoke at a
Cosmo
salon, she told us something that I’ve never forgotten. According to Dr. Fisher, one of the ways to help keep feelings of infatuation alive in a relationship is to always do new things together. That’s because novelty drives up the levels in the brain of dopamine and norepinephrine, neurotransmitters that are associated with energy, elation, focused attention, and motivation—the central traits of love.

Consider how Dr. Fisher’s theory might relate to change. Change is novelty, after all. It can be an opportunity to feel excited, energized, and elated—
if
you allow it to happen. When you think about it, haven’t many of the initially scary changes you’ve faced in life turned out in time to be thrilling?

So alter your view. Vivien Jennings, the founder and president of Rainy Day Books in Fairway, Kansas, a woman who could have been rocked by the enormous changes in the book business but wasn’t, put it this way: “Embrace change as an ally and an opportunity.”

And if you have people working for you, make sure you share that view with them, because they’re probably more nervous than you are. Don’t complain or appear panic-stricken in front of them.

Instead of asking “Why is this happening?” ask “What can I take control of?”
Put yourself in charge as soon as possible. For instance, if you unexpectedly end up with a new boss, you can control, to some degree, her perception of you by being open and offering to take her up to speed, rather than hiding out in your office.

And consider this: though we sometimes worry that change is going to knock us off our feet, it doesn’t always involve as much of a disruption as we fear, and taking control won’t be as hard as it looks. Says Trendera CEO Jane Buckingham: “One of the things I hear the start-ups in Silicon Valley talk about is how key it is to know how to pivot. Not reinvent,
pivot.
You look at where you are going and adjust slightly. I’ve always liked that quote of Bill Gates, where he says we tend to overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.”

So relax and consider how you will pivot, not overhaul. The definition of “pivot” is to step with one foot while keeping the other on the ground. Think of the ground as the things you already know and the skills you already have. Your other foot needs to reach for new information.

Pivoting is what Vivien Jennings has done—and done well. One of the ways she’d been building her book business was with author events. I’ve been lucky enough to participate in a few, and they’re terrific. The events had become an important way to drive book sales, but the store wasn’t big enough to accommodate a large audience. “If people can’t sit during an author event, the experience isn’t going to be optimum,” she says. “So we decided to go off-site. We began holding events in a variety of places—from restaurants to businesses to churches.” Books were sold, of course, at these events. Lots of books, and many events had an entry fee. Creating all these special events was a great new revenue source. “And it did something else,” she adds. “It took us into the community rather than made the community have to come to us.” That helped create even greater customer loyalty.

Be a just-in-time change agent.
A just-in-time system usually refers to handling inventory, where you store only the right materials at the right time and at the right place because more than that involves waste. You can use that approach with change. One of the aspects of change that can make your heart pound is how much knowledge you are suddenly going to have to acquire in order to stay in control. But in so many cases, all you really need to learn is what you will require at the present moment and in the right-ahead-of-you future. Remember: It’s a little like handling white water. Concentrate on the rapids you need to deal with now, and don’t worry about what’s far around the bend.