I Shouldn't Be Telling You This: Success Secrets Every Gutsy Girl Should Know (8 page)

So I decided to get out ahead of the situation. I told my photo editor to see if she could find some great shots of Rihanna that had appeared on a European magazine but hadn’t been released in the United States. I thought that if we went to the singer and said we had a cover-worthy photo and she had to do only the interview rather than the interview plus a photo shoot, she might be tempted to consent. We had never gone with a cover photo we hadn’t commissioned, but I wasn’t opposed to doing it once.

Well, we found a nice set of photos that had been shot for a European magazine and were available for purchase, as long as Rihanna’s publicist agreed to let us use them. So we asked Rihanna’s publicist and, sure enough, she agreed to let us use one of the photos for the cover and arranged for us to interview the singer. But then, a few weeks later, we found out that Rihanna had decided to do a summer tour. She would need publicity. We went back to her publicist and said that as long as she was now doing the interview and she had the tour, why not let us shoot her? Things were already in motion, so it was easier now for them to say yes—and they did. We’d jumped ahead a step, and it had paid off.

Inform your boss of your progress.
Even if your boss isn’t asking for in-person updates, send her periodic e-mails about the project. That way she can get a sense about whether there’s any kind of problem you might not recognize, especially if you’re new at the game. Better to have her course-correct than have the project later blow up in your face.

Keep close tabs on what other team members are doing.
If you’re working on a project with your peers, you must stay abreast of their efforts and make sure no one is screwing up, which could end up making
you
look bad in the long run. And what if someone isn’t carrying his weight or is doing his part badly? You don’t want to be a tattletale, but you can’t ignore the problem either. One strategy is to suggest to your boss that everyone on the team meet with her and give a progress report. That way she’ll see firsthand what’s going on.

As you progress in your career, you’ll have projects where you supervise team members, and you’ll want to inspire the best from them. Peggy Schmidt, an independent college counselor in Silicon Valley, supervises students as they apply to schools. Her advice: “Get a handle on what your team’s strengths and weaknesses are. If you know what to expect in advance, you can modify how you work with a particular team member—for instance, what incentives or parameters are likely to produce results. People are surprisingly candid about their work habits.”

She also feels that people are more invested in completing a task if they have the autonomy of selecting days and times for turning in work as long as those deadlines fit into the larger picture.

Leave room at the end, says Lili Root, to “sprinkle on some fairy dust.”
Always plan to finish a day early or, at the very least, a few hours early. This allows you to step back, look at your finished project with fresh eyes, and tweak it if necessary. It can also give you time to add a magic touch or two.

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Develop a Golden Gut
 
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A
t one point in my career, the magazine company I worked for was sold, without warning, to a large European corporation that took over with all the aplomb of a blowtorch. Management treated my staff and me as if we were summer interns who were just learning the business, asked zero questions about U.S. consumers, and immediately redid the entire magazine, with a young guy on the business side supervising all the layouts.

It was a terribly unsettling experience, one of the worst I’ve ever been through professionally. Every day meant new changes and new instructions to follow. I felt worried about my own career but also concerned about all the turmoil and uncertainty my staff was going thorough. Fortunately, about five months later, I was offered a job as editor in chief of another magazine at a terrific company, and I fled the scene with just a few singe marks on my butt. Yet I don’t regret the time I spent in those stressful, unpredictable conditions—because it was there that I learned to listen to my gut.

I’d always respected my gut, but I’d never put it to work the way I did during that time. At first I didn’t even see how much I was relying on it. I did know that since the ground underneath me was shifting every day, I needed to do my best to anticipate what might be coming next so my staff and I wouldn’t be caught off guard. I found myself saying things to my managing editor such as “Let’s do
a
, because
b
will happen and we’ll be ready.” Or “Don’t do
c
—it will only create problems tomorrow.” My decisions turned out to be right on. One day as my managing editor and I were strategizing, she narrowed her eyes and asked, “How do you
know
all this stuff?”

At that moment I realized that for the past few weeks I’d been paying heed to my intuition on an almost primal level. And it was helping save my ass, big-time. It was as if I were in a survival-training camp and I had no choice but to use my instincts. Later, after I was ensconced at my new job and had caught my breath, I analyzed what I’d been doing so I could always have those skills to fall back on. Since then I’ve relied on them through thick and thin.

It’s never too soon to begin developing your gut. Here are the tricks that have served me best.

Know how your gut likes to talk to you.
Vowing to trust your gut won’t do you any good if you can’t tell when it’s sending you a message. You have to learn to tune in. For many people, me included, a gut reaction is just that—a rumbling feeling in my stomach. A gut reaction, however, may not actually occur in your
gut.
I’ve heard some people say that they’ve learned to pay attention when their pulse pounds or they feel a tingle all over. (A
Vanity Fair
writer once remarked that when Tina Brown was the editor, she knew an article was right if her nipples got hard when she read it!) You might not even have a physical reaction: perhaps you just have a niggling sense in your mind that something’s really good or really off. Doesn’t matter how it occurs. What’s key is to begin to note when you feel different in some way and ask yourself
why.

If you’re not sure if certain sensations really mean anything, keep track of them and see if you can validate them later. Let’s say that when you leave dinner with a friend one night, you end up with a nervous feeling in your stomach on the drive home. When you arrive at your place, write down your impressions. What could have happened during the night that made you feel that way? Was there something subtle about your friend’s behavior that suggested she was troubled though not admitting to it? Did she arrive seeming that way, or did her behavior shift during the meal? Later, if she confesses to a personal problem or admits that you pulled a move that upset her, you’ll have an idea that your tummy was definitely talking to you that night.

Just shut up.
Even when you learn to trust your gut, you may sometimes not hear when it’s signaling you. The secret is to listen. One of the smartest, most intuitive women I’ve come to know from writing mysteries (and I love the fact that she is now a great friend) is Barbara Butcher, the chief of staff and director of Forensic Sciences Training Program at the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner. Barbara spent years working crime scenes as a medical death investigator, investigating 5,500 death scenes and 680 homicides. It was at those death scenes, she says, that she learned to develop a golden gut.

“Everything we need to know is around us for the taking as long as we are truly taking it in,” she says. “As a death investigator I learned to open my senses to what was around me and abandon preconceived notions of what I was going to find. I learned early on that if I was told that I was going to investigate a homicide, then that is what I would find, but if I reminded myself that I was going to investigate the cause of death, then I would find the truth.”

Her advice for honing your gut instincts? “Take your hands off your ears and put them over your mouth,” Butcher says. “Learn to listen, see, smell, and absorb everything around you without speaking your thoughts first. If you practice these skills, you will get all the signals you need to be able to trust your instincts.”

Trust your gut but teach it first.
Your gut is directing you based on what it knows, so be sure it’s well informed about what matters. Experts who swear they make gut decisions often have years of training, and their response is an automatic one based on their reserves of knowledge.

A few months after I began at
Cosmo
, I took a bunch of mocked-up covers out to a shopping mall, showed them to young women, and asked how they liked them. Based on all the covers I’d done over the years, I was pretty sure the women would automatically pick one particular cover because the model was gorgeous and the background color was a yummy shade of yellow. But before they gave their answer, woman after woman asked me the following question: “What month is it for?” Until then, I hadn’t realized how important the
seasonality
of the cover clothes was to
Cosmo
readers. Knowing that enabled me to better use my gut when picking cover shots.

Connect the dots.
You just saw two coworkers whispering furtively in the hallway. Is something up that you should be concerned about? Maybe—though it
could
be that one of them has hooked up with a guy in accounting and is simply sharing the steamy details with her office pal. Your boss didn’t make eye contact with you when she passed you in the hall. Is she annoyed with you? Maybe. But then again, she might just be having a bad morning or got reamed by
her
boss earlier that day.

Little moments don’t always mean anything, but sometimes they do—though it may not be exactly what you think. So how do you know what to pay attention to and what to ignore? You play “connect the dots.” If one thing catches your eye in an odd way, make a note but don’t go insane with concern. But if two things relating to the same person or same situation grab your attention, it’s time to sit up. In your mind, run through a list of things they could suggest. Ask yourself how it might relate to you and whether you should be concerned.

Guard against your gut’s biggest enemy.
Even if you’ve learned how to tune in to your gut, there may be times when you end up stupidly ignoring it. Why? Because other people pressure you to—directly or indirectly.

I’ve seen the potential for that kind of thing to happen with magazine covers. When you’re a magazine editor, sometimes a cover shoot comes in and for some reason just isn’t strong enough. Maybe the clothes didn’t work or the celebrity felt awkward (or was hungover!). Your gut will tell you you’ve got a loser on your hands, but you feel pressure not to say the word “reshoot.” People
hate
that word. It’s difficult enough to coordinate the celebrity’s and photographer’s schedules the first time, let alone for a reshoot. But you can’t allow your gut to be silenced.

This happened with the second Kim Kardashian cover we did at
Cosmo.
In order to make this cover look different, we had decided to shoot Kim in jeans and a bathing suit top and mist her body with water, even wetting her hair a little. I loved the idea—until I saw the results. Kim was her gorgeous self, but she looked in the photos as if she’d been hosed down with Wesson oil instead of water. It was like a
Maxim
shoot run amuck. My gut was rumbling big-time, and when I started talking about needing to do it again, everybody turned ashen. But it was totally the right call.

We reshot Kim in a salmon-colored minidress made of sweatshirt fabric, and the cover was the biggest seller of the year.

Know that you shouldn’t necessarily take your gut at face value.
That rumble or knot is telling you something, but it may not be the obvious thing. In a
Cosmo
interview, Laura Day, the best-selling author of
Practical Intuition
, pointed out something I’ve found to be true. “When you have an instinct,” she says, “it doesn’t mean you should blindly follow it. It’s a message that you should examine the situation a little bit more.”

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Always
Ask for What You Want
 
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I
probably don’t have to tell you that it’s vital to ask for what you want. You know that, right? Whenever I give a career talk to a woman’s group, I stress the value of asking, and lots of women always nod their heads in agreement.

The reason I think that there’s so much vigorous head bobbing isn’t simply that I’m telling them something they know. It’s because they’re trying to drive home the point to themselves. Women realize that they should ask—and ask for
more
—but so often we don’t do it. According to a study by Linda Babcock, a professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University’s John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management, men initiate negotiations between four and eight times more often than women. It’s no surprise, then, that in another Babcock study, the women received average annual starting salaries that were 8.5 percent lower than the men’s.

Why are we such scaredy-cats when it comes to asking? We’re afraid that if we ask, it will seem as if we’re overstepping our bounds. The other person might get mad, or stop liking us. If someone’s offering us a job, we may even fear that if we ask for a higher salary than the amount being named, the offer might be snatched back from us. We may also hesitate because we lack experience in asking and it makes us self-conscious. “Guys,” says a business friend of mine, “grow up calling for the ball.”

But if there’s one thing I’ve come to accept with certainty, as both an employee and a boss, it’s this:
the squeaky wheel definitely gets the grease.
One of the most important things you must learn to do in your career is ask—
in the right way.
You must ask for money, responsibility, opportunities, title changes, benefits, bonuses, and perks. And don’t worry about the other person becoming ticked off. Bosses or prospective bosses may seem annoyed that you’ve asked, but they expect the best employees and job candidates to do it. They will get over their annoyance soon enough. And trust me, you will be glad you spoke up. The actress, comedian, writer, and producer Whitney Cummings put it perfectly when we interviewed her for
Cosmo
: “I learned this magic trick at an early age. If you ask for something you usually get it.”