Read I Shouldn't Be Telling You This: Success Secrets Every Gutsy Girl Should Know Online
Authors: Kate White
So let’s talk about how to guarantee that happens. Career breakthroughs occur at the intersection of
readiness
,
opportunity
, and
hustle.
If you are itching for your first big breakthrough (and I’d say that, early in your career you should never be at any job longer than a couple of years before questioning if you’ve been there too long), you need to create that intersection.
Ask yourself these three questions:
1. Are you really ready?
If you’re hoping you’ll be promoted when a job above you opens up, have you been mastering the skills you would need for that job? Have you been impressing the hell out of your boss by going big with your ideas and doing far more than you’ve been told to do? If not, get busy. If the right job outside the company opened up, would you be ready for
that
? When I was a young feature writer at
Glamour
, it finally dawned on me—later than it should have—that if I wanted to move up (at either
Glamour
or another magazine), I was going to have to master a whole new skill, one I hadn’t even begun to develop in my current job. I loved being a feature writer and seeing my name in print, but it was really a dead-end job. The positions directly above mine at the magazine were associate editor and senior editor, and as the titles implied, they involved
editing
, not writing. Luckily, around that time, the articles editor started giving me pieces to edit in order to lighten her own burgeoning load, but if I’d been less naive, I would have already volunteered to take on that task. At least I was smart enough to see how fortunate I was that she’d asked. I stayed late every night doing as much editing as possible, developing this necessary skill and making certain I did a good enough job so she’d keep giving me more.
In some cases you can learn what’s required in your own workplace, but there’s also a chance you’ll need to take a class or program outside. I signed up for a couple of classes in copyediting to bolster what I was learning on the job.
2. Are you creating enough opportunities?
Look, sometimes opportunity really does knock, and that’s a beautiful thing. But that happens the least when you’re first starting out because you have so few connections. One of my best friends when I was younger landed two amazing jobs during her twenties, one just a couple of years after the other, because in each case her boss got a great new job elsewhere and took my friend along, but nothing like that ever happened to me. You can’t wait around for that kind of luck. You’ve got to:
• Make sure your boss knows how eager you are to move up, by both your performance and the messages you give.
• Network your butt off, inside and outside the company (see “Advanced Networking [Never Say You’re Too Busy to Do It]” in part II).
• Watch job boards and your company website for opportunities.
• Introduce yourself to senior people in your organization who may be in a position to hire you one day. And continue to develop sponsors.
• Sign up for LinkedIn if you haven’t already (see “Ballsy Strategies for Finding a Job” for more about using LinkedIn). Study how it works and maximize it, using the advanced search options.
• Get job news from companies you’re interested in by signing up for their Twitter and Facebook feeds.
• Read trade journals and websites devoted to your field.
• Shoot periodic e-mails to former bosses and colleagues, updating them on what you’re up to and sharing a link to something they’d be interested in.
• Keep a folder of clippings or a computer file about new companies or people doing things that intrigue you. (I still have that kind of folder!)
• Check in with your college career office even if it’s been a few years since you graduated.
• Stay in regular contact with friends in your field, particularly those who seem to know all the gossip.
• Allow for serendipity and opportunities beckoning from whole new directions.
3. Are you ready to hustle?
As soon as you learn about an opportunity, go for it in as big a way as possible. Don’t just send your résumé. Make a call introducing yourself. Use a sponsor to open a door for you (see “What You Need Even More Than a Mentor”). And do not hesitate!
Part II
{
Success: How to Go Big with It
}
C
ongratulations! You’re obviously reading this section because either you’ve achieved a significant level of success already or you have every intention of doing so. It’s a fantastic stage to be at in your career. Your skills and efforts have begun to pay off, and the work you’re doing at this point is probably more interesting and exciting than some of the stuff you were required to do when you first started out.
In my career, my first real success was being hired to run the articles department at
Mademoiselle.
Though at
Family Weekly
I’d eventually been promoted to the number two position, this was a much bigger deal at a much more prestigious company, and it was a fun time for me. I assigned pieces to writers such as Jay McInerney and Tama Janowitz, had a cute office with an actual couch (well, love seat), and oversaw a staff of seven or eight, including my Harvard-educated male assistant. After I’d been there about a year, the magazine ran a four-page fashion story about me as a single girl in Manhattan. If there’d been a Carrie Bradshaw on TV then, I would have felt I was having a Carrie Bradshaw moment.
Yet first success brings many challenges. As you handle plenty of day-to-day demands, you must also focus on the larger picture in a way you were not expected to do as a junior player. You need to come up with even bigger ideas and run with them. Office politics can be intense, sometimes even brutal, at this stage of the game. And there’s a good chance you are overseeing staff now—perhaps only one or two people, but still, managing
anyone
takes understanding and skill. At this stage I sometimes felt as if I was flying by the seat of my pants. And I probably looked more confident than I was.
This is a period when you also should be paying serious attention to your career as well as your job. Where do you hope to go from here? What moves should you be making to help you reach the next level even if you don’t feel ready to jump right this second? Some opportunities may open up all on their own, but if you want to guarantee that you’ll go big with your success, you need strategies and you must work them. In some ways you have to think of your career as a living, breathing thing. It needs nurturing!
Plus, timing can be critical. At
Mademoiselle
I was becoming pretty certain that I really did want to be an editor in chief one day. But I also could see that I didn’t have all the time in the world. From my vantage point, it seemed that most editors in chief of women’s magazines had secured that title by the time they were in their early forties, if not sooner. I was in my mid-thirties, so that meant I had a window of about five or six years for it to happen. Many fields have this kind of window. Do your homework and figure out at which points you should be going after certain jobs.
This section of the book is jam-packed with strategies for supersizing your success, including tips on how to generate winning ideas, handle office politics shrewdly, use information as your secret weapon, develop your personal brand, and navigate setbacks (because they happen to even the best of us). I’ll also share advice on how to manage your career—and finally land the BIG JOB.
I
have a confession to make. When I was the editor of
Redbook
, one of the group publishers in my company asked if I would have lunch with a woman who had really impressed him. The woman had developed a cooking concept that she was now peddling, and the executive thought there might be a way for
Redbook
to feature her, perhaps even monthly. Sure, I’d be glad to join them for lunch, I said. We were always looking for new ideas and new voices.
We met at a Midtown restaurant, and though the woman seemed polished and determined, I quickly decided that there was no way I could use her for
Redbook.
To me there was nothing appealing about the concept she was championing: using store-bought foods such as pudding mix to create partially homemade meals.
Okay—wait for it—the woman I had lunch with that day was Sandra Lee, the author of the
Semi-Homemade
cookbook series, which by now has sold millions of copies, spawned other products, and led to her not only hosting her own show on the Food Network but creating a whole line of home products. Guys obviously like her cooking, too, since her live-in boyfriend is Andrew Cuomo, the current governor of New York.
Okay, clearly I’m pathetic at spotting talent in the chefs-Middle-America-will-love category. Still, I can’t help but admire Sandra Lee’s success and the gritty resolve that helped her achieve it. She knew what she wanted and went after it single-mindedly, not allowing herself to be discouraged when she met someone like me who didn’t go gaga for the concept.
She
liked it and sensed that many busy women would. Recently I came across an interesting comment she made about the secret of success. “You have to want it,” she said. “You have to have the eye of the tiger, and you have to do it every single day.”
The eye of the tiger.
It means you’re focused, steadfast, and fierce. Sandra Lee’s point was that you absolutely must have those attributes in order to be truly successful. Though I still don’t appreciate her food philosophy—to me eating a chicken dish made with frozen haricots verts and condensed soup seems about as fabulous as hand washing a week’s worth of panty hose—I have to agree with Lee’s philosophy of success.
Helen Gurley Brown certainly had the eye of the tiger when she ran
Cosmo.
I didn’t know her well then, but everything I saw, heard, and read indicated that she was utterly focused and that she watched out for her brand like, well, a killer big cat. A major media executive told me a story that perfectly illustrates this. Years ago, he was sometimes invited to attend the monthly luncheons at the “21” Club where Helen would preview each issue of
Cosmo
for a roundtable of advertisers. At one particular luncheon this guy ended up talking the whole time to a gorgeous advertiser seated next to him, even though he knew he should be working the table more. When it was time for the preview, Helen asked him if he would hold the display book—it was customary practice to have someone do that. Right before she started to speak to the group, Helen leaned down, put her hand onto the exec’s neck, and whispered something into his ear. He told me that anyone at the table would have assumed that she was saying something wonderfully flirty to him. But what she was really doing was digging her nails into his neck while telling him “Don’t you
ever
monopolize one advertiser again.” Now,
that
is some awesome fierceness.
To take your career from “Hey-isn’t-this-nice?” success to major, fabulous success, you need the eye of the tiger. Where does that come from? Sandra Lee is clearly hardwired that way, and her tough upbringing ended up making her even more determined. In other words, a combination of nature and nurture creates that kind of drive. You actually can’t just go out and
get
the eye of the tiger.
But even if you didn’t wake up this morning with the urge to take down an antelope or a wild boar, do not panic. It doesn’t mean you aren’t cut out for big success. I think that focus and fierceness can sometimes take a while to fully bloom—and that they also require a bit of cultivation. That was certainly the case for me. By my late twenties I was a senior editor at
Family Weekly
magazine, reporting directly to the editor in chief and overseeing all the articles that ran in the magazine, including the celebrity cover stories. But in no way did I have the eye of the tiger. I wasn’t sure yet what I wanted professionally. Though I’d fantasized about becoming an editor in chief and was on a path that
could
lead there, I also sometimes toyed with the notion of being a freelance writer. That’s because the thought of becoming an editor in chief scared my pants off.
If you don’t feel full-throttle fierceness yet (but wish you did), the first thing you need to do is ask yourself if you are in the right place. I mean, do you
love
what you’re doing? Essie Weingarten, the founder and creative director of Essie nail polishes, which is now owned by L’Oréal, told me, “The one sure way to be totally focused is to be passionate about what you’re doing.” Essie ended up creating nail polishes because she was captivated by fashion and style (plus she adored getting her nails done). Loving what she was doing made it easier to work long hours, push the envelope with creativity, and cold call on hundreds of salons, introducing her polishes to them. Sometimes the reason you see other people charge by you is that you’ve stumbled into the wrong workplace or wrong field.
If it
does
feel like a pretty good fit (at least for now), one way to fire up your fierceness is to get a taste of what big success feels like. I still remember the moment that happened for me. After I’d been a senior editor at
Family Weekly
for several years, my boss, Art Cooper, was tapped to be the editor in chief of
GQ.
I was named executive editor and given the task of running the magazine while management searched for the new editor (they told me I was also a candidate). I was so nervous at first—28 million people would see what was published under my direction each week—but of course I couldn’t say no. Then all of a sudden, after I’d been running the magazine a few weeks, a funny thing happened: I discovered that I found the whole experience absolutely exhilarating. I loved being in charge, loved deciding what the cover stories would be, loved telling people what to do. I even loved having the buck stop with me. I realized that some of the stress I sometimes felt at work involved reporting to a boss, and when I didn’t have one—at least a direct boss—I actually was much happier. (When the editor in chief job went to a man, Art said he’d heard that had been the intention all along. But I tried not to let it bother me. I’d had an epiphany from the experience, making it all worthwhile.)