Read I Shouldn't Be Telling You This: Success Secrets Every Gutsy Girl Should Know Online
Authors: Kate White
A
s I mentioned earlier, it’s essential in a new job to clarify with your boss what he or she expects of you. That will help guarantee, at least temporarily, that you know what to do and that your boss will be satisfied with your performance. In the long run, however, you must go beyond leaving your boss feeling content. To become a success, you need to knock your boss’s socks off. And you can’t do that by simply being proficient at your responsibilities. One of the key mistakes I see young women make in the early stages of their careers is doing exactly what they’ve been told to do—
and no more.
“It’s not enough to do what’s expected of you, to hit the numbers,” says MetricStream CEO Shellye Archambeau. “You have to excel beyond what others are doing and find ways to differentiate yourself, and show your value.” In other words, you have to go big or go home.
“You must get out of the ‘check the box’ mentality on assignments,” says ESPN’s Hannah Storm. “When you’re first starting out, one of the surest ways to make sure you’re noticed is to do something that’s not in one of those boxes.”
Easier said than done, though, right? How do you know what to go big with? Here are some surefire tactics.
Do things a hell of a lot better than they imagined was possible.
It goes without saying that you should aim to handle your work fabulously. But not everyone does. Figure out what you need to know (through feedback, keeping your eyes and ears open, research) to tackle your projects spectacularly. This is the first step to dazzling your boss, and you shouldn’t try to jump over it.
Kick it up
at least
one notch.
Look at a basic responsibility you’ve been given and expand it, even if no one has instructed you to. Here’s the perfect example from Lori Andrews, a professor of law at IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law and a leading adviser on genetics and reproductive fertility to Congress, the World Health Organization, and the Centers for Disease Control.
“I always pick very smart people as my research assistants, but recently there was one who was just hitting it out of the park compared to the others,” says Andrews. “She saw the whole picture and what needed to be done and then just took things a step further. For instance, I had asked her to proofread a chapter of my book, but she didn’t just proofread it, she started to make really great suggestions. She’d say something like, ‘Well, you’ve got this thing here, and you could end the chapter with this whole new idea that parallels it.’ ”
If you’ve been given a certain assignment in relation to a project, ask yourself what would make it even better? What extra step could you do?
Let’s say, for example, that your boss asks you to pull together numbers on your department’s performance in one area. Instead of just downloading the figures, study them and see if they tell you anything. If you spot a pattern, include a note when you turn them in, offering your observation (something like, “I happened to notice when I put these together that . . .”) and even making a recommendation if you’re pretty sure it’s on the mark. Chances are more than good that your boss will be impressed by your comments, especially if they’re shrewd. If it becomes clear that your boss isn’t interested in hearing this kind of observation from you, you haven’t overstepped your bounds in an obnoxious way. And you’ve also discovered that your boss may not be the type you want to stick with for very long.
Ask yourself, “What’s missing?”
A great way to go big is to add something new and valuable to a workplace that no one has contributed before—especially if it doesn’t cost anything, tax the system, or cause unnecessary grief. That’s what Hannah Storm did. “In the beginning of my sports career—on the radio in Houston—I was supposed to mainly report scores of the local teams,” she says. “But I convinced my bosses at the station that it was important for our listeners to have a sense of live reporting from the big sporting events like the Super Bowl and the Final Four. So I paid my own way to those events and did phone-in calls to the station. It was a total win-win situation. I got great experience reporting from a live event, and the radio station got something interesting for listeners.”
And you know what
really
pays off? If the tasks you take on or the ideas you generate not only provide special dividends for your workplace, thus setting you apart from the pack, but also allow you to begin developing your own unique specialty.
In my first year or so as a writer at
Glamour
, I worked on a lot of small items for a section in the magazine called “The How to Do Anything Better Guide.” I enjoyed writing these, but I also knew I wasn’t going to make much of a mark for myself with pieces like “How to Get Rid of a Pimple by Saturday Night.” So I started pitching ideas for big reported pieces. But the editor in chief told me I didn’t yet have the reporting skills to do that kind of article.
I could have tried to beef up my skills with
short
reported articles, but another strategy began to form in my head. As a young single woman in Manhattan, I was wrestling with so many issues, but there was rarely anything in
Glamour
on that topic. We ran service articles, not essays. So without an assignment, I went ahead and wrote a wry first-person piece about being single and dropped it on the editor in chief’s desk. Two hours later she walked down to my cubby and told me she loved it. She published it in the next issue and we received lots of letters from young women saying how much they related to the piece. From then on I began writing personal essays for the magazine and eventually my own column. There was a kind of gap in the magazine and I was able to fill it, thanks to a wonderful editor in chief. But I was also beginning to develop a specialty—different from my peers—that would serve me for years.
Ask for more.
Bosses love this, as long as you’re already doing your main job well. One of the best approaches is to volunteer to take on a task your boss doesn’t have time for or one that was previously handled by a colleague above you who was downsized. The beauty of this is that it will prove that you’re capable of tackling something above your pay grade.
Fix something that that no one else has ever gotten around to fixing.
One of the fascinating aspects about so many workplaces is that there is always something that doesn’t function perfectly or hasn’t been figured out yet. It’s like a bedroom bureau with a broken leg that has been propped up with a block of wood for months, even years. And guess what?
It’s yours for the taking.
You can score points by being the one who comes to the rescue.
When I was at
Glamour
, the magazine routinely rated every item and feature in the magazine for overall reader satisfaction. The findings were generally pretty straightforward, but there was one result involving “The How to Do Anything Better Guide” that editors found baffling. Though the section was one of the most popular in the magazine, the overall rating could vary as much as twenty points from one month to the next. The managing editor, who was in charge of the section, worked hard to put together a good batch of items each month. The articles staff, which included me, would pitch ideas, and she’d fill the section with twenty-five or so of what she considered the best ones—a combination of fashion, beauty, health, relationship, and lifestyle tips. She had no clue why some months readers rated the section so much higher than others.
On my own, I decided to try to figure it out. I pulled together all the ratings and analyzed the months the section had rated the highest and the months it had rated the lowest—and finally I had the answer. Though the managing editor picked decent ideas and made sure all the right categories were covered, many of the topics tended to be very specific (there was once even an item on how to deal with a diabetic pet!); it was clear that she never stepped back and considered the right overall
mix
of topics.
In analyzing the ratings, I discovered that if all the items in the section were very specific, the overall rating tended to be low. It wasn’t hard to figure out why. A reader might not find anything for herself in that kind of mix. If, on the other hand, the section contained at least five items of more universal appeal—such as how to beat insomnia or ask for a raise—the ratings went through the roof. I’d figured out how to fix the broken bureau leg.
Caveat: I (stupidly) ended up getting cold feet about turning in the analysis; I was afraid the managing editor might view it as my trying to show I was smarter than she was. But in hindsight I know it would have knocked the editor in chief’s socks off. All wasn’t lost, though; I went on to use that type of analysis in every job I had after that.
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How to Pull Off a Project Perfectly
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kay, I hope I’ve impressed on you the importance of doing far more than what you’ve been told to do, of generating ideas that will knock your boss’s socks off. But now it’s time to talk about actually
executing
those ideas, as well as whatever else your boss puts on your plate. You need to know how to get a project off the ground, keep the momentum of it going,
and
see it through to its conclusion. Law professor Lori Andrews told me recently that many of the projects she’s been asked to take on actually involve finishing what someone else has started. “You wouldn’t believe how many projects just don’t get completed,” she says.
These strategies will help guarantee your projects never derail.
Be absolutely certain of what you are supposed to accomplish.
When your boss assigns you a project, take good notes and ask questions regarding anything you’re not sure about. Over the years, I’ve noticed that junior staffers are often reluctant to ask too many questions about a project—perhaps out of fear of looking stupid—but then they fail to do the project well. The key question to ask: “What are the results you’re looking for?” Sometimes a boss can forget to spell that out. It may sound as though she wants a simple PowerPoint presentation about the business, but if she’s hoping to persuade a client of something, you’ll want your slides to help do that. Be clear, too, about deadlines and who needs to be looped in on the project.
In some cases giving your project a name can help motivate you. Lili Root, the terrific executive director of events marketing for Hearst, told me that she comes up with a name for every event she does even if one hasn’t been provided. “A name just helps you focus,” she says. “As you brainstorm ideas, you can hold them up against the name and see if they fit or not.”
Make a plan.
You need to figure out exactly what must be done to complete the project, and then you must break it down into what the productivity expert Julie Morgenstern calls small, “complete-able” steps. Otherwise, the project will seem overwhelming. Morgenstern (whom I’ve hired on occasion to teach me better time-management strategies!) says that one of the smartest things you can do is talk to someone who has done a similar project before and confirm what those steps are. Perhaps it’s the person you’ve replaced, who has just moved up in the department. Go to him and say you heard he did a brilliant job and you’d like to pick his brain.
If no such person exists, look through files and old records to see what they might tell you. Nothing there? Get as much info as possible from those you will be interacting with. Let’s say you’ve been given the task of organizing a luncheon for your boss. Tell the caterer or restaurant manager that this is your first time and you’d love her to provide you with a to-do list and also any information you might not think of. She can tell you, for instance, the date by which a final head count is needed.
Morgenstern says that one helpful strategy for kicking off an overwhelming-seeming project is to figure out the first three steps. “It’s as if you’re focusing on just the things you can see with your car headlights,” she explains. “So if you’re setting up a luncheon, those first three steps will be (1) determine the goal of the event, (2) decide on a theme, and (3) pick the venue.”
It’s extremely important to factor in deadlines. Figure out how long each step will take and then work backward rather than forward. Let’s stick with the idea of arranging a luncheon. If the date for the event is October 25 and the restaurant has told you it needs the head count by October 18, you will need to have “RSVP by October 16” on the invitation to allow time for stragglers. The invitation will need to go out around two to three weeks in advance (the length of time you give people to respond depends on the field and the age of the invitees; the caterer can help you with this number). It takes only about fifteen minutes to create an e-vite with Paperless Post, but you will need a day or two for your boss to review what you’ve created, so you must complete it by, let’s say, October 2. You get the idea. All the dates and details go into your “plan.” Keep track of certain details on your calendar.
Determine your concentration threshold.
Morgenstern says that this is essential. If you try to do too much on any project in one sitting, you may end up procrastinating. Break down a big task, such as writing a report into three sessions, for instance—one for the draft, one for the revise, and one to review.
If you hit a roadblock, try jumping ahead a few steps in your plan.
Sometimes you can end up stalled on a project not because you’re procrastinating but because there’s a sudden impasse or someone isn’t getting back to you. A trick I like to use in those situations is to proceed to step 4, let’s say, instead of staying stuck at 3.
Here’s an example of what I mean. For two years I tried to arrange for Rihanna to do a second
Cosmo
cover. We’d been the first major magazine to feature her on the cover, and the issue had sold brilliantly, but then everybody else wanted her and we had to wait our turn again. We were due for another cover, but after Chris Brown assaulted her, she decided to keep a low profile. My project was to score another Rihanna cover, but I wasn’t having any luck.