Read Online Why Good Girls Don't Get Ahead... But Gutsy Girls Do by Kate White - Free Book Online Page A

something both ways—the standard and the more experimental.
5. Share the glory. Lyle Sussman, a professor of management at the University of Louisville who wrote a management-strategy box each month while I was at Working Woman, once told me that “stars today must be team players” It's just a fact of life that many of your peers and even some of your subordinates are not going to be overly pleased to see you stepping boldly into the limelight. They may feel jealous, threatened, overwhelmed with a sense that you are on a very fast train and they are being left behind at a dusty little small-town station. They may allow their negative feelings simply to simmer or they may go so far as to act on them, sabotaging what you're doing, criticizing you behind your back. However, if you demonstrate that you are taking them on the train with you by including them in your projects, you have a chance that they will support your efforts rather than hurt them. Frankie Sue del Pappa, the attorney general of Nevada, says her motto is “Put your arms around as many people as possible.” When she has a news conference, she includes everybody she can up there with her.
    THEY SHOOT MAVERICKS. DON'T THEY?
    What if you do all you're supposed to do to protect yourself and they still try to pounce on you?
    You have to be prepared for the fact that it could happen. Grace Joely Beatty, senior partner of the management consulting firm Gardner-Beatty in Rancho La Costa. California, says that despite the fact that there are many open-minded companies today, there are still plenty of good-old-boy operations that are immovable. You bring up one creative idea after another and they are shot down like clay pigeons. It just might not be worth your while to stay.
    “Many companies want ‘maintenance managers’ who don't innovate.” says Beatty. “If you're the creative entrepreneur type, you won't do well there. IBM is such a company—look where it is now. Women, especially, think they can change such a climate through sheer willpower, but actually the smart move is to just get out and go to a more dynamic environment.”
    If you stay and try to play by the rules, you'll be miserable If you buck the system, they'll do their best to make you miserable.
    Use your rule breaking strategies to find your way out. Recently I had the chance to talk to Jeannie Boylan, the police sketch artist who helped solve the Polly Klaas abduction and murder. Unlike the majority of police sketch artists, who have witnesses pick out features from books, Boylan simply has witnesses describe suspects from memory—after she allows them lots of time to relax and feel comfortable. Though her sketches have consistently proven to be uncannily like the actual criminals, the police departments she worked in often made her life hell because she didn't do things the standard way. After many years of trying fruitlessly to work within the system, she told me that she's found career happiness working as a freelance consultant to law enforcement agencies.
    GO FOR THE GUTSY MOMENT
    There's one last thing I want to say about rule breaking, and it relates not to projects or assignments you're working on but to personal behavior. I feel I should begin with a warning similar to one of those you see on late night TV commercials that goes something like, “Do Not Attempt This in Your Own Home.” What I'm about to say is fairly provocative and risky advice and yet, it seems to have worked for many gutsy girls. When you need to get their attention, try something brash. You take what could be an ordinary moment and turn it into a gutsy one.
    This story might help explain what I mean.
    When I was in ninth grade, the nun who taught the honors English class always gave us the most remarkable assignments, like writing essays on current affairs and composing our own ballads. One week our project was to write and give a presentation on something the other kids in the class knew nothing about I