7

Climbing the Ladder

I was so excited when I got my first promotion: I recognized that move as only the first step up the ladder. I was very, very determined to keep moving up and do everything I could to make a success of myself. Part of my work ethic was to be seen as someone who would do anything, to show people that no task was beneath me.

When you get your foot in a company’s door, you have to show your boss and the people around you that you’re the go-to person, that no task is too big or too small. They need to know that whatever area or job you’re involved in, no matter how big the challenge is, you will be willing to tackle it and get it done. Even if you don’t know how to do the particular assignment or task or responsibility that’s handed to you, you have to be seen as someone who is smart enough to figure out who to talk to and find someone who can help you. It’s extremely important to be seen as one of those people management can rely on to get the job done. Go out of your way to meet people and ask all of them what they do. Ask if you can you sit in on meetings. Ask people if there is something you can help with if you have some time.

I asked questions that others maybe never asked or thought to ask, and when I was working my way up, I could see in the eyes of the people I talked to that they had confidence in me, that they felt comfortable asking me to do things they might not have asked someone else to do, for example, to work late or on weekends. If people like you and see that you’re a go-to problem solver, chances are that you’re going to get more exposure and be given more opportunities.

This ties in to the issue of whether you should stay with one company or leave and explore other opportunities at other companies. When I was starting out in my career, it was a badge of honor to spend a long period at one company and move up the ladder. That was respected because it showed that apparently you were doing something right: if the company continued to advance you and give you new opportunities and you excelled at them, you would move up the ladder. In the current business world, the model is very different, because companies look for people with multiple and varied work experience.

For example, someone starting out today might work for a time at a company such as J.Crew, which has a reputation for really understanding how to develop product. Then you might work for a company such as Ralph Lauren, which has a great understanding of men’s fashion, and then for a company such as Donna Karan, which has a great reputation for women’s fashion. Then, if you’re lucky enough, you might work for a company such as Louis Vuitton, which has an extraordinary reputation for luxury goods. If you moved up each time you changed jobs, you might consider that career path to be more exciting than staying at one company for your entire career or a good part of it. Either path can work: climbing the ladder at only one company or rotating through different companies.

I believe you’re more important to the company than the company is to you. You might not feel that way when you’re working and thinking, Am I doing the right thing by staying here? Am I going to get the next raise? Am I going to be promoted? Do I have a future at this company, or should I move on? But companies need qualified people, and when they find people they feel are really good, they want to do everything they can within their power to keep those people. Somewhere along the way in your career, you need to understand that leverage you have.

If you’re getting multiple assignments and promotions consistently within a one- or two-year period and if you are learning more in different areas of responsibility, I’d advise you to ignore the current thinking and run the course to see how far you can get in your current company. If this is not the case and your career is stagnant, you have to consider that it may be time to leave. Also, moving from one company to the next can be profitable, because when you’re homegrown in a company, you’re being compensated fairly but you won’t be as richly rewarded as you will be when you move to higher-level positions at different companies.

In my case, I had 25 different assignments at PVH in my first 25 years, culminating in president of the company (I moved up from there, too). I started as a creative person in the boys’ division (which they had at the time). That was a great place for me to start because it was a smaller division in the company and the profits weren’t as robust as those in other divisions, so the company didn’t have as extensive a staff there; that meant I could do more and experience a wider area of responsibilities, and I could move up more easily. In the rest of the company and in many other companies, there are departments devoted to specific apparel—a shirt department, a sportswear department, a children’s department, and so forth—and in each of those departments there are specialists. There’s a designer for dress shirts, another for sports shirts, another for sweaters, and another for pants. What happens in those departments is that the staffing structure devolves into “stovepipes”: in other words, employees get pigeonholed in one department, and the only way to advance is to move straight up the stovepipe. That structure doesn’t allow you to move around and learn different disciplines, and that can limit your career.

When I started as an assistant designer, I was designing boys’ dress shirts. My boss was the VP of the children’s department, and she was a knitwear expert, and so she taught me knitwear. Within a year and a half, I replaced her. I was then responsible for learning sweaters, knitwear, pants, and many other categories. Thus, I had a head start on everyone else because I was already moving up in the company. Learning entirely new disciplines is a great reason to stay with one company.

Very often in business today, it’s almost as if you’re given an index card with your name on it that says you’re a salesperson, and so for the rest of your career you’re a salesperson. You’re not trained cross-channel, and so it’s very hard to leave that stovepipe to get into merchandising or design. You have to be very lucky, your company has to like you, and you have to be determined to put aside your expertise in one area (or use it as a lever) to go into something totally new and really excel at it.

I was very fortunate that I had a head start because I had multicategory experience under me, whereas everyone I was competing with was a specialist. That was one of the reasons I moved up so rapidly in terms of salary and expertise: I had more to offer. I put myself in a position to learn everything I could about everything I could. You need to do the same thing if you want to move up in your company: keep your eyes open, recognize that knowing only one discipline could be a deterrent, and realize that if you are really striving to get ahead, you need to understand more than one area of your business.

I realize that some companies may not encourage or even allow their employees to move around the way I’m advocating. Some managers may feel that they hired you to do a specific job, and if you’re excelling at it—especially if you’re excelling at it—they don’t want you to leave that job to move to another department. They may feel they need you doing exactly what you’re doing. To avoid that situation, you need to make sure to talk to the right people (while still doing a great job) and put it in their heads that you have an interest in something else and would like to pursue it.

This approach works only if you’re well liked. Moreover, you need to show that you want to be loyal to and stay with the company but also have a need to learn. You need to present your case extremely convincingly: for example, say something like “I understand that I’m important in this division, and I will continue to do my job here well, but at the same time, could I start learning after work, or sit in on meetings in other areas, or take on some small assignments from someone working in another discipline?” If your company likes you, it will be willing to do something extra for you.

Asking to be included is usually considered a great thing. It shows that you’re interested in learning more, you care about the product, and you want to move forward in your career. You might run into politics, because there may be three other people like you who also are doing a similar job and want to learn. To stand out in that situation, you need to present yourself well, make a compelling case for why you should be included, and work yourself into the political structure of your company. Make a friend. Impress people. Ask if you can help them.

In my case, I was still working in the small division of boyswear, but the men’s shirt division was where all the money was made, and my work started to get noticed because everything I did was in really good taste. The company instructed the men’s shirt designers to come look at my work to see what I was doing. That sent a signal to management that maybe they should have me work in a more important capacity or area of the business. And they did.

First, they moved me from the kids’ division to the sportswear division; then they moved me to the cash cow, the men’s shirt division. They gave me the title of fashion director, which was really a merchant’s job overseeing all the design work. From there, the company developed sportswear collections—outerwear, pants, shirts, and sweaters—with everything under one roof, and I was earmarked to be one of the lead merchants to head up a division to put the collection business together within the company. That’s a lot of different assignments, and that’s how I was able to learn so much about so many areas of the business. Then my first real leap to another discipline was merchandising, where I started to learn the numbers. But I’m getting ahead of the story again.

Even when I was still working as a children’s designer, it wasn’t enough for me to know that there was a printed T-shirt business in which, for example, we could take a picture of a tiger and put it on the chest of a shirt. For me, it wasn’t enough to know this could be done; I wanted to understand the manufacturing process. I wanted to know, How does the picture stick to the shirt? Where do these materials come from? How long does it take to make one, and how many can you make in an hour? I had this incredible thirst for knowledge. As I started to learn more, that was when it became clear to me that designing was not my forte, but I could be the one holding the strings of that marionette I wrote about in Chapter 5. You need to decide what you want to do with your career and then make it happen. But most important, remember that “smart companies lose their people to themselves.”