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Embrace Your Dream and Do a Diagnostic
Do you have a vision for yourself? A clear picture of your career destination? Do you know what success—your success—will look and feel like?
Executive coach Gail Blanke suggests that anyone contemplating an arduous undertaking remember Walt Disney’s advice to the executives planning the Magic Kingdom: build the castle first. Back in 1971 when he was spearheading that first theme park, he understood that everyone involved in achieving his dream—from the Madison Avenue ad men selling it to the guys hacking their way through the mosquito-infested Florida swamp—needed literally to see the majesty and the beauty of this vision, lest they forget what they were working toward. So the first thing to rear up out of the Orlando swamp was, in fact, Disney’s castle, which, with its fluttering flags and soaring gilded turrets, was the very embodiment of the magic he intended to make. It worked wonders, lifting morale, enhancing performance. As Blanke observes, “Nothing really big, really bold, or really beautiful was ever created in a country, in a company, in a family, or in a life without a vision—a vision so powerful that people will work miracles to bring it to life.”
The Vision Thing
Building a successful career is one tough journey. No matter who you are, no matter where you’re coming from, and no matter what you bring to the undertaking, you need a vision: not just a goal, but a dream; not just a destination, but an inspiration. A good sense of direction and loads of drive will serve you well, but you’ve got to see where you’re headed to set a course and be hugely motivated by what you see in order to push forward. With a magnificent castle beckoning on the horizon, you can fend off swarms of mosquitoes and keep lifting your feet out of the muck.
The vision thing, however, is where women falter. They set out with a purpose, but not a dream. They are committed and driven, yet hesitant to put their foot down on the gas and keep it there. As Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, points out in her new book Lean In, it’s as though they’re driving with one foot on the brake, holding back in tiny but impactful ways from the get-go, pruning their career plans to accommodate marriage and children long before they’re even in a relationship. Rather than build their castle and strive to inhabit it, they tentatively sign on to an arduous journey and hope their slog will deliver them someplace sometime.
What accounts for this ambivalence, this seeming failure of vision? There are three things going on here.
For starters, women continue to have more distractions than men. For two decades, they have toddlers or teenagers nipping at their heels, and no matter what their child-care arrangements, that’s a significant preoccupation (as is the ticking biological clock that precedes these decades). They’re also still burdened with more than their fair share on the home front (our research shows that 56 percent of working women shoulder 75 percent of the child care, and 60 percent do 75 percent of the chores). Taken together, the second and third shift at home mean that, at work, women simply don’t have the “white space,” or unencumbered time, to do some blue-sky thinking about who they want to be, what they want to do, and where they want to end up.
Then there’s the ongoing lack of compelling role models. Few female leaders provide an image of success women can really embrace. If they happen to be world leaders (think Condoleezza Rice) or monumentally successful businesswomen (think Oprah Winfrey), then we’re obliged to dwell on what they don’t have—the missing life partner, the nonexistent offspring—that we’re just not prepared to sacrifice ourselves. Older women in particular throw into relief the awful bargain that ambitious women must seemingly strike—the kind of glaring sacrifice men just don’t have to make. If somehow a woman does win the triple crown—career, spouse, children—we hold against her the sacrifices we feel aren’t being made but should be. Remember how Hillary Clinton was pilloried for taking command and control of the health-care bill during her stint as First Lady? And how, at the same time, her cookie-baking prowess came under scrutiny? Implicit in the attacks was the suggestion that by driving a pivotal piece of legislation, she was shortchanging her husband and child and, indeed, the nation, as White House wife and mother.
The other reality is that amazingly capable women who do make it to a career pinnacle rarely talk about the agency, impact, influence, and joy that come with their achievement. Instead they talk about sacrifice and struggle. Looking back, I’m at fault myself. I’m sure that during the years I was coping with difficult childbearing experiences (I miscarried twins and subsequently gave birth to an extremely premature child), I failed to fully “share” with students and colleagues the enormous satisfaction I derived from publishing my first book or giving my first keynote address. But my voice was inconsequential. Women who have real power bear a particular responsibility to talk eloquently, openly, and frequently about the fruits of success. Consider Anne-Marie Slaughter’s piece in the October 2012 issue of the Atlantic Monthly.1 In this poignant article (which went viral and was read by millions), she chooses to focus not on the magic of her dream job (she headed up policy planning at the US State Department), but on the unexpectedly fierce tugs and pulls exerted by her teenage son back home in Princeton. With searing honesty she walks us through just how difficult it had become to “do the kind of job I wanted to do as a high government official and be the kind of parent I wanted to be, at a demanding time for my children.” As I read the article I wanted her to also paint a rich and alluring portrait of how wonderful it was to have impact and agency in Washington. What did it feel like to shape foreign policy at a watershed moment in history—when American power in the world was newly projected by an African American president and a female secretary of state? Now that role and position might be worth sacrifice and struggle.
In other words, female ambition is laced with ambivalence because every fluttering flag women see on the horizon bespeaks of a burning castle, a success not worth attaining at the price it will extort. Younger women, fearful that too much success will scare off eligible men, scale back their castle and embark on their careers with one foot on the brake. More-senior women, unwilling to uproot and relocate their families should they be selected for a regional directorship, duck below the radar of the search committee or succession planners. They’re not afraid of hard work, but they most certainly fear what hard work will net them in the way of greater visibility, accountability, and time away from their families. That a top job might endow them with significant autonomy, or grant their children singular opportunities, or position them to effect sweeping change for all women seems not to hold much sway in their calculus. They’re focused strictly on the cost.
This gloomy state of affairs needn’t persist. Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer, and US Senator Elizabeth Warren are already changing the conversation, showing that women can not only win the triple crown, but also revel in its spoils. Some of these voices—Cherie Blair, Joanna Coles, and Sallie Krawcheck, for example—you’ll find in this book. In the final chapter, I’ll share my own castle and describe how I dreamed it and what I feel about it now that I inhabit it. That should get you thinking about a bold and beautiful vision for your own success. This is the first step in your journey.
JOANNA COLES
You’ve likely seen her on TV, on CBS playing herself as the formidable editor in chief of Cosmopolitan, or in her mentor role on Project Runway All Stars, judging the career prospects of aspiring fashion designers. Or maybe you caught one of her many appearances on national news programs including Anderson Cooper 360, CBS This Morning, and MSNBC’s Morning Joe.
Ever since 2011, when Adweek named her “Editor of the Year” in recognition of the extraordinary job she’d done at Marie Claire, Joanna Coles has been seizing the national spotlight—the very embodiment of the Cosmo girl with her chic looks and cheeky professionalism.
And she’s clearly loving every minute.
“I didn’t realize, before I became editor in chief of Marie Claire, how much I was going to enjoy being in charge,” she says.
Since September 2012, when I interviewed her, Joanna’s been in charge of Cosmopolitan, the world’s largest women’s magazine with sixty-four international editions and best-selling digital and newsstand versions. The job entails much more than overseeing content for the print magazine: there is also the website, tablet, and brand extensions, including Cosmo Radio on Sirius/XM, the Cosmopolitan Collection of lingerie, handbags, and shoes at JCPenney, and even a joint venture with Harlequin Books. Yet when we spoke, she wasn’t the least bit stressed. On the contrary, this is the level of command she’s sought her entire life.
“I love seeing my ideas of what a magazine for women should be unfold, and watching them take shape over a number of issues. It’s thrilling being the person ultimately making the decisions.”
She knows only too well the frustrations of being number two—the role she played at More magazine prior to taking over at Marie Claire in 2006. “I would be consulted, of course, and would give my opinion—it might be the choice of cover art or the mix of features within the magazine,” she explains. “But in the end it wasn’t my decision and I would often disagree. You yearn to play out your own vision.”
In her six-year tenure at Marie Claire, that vision played out in extraordinary ways. For two years running, the magazine was nominated for public service awards for its investigative journalism. One story on buried rape kits—evidence victims submitted to police that was subsequently ignored—got the magazine shortlisted for an award that ultimately was conferred on The New Yorker. “Just the fact we were up there alongside a storied magazine with a huge tradition of investigative journalism made me so proud,” she told me. “Traditionally, women’s magazines are not in this territory.”
Coles’s vision also proved remarkably successful in terms of ad revenues, which she boosted by 31 percent over the course of 2011. With 181 pages of glossy, high-end advertisements from the likes of Gucci and Bulgari, the spring 2012 issue broke a record in the magazine’s seventeen-year history. Newsstand sales rose, too, despite the downward trend in print media overall and the sluggish economy.
Many former journalists would find that kind of success stressful. But Coles, who used to chase down everyone from politicians to criminals to file stories for The Guardian and the Times of London, finds her high-visibility job at the helm “hugely liberating.” What produces stresses and strains, she told me, is not being in control of your schedule, especially if you’re a parent and are tugged and pulled by responsibilities to children. She remembers with painful clarity a hellish week that began on the morning of her son’s second birthday. Her editor at the Times called to have her cover a breaking story about two professors who’d been stabbed at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. She told him she couldn’t do it; he called back and told her he really needed her to do this. So she handed the birthday boy to her husband who had just arrived home from a business trip, traveled to Dartmouth, and set about capturing the story—interviewing neighbors, hiring a photographer, and staying up until 5:00 a.m. to meet the deadline. And then her editor called to say that, as much as everyone loved the story, they weren’t going to run it until the end of the week.
“That was the moment I realized these two lifestyles are no longer compatible,” she said. “Here I’d just missed my son’s second birthday for a story that didn’t run. I knew what my priorities were: I wanted to work and I wanted to have a family. But I needed more control and the impetus was on me to go find it.”
Finding the right job wasn’t easy. Coles took an editing job at New York Magazine, as it seemed to offer, with more regular hours, more control. Instead, she found herself working until 11 p.m. three days a week, and going home to a “second shift” (she often was up all night with her newborn). “It was the only time I’ve understood what it must be like to be a drug addict,” she said. “I would get up in the morning and all I could think about was when I could get more sleep, how I could get more sleep, I have to get more sleep. If someone could have given me an intravenous drip of sleep, I would have taken it. I was desperate. Those three years were really tough.”
But she powered through, sustained by her belief that she would “eventually run the show.” When she got the job heading up Marie Claire, she at last had the control—over her schedule and over the strategic vision of the magazine—she had sought throughout her career. “I suppose this boils down to power,” she commented, “but that’s not how I thought about it at the time. I saw it as the ability to drive the right decisions in areas of life that I cared about most.”
In addition to her role at Cosmopolitan, Coles derives enormous joy and satisfaction in being at the red-hot center of the fashion world. For two seasons prior to taking over the magazine, she starred in Project Runway All Stars, the spin-off of Project Runway that she helped create with Marie Claire fashion director Nina Garcia. Fashion allows her, she says, a unique perk: to be celebratory about the place she’s in and the living she earns. She laments that women cannot talk about money without seeming “braggy”—and unlikeable. “It’s increasingly important to earn your own money,” she observes. “It buys you freedom from a miserable relationship. It buys you freedom from bosses you’re no longer in sync with. Being on edge financially is very stressful. It undermines your energy.” She adds, “These are things we women don’t talk about enough.”
Dare to Dream
So you’re going to dream, and you’re going to dream big. You’re going to embrace your God-given right to power, influence, agency, and impact. You’re going to own your ambition, and you’re going to design a castle for it, right here and now. Because without a clear sense of your destination, there’s no point in getting yourself a sponsor. Sponsors are the dream enablers.
To get started with this dream work, consider the following questions:
- What place would feel magical? What kind of room or space do you want to inhabit? What is the view when you look out the window?
- Whom do you want to meet with? Who intrigues you or excites you? What sort of conversation do you wish you could have with them?
- What transformation do you most want to drive? What sort of large-scale change do you wish you could be part of?
These are challenging questions, which is why women put them off. But if you give yourself permission to contemplate any and all answers—if you don’t burden the process by trying to be realistic or pragmatic, if you forget the “should” and don’t think about the “cans”—this exercise can be incredibly liberating and inspiring. If it’s not, or you’re having trouble silencing that ever-rational left brain, turn to the epilogue. You might well benefit, too, from consulting the vast tranche of motivational literature, including Gail Blanke’s book, Throw Out Fifty Things: Clear the Clutter, Find Your Life.2
Just commit to building a castle, if not the castle. Understand you are not going to make any more excuses or tolerate any more postponements. No matter how old you are, you simply don’t have time. None of us do. There will be plenty of detours and side railings without you furnishing your own at the very start.
Do a Diagnostic
Now you can get pragmatic: with those turrets and flags fluttering on the horizon, you can determine what you’ve got in your kit that will help you attain your dream.
Assess what you have: what you’ve done, what you’ve proven you can do, what you’re ready to do again. Resist the temptation to catalog skills you don’t have, or feel you should have by now, or are afraid you’ll never have. Catalog only your strengths. It’s essential you answer the following questions:
- What do you do exceptionally well? In what skill sets do you have your black belt?
- What is your currency? What sets you apart?
- What experiences distinguish you?
- What inherent or acquired differences lend you a distinctive brand or value added that others may not bring to the table?
- What accomplishment has given you joy and won you accolades? What gives you satisfaction so you want to do more of it?
- How does the mission or mandate of your organization overlap with your own values or goals?
This is heavy lifting, but you needn’t do it alone. This work is ideal to take up with a mentor. Mentors have the time and the inclination to help you with your self-assessment as well as your blue-sky thinking. A selfless desire to help you with your future is what makes them mentors. They can see and put into words what you may not see about yourself or be able to articulate. You might also consult online assessment tools and any performance reviews that have been done on you at work (if you’ve not been evaluated, now’s the time to make that request). Classes, seminars, or lectures are other good opportunities to hold a mirror to yourself or discover what you didn’t know about your abilities. Remember, the inventory you want to take is strictly positive.
CHERIE BLAIR
To most Americans, Cherie Blair is a Famous Wife—the spouse of ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair and mother of his four children.
In fact, there is another Cherie: Cherie Booth QC, as she is known professionally, a barrister who has achieved one of the highest honors of the legal profession as a member of the Queen’s Counsel. It was Cherie, and not Tony, who first attained a coveted pupilage in the chambers of Derry Irvine, adviser to the Labor Party and Lord Chancellor for the first six years of Tony Blair’s tenure as Prime Minister. Many supposed that Cherie, a blazing star in the legal profession, would enter public office ahead of Tony. “I was always interested in politics,” she explains. “But I learned fairly early on that my skills as an advocate and my imagination as a lawyer were better used to achieve social change.”
Booth knew firsthand the difficulties women faced if they were not allied with men. Raised by her mother and paternal grandmother—her father abandoned the family when she was a baby, and her grandfather died when she was fourteen—Booth excelled at school, earning a First class degree at the London School of Economics and winning the prize for top student. She was top-of-her-class on the bar exams, as well. When she went to get a job as a lawyer, however, she found that being a wife and mother were the only identities others perceived. “Suddenly I learned the reality of the world in the 1970s: that women still should know their place,” she comments. “The assumption was that backing a woman wasn’t a good idea because obviously, she would leave.”a
Booth did not leave. Through the births of three of her children, she committed herself to challenging cases in employment and discrimination law, a brand-new field in which she was ideally credentialed. The cases she took on—arguing on behalf of a Muslim schoolgirl who wanted to wear a hijab to school, on behalf of a lesbian who sued South-West trains for denying concessions to her partner, and seeking damages for a girl whose school failed to diagnose her dyslexia—established her as a formidable voice in social justice and a viable contender for the Queen’s Counsel.
Soon after the birth of her third child in 1988, Booth decided to move chambers (the UK equivalent of changing law firms) in order to position herself for her QC bid, approaching one of the firms who’d turned her down when she was seeking her first position as a barrister—“quite a hard thing, a masculine thing, for me to do,” she notes. In addition to her caseload, Booth was involved in the bar’s council, chaired the bar’s IT committee, and was mounting a bid for Queen Counsel, all while her husband was campaigning to lead the Labor Party. The day she heard she’d been appointed QC turned out to be, coincidentally, the very day she and her husband were invited to dine with the Queen. “It’s quite rare for a QC to be able actually to thank the Queen personally for being appointed,” Booth notes. “It was a fantastic moment. I felt I had achieved something truly significant by dint of my own efforts and abilities.” She was the seventy-sixth woman in Britain’s history to “take silk,” a reference to the gown that QC barristers wear in court. At forty-one years old, she was by far the youngest.
Booth has acquired many accolades since then. Today, she’s recognized globally for her ongoing human rights advocacy, particularly on behalf of women. Indeed, her work spearheading the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women, which has improved the earning power and life prospects of twenty thousand women worldwide, won her a CBE in the January 2013 honors list. “Having financial independence has given me a voice; other women should be able to have that voice, too,” she says. “It’s fantastic to think I have done something to help them.”
But to this day, she regards the QC ceremony as her crowning achievement. The photos capture some of the pomp: the long, full-bodied wig, the elaborate lace ruffle, the pair of breeches she had specially made in lieu of the skirt her predecessors had been made to wear. Nor will she ever forget piling into a Rolls-Royce with her children, being driven to Westminster Hall in Parliament, and being greeted by the clerk in his gloves and morning suit. “It’s a very old ritual,” she explains. “The Lord Chancellor makes a speech about the importance of the legal system and, one by one, all the new silks take an oath of allegiance to the Queen. After that you’re called to the Lord Chief Justice’s court, the highest judge in the land, where you move to the outer bar. In my year it was a particularly big event, not because of me (though there was a lot of press because I was the Leader of the Opposition’s wife) but because six women were appointed, the most ever.”
With her sister and mother in attendance, Booth was especially conscious of the three generations of dreams she carried that day. “What was going through my head was how proud my mum was, and how proud my grandmother would have been,” she recalls. “From a very early age my grandmother had been a huge fan of Rose Heilbron—the first female silk—because Heilbron was, like her, from Liverpool. My grandmother used to go and watch her plead in court. I don’t think that in all those years when she was such a big fan of Rose’s that she ever thought her granddaughter would become Heilbron’s successor. That day at Westminster gave me a huge sense of accomplishment and gratitude. It was a pretty big thing for a working-class girl from Liverpool to have done.”
Assess Your Organization
Having a confident handle on what you bring to the mission is half the diagnostic. The other half is assessing the context in which you’ll be leveraging those strengths. You must map the organizational landscape. Consider the following questions:
- Is your firm flat (few titles, no apparent ladder) or hierarchical? If there is a ladder, how is it constructed?
- What do titles mean in terms of what you do, where you do it, and whom you manage? Where are you on the ladder?
- If your organization is flat and titles mean nothing, how do you then navigate the organization?
- What deliverables will get you promoted? As I discovered as a young professor, being “teacher of the year” was certainly an indication of high performance, but it did not win me tenure. Nor did publishing a high-impact trade book. Publication in obscure but highly regarded, peer-reviewed journals was the deliverable I should have focused on.
- What are the notch points—the sticky places, the plateaus, dips, or pitfalls—you need to power through? Every company, every profession, every worthwhile journey has these shoals, and many capable employees have foundered on them. Identify them now so that when you do win a sponsor, you know where to focus his or her efforts.
Again, for help with this homework, turn to mentors. A well-chosen mentor will know the lay of the land in your firm. More importantly, he or she has successfully navigated it. Mentors can help you understand the unwritten rules, provide a map for the uncharted corridors to power, and reveal the business behind the business. They are typically not positioned to make your dream happen, nor do they owe you that kind of leg up. But in assisting you with this essential assessment, they prepare you to attract sponsors.
- Look for role models. Read about people (like Coles and Booth) whose achievements inspire you. Keep refreshing your pool. It’s important you have a robust sampling, lest the daily cavalcade of stories about unrewarded struggle or unwarranted sacrifice succeed in dampening your drive. Amazing people triumph, often overcoming hurdles far greater than your own. Put them in your sights.
- Envisage yourself at age fifty, with twenty-five productive years ahead of you. It’s never too late to focus on a goal and go after it.
- Consult with a mentor, role model, or personal development coach who can help you see the big picture. Brainstorm a professional target list. Write down your aspirations, however modest or fabulous, and figure out how to hold yourself accountable.
- If you’ve had your performance assessed using an industry diagnostic (a Hogan Personality Inventory or 360-degree review, for example), ask for the results and review them with your manager and/or mentor to zero in on your strengths. If you haven’t had a performance review, informal or formal, ask for one. No matter what size company you work for, somebody’s taking your measure. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to benefit from their perspective.