I Shouldn't Be Telling You This Part 10

Many of the visions drummed up by leaders are too fuzzy to provide much help to anyone. Others are so earnest that you wonder if people feel kind of creepy being a.s.sociated with them. One way to make a vision both clear and exciting is to make it visual.

That's what Ann Edelberg did when she took over the job of producing MSNBC's Morning Joe. "I decided to treat the show like an incredible c.o.c.ktail party," she says. "Every day I wanted the show to feature the next big thing, the thing with street cred, and nothing that said 'has been.' I always erred on the side of edgy and cool. If the show was a restaurant, I saw it as n.o.bu-cool and s.e.xy and hip, even though not everyone would want to eat there. The guests we invited had to fit within those parameters. And I told the guests to view being on the show not as an interview but as a conversation."

Unless your job is to salvage some huge disaster, it's not necessary to trash what was done before you arrived. I'm always surprised by new editors in chief who come into a magazine and use their first letter from the editor to explain how they're overhauling a product that really sucked before they got there. That kind of letter must make both the staff and the readers feel like bozos. Focus on the future, not the past.

As soon as you can, meet with your direct reports one by one. No matter how crazy busy you are, find the time to do this in the first week or two. People get offended if you don't. Tell them in advance that you'd like an update from them regarding what they're working on. This is a good chance to start to learn what's really going on and begin to sense where the land mines are. You may be tempted to try to probe for a little dirt, but at this point people are in defense mode, so they're probably not going to tell you where the bodies are buried. And you don't want to look too eager for dirt.

This is also a time to share your vision individually with your top people. There's no need to go into tons of detail. That's because you're still figuring it out, and also it helps to be a bit of a mystery now. Tell them you will share more as the weeks unfold. It's good to keep them guessing a little, make them feel intrigued. And besides, anything you say is likely to be repeated.

Divide and conquer. Though some people will respond to your presence graciously and embrace your vision, others will make you feel as though you're an interloper who has disrupted their perfect ecosystem. A few may even bare their teeth like wolves whose territory has been threatened.

I've taken over five different magazines, and I've always been stunned by the way some people respond to a new boss. When I started at McCall's, one senior editor strolled by my office, popped her head in the door, and announced that there were certain ways things were done there and she'd be glad to show me. Sometimes even the good ones become victims of a pack mentality.

What they don't seem to realize is that you may have been given carte blanche to fire anyone you desire. But don't be rash. Take a few weeks to get the lay of the land, determine who's worth keeping and who isn't, and begin to engender loyalty.

In the beginning, avoid big group meetings if at all possible. Let your gut tell you who the best people are and spend as much one-on-one time with them as possible. Tell them you'd like their impressions of something fairly neutral-like on an article about the field or a report that was done just before you arrived. That will help you (1) gauge their strengths and weaknesses and (2) begin to form a bond with them.

Once you sense you can trust someone-and the person's judgment-pick his or her brain to learn as much as you can about the operation. You want to figure out the history, the real obstacles, the festering problems-all of which will enable you to hone your vision and the strategies you need to implement to pull it off. You don't want to look desperate. But you can say things such as "I'd like to hear what you think about the way this plan was implemented" and "You were here when the study was done. What, in your opinion, are the key findings?" Because you're new, you won't have all the answers, so let people guide you to a certain degree-without looking needy for the info.

When I arrived at Working Woman, the three senior editors seemed to greet me with-dare I say it?-disdain. I was seven months pregnant the day I started and had no experience in business reporting, and they clearly thought I'd duped the owner of the company. (One of them later wrote an article admitting that she'd been too much of a good girl to throw her hat in the ring for the big job, but I clearly hadn't been, even with a belly the size of a beach ball.) But there was an a.s.sociate editor named Louise who I quickly realized was incredibly well informed about business and business writers and also eager to embrace a new boss. I started working with her as much as possible.

A few weeks after I started, I asked Louise for insight into a move I wanted to make. "I think it's time to introduce a couple of new columns in the magazine," I told her. "I'd love to hear your recommendations for columnists." She gave me two names, and as I looked into them, I realized they were perfect. We signed both of them within a month. Today, I almost can't believe who those two columnists were. One was Gail Collins, who now is the marvelous New York Times op-ed columnist, and the other was Andy Grove of Intel, who a decade later was named Time's Man of the Year. Louise, wherever you are today, thank you!

Know as you go. When you land a BIG JOB, you may be past the point of requiring a course in Web design or public speaking, but there's still stuff you must know to succeed. And you probably have to put your hands on it fast. Instead of freaking about it, consider what you need to know this minute.

After Alexa Hirschfeld started Paperless Post (that's the incredible company that allows you to send fun and gorgeous e-vites) with her brother, she said she read about fifty books-by everyone from Peter Drucker to Seth G.o.din-but only when the info was required. "I would pull in as much information as I needed to know at that time about the thing I was trying to solve," she says. "Sometimes I would feel that if I didn't end up finishing a book that night, I might not be able to do my job the next day."

When I became the editor in chief of McCall's, it was the first time I was editing a magazine that had to sell big-time on the newsstand, and I didn't feel my cover line writing skill was particularly strong. I'd always admired direct response copywriting (have you ever received an enticing pitch in the mail to buy something or subscribe to a magazine? That's direct response writing) and bought several books on the subject. Then I went a step further: I paid one of the top writers in the field to come in and teach me as much as she could in a morning. It was one of the smartest things I ever did. (Come on, you didn't think I came up with cover lines such as "Never Lose an o.r.g.a.s.m Again" without any training, did you?) And the day I started at Cosmo, I hired Jane Buckingham as a contributing editor. Jane is an expert on Gen Y and Gen X, and I knew, as a baby boomer, that I needed her insights if I was going to run Cosmo successfully.

Do one big thing and thereby buy yourself some time. When I was at Working Woman, a top female executive we interviewed shared that tip for starting a BIG JOB. It's such wise advice. Yes, you need to get the lay of the land and gather info, but people are waiting for you to do something. So do something smart and splashy but relatively low risk. It will manage expectations and allow you time to really get your game on.

But once you've acquired the knowledge you need, don't sit tight, take action. Sooner is almost always better than later. One of my favorite quotes is from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar: "There is a tide in the affairs of men / Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune." Take it "at the flood."

Beware of haters. Subordinates who had wanted your position (or some of the duties of the position) will attempt to sneak responsibility or power away from you. Let them know (without losing your cool) that it's not acceptable, or they will keep trying until they are successful.

Fire the dissenters. Because you must. Give people a chance to come on board, and if they don't, get rid of them. Otherwise, they will drag you down, I swear.

Be a little bit scary. It's not bad, as I said, to keep people guessing, and it's not bad to keep them on their toes. You don't have to be b.i.t.c.hy or mean. Don't talk too much; make them wonder what you're thinking. It will guarantee that they're less complacent and more focused during your first days and months in your new job.

Part III.

{ Success: How to Savor It }.

One of the events that partly shaped my sense of how I hoped to live my life as a career woman happened when I was still in college and long before I was even certain what I wanted to do professionally. It was my junior year, and the school had invited a professor from a neighboring women's college to come and talk about feminism. My college had only recently gone coed after 175 years of being an all-male inst.i.tution, so we had hardly any female professors of our own. Almost all the girls on my floor decided to attend the lecture. The women's movement was in full bloom then, and we were eager to hear someone discuss how it might impact our lives.

I was curious, too, about what the woman would look and sound like. Back in the early and mid-seventies, there weren't many female role models in the career world. I wondered if she would wear a snappy pantsuit, which was popular then for working women, or if she'd be all jean-jacketed out, like many of the feminists I saw in the media.

The lecture turned out to be amazingly inspiring. The woman lit a fire in many of us about all the emerging possibilities for women in the world. Here's the funny thing, though. I don't recall anything specific she said that night, but I do remember in vivid detail what she wore. She was dressed in a gorgeous black c.o.c.ktail dress-and that was the thing that helped shape how I wanted to live my life.

Why was that dress so important to me? At the time there was a lot of the emphasis in the media about the struggle ahead for women. And it was tough in so many respects. But what that dress said to me was this: you may have to struggle at moments and you will have to work your b.u.t.t off, but you can be a success, and you can have a fabulous, delicious time while you're at it.

So that was always my vow to myself: to make certain that any success I achieved enhanced my enjoyment of life rather than undermined it. I never wanted to be a workaholic or someone who found herself buried under mounds of work on the weekend or preoccupied with the office while I was on vacation.

Did I manage to accomplish that? I think I've done a decent job of honoring my vow. I live in Manhattan, a city I adore and take advantage of. I love to travel, and I have done my fair share of it with my husband and kids-we've even been to Antarctica. On weekends I walk, read, and often entertain friends at dinner parties. And I've also managed to pursue my crazy back-pocket dream of writing murder mysteries.

Yet I'll be honest: it took me a while to figure out how to work things to my advantage, especially when my kids were small. Sometimes there was just too much to do. Other times I made it worse by failing to get a handle on a situation or biting off more than I could chew. One night when my kids were small, I gave an outdoor dinner party for twelve at our weekend home in Pennsylvania. I was a fool for organizing such a big dinner when I already had so much on my plate, but I hated not taking advantage of the summer.

It turned out to be a gorgeous night, and because I had a woman helping me in the kitchen, I felt in control. But during one trip to the bathroom, I became overwhelmed with fatigue. I lay my head on the sink to take a very short catnap, hoping that it would revitalize me. It worked perfectly. I returned to the table, feeling completely refreshed. But when I picked up the conversation exactly where I'd left off, one of the guests leaned in and whispered in my ear, "You've been gone forty-five minutes!"

Let's just say I've been on a learning curve. And today I'm much better at keeping the craziness at bay and savoring the success that's come my way. Because it can be done-maybe not always, but lots of the time, partly by using some of the great skills you employ at work. In this part I'll offer some of the strategies I've learned-everything from bringing more bliss into your life to wrestling down an insane day to managing your time ingeniously. I even offer a few thoughts on making time for your own back-pocket dream.

{ The Bliss Quiz: Is Your Success Making You Happy? }.

When you're really, really busy juggling work and life, it can be hard at times to a.s.sess how well you're handling everything. To me it's a little like riding a bike fast because you need to get someplace in a hurry. You're pumping and pumping and making the best time you possibly can, but you don't really consider how you're peddling or even the ground you're covering.

Sometimes a wake-up call is forced on you. You leave your wallet on the counter of the pharmacy or your kid's teacher tells you he failed to hand in a project you didn't even realize he'd been a.s.signed, and you come face-to-face with the fact that things have slipped out of your control a little-or a h.e.l.luva lot.

I've never forgotten one moment of awakening for me. My husband and I had gone away with our young kids for a family beach vacation (which, when your kids are little, really shouldn't be defined as a vacation). We'd arrived at the airport and were headed by van on a dusty, hour-long ride to the resort. It had been a tough time for me at work. My company was in the process of being sold, and though we didn't know it officially yet, there was a lot of weirdness in the air.

All of a sudden my husband, clearly empathizing with what I'd been experiencing, reached over and gave my shoulders a quick ma.s.sage. It wasn't until his hands touched my rock-hard shoulders that I realized how rattled and b.u.mmed out I'd been feeling. I knew I needed to use the vacation not only to enjoy my family but also to try to find my way back mentally to a less frazzled place.

Many women feel under enormous stress today, even women who don't have young kids in the mix. In early 2012, I did a website poll at Cosmo asking women if they felt they were headed for a burnout. Among women eighteen to twenty-four years old, an absolutely shocking 84 percent said yes, and among those twenty-five to thirty-four, 86.5 percent said yes. And in all age groups, around 90 percent said they often felt stressed and overwhelmed. Those numbers aren't a surprise when you think how much pressure we're all under these days as workplaces demand an ever-expanding amount of our time and energy.

So I doubt I'm being presumptuous in saying you want less stress and more pleasure in your life as a working girl. The first step is to a.s.sess what your stress-to-bliss ratio is. Take this quiz for a quick evaluation.

1. A long weekend is coming up, the kind where you get Monday off as well. What will you use the extra day for?

a. To take a long bike ride I haven't had time for lately.

b. To get a jump start on an upcoming work project-dressed in my PJs c. To catch up on laundry and finally repaint my bedroom.

2. What's the most recent piece of advice a friend gave you?

a. "You ought to write self-help books-your advice is that good."

b. "I think you'd enjoy our nights out more if you weren't always checking your e-mails."

c. "Try to get more sleep. The bags under your eyes are big enough to pack for a weekend trip."

3. When you have a ton on your plate during a certain period, what word or phrase would your romantic partner, use to describe you?

a. Crazy busy b. Crazed c. Crazy 4. If you have kids, how do they generally grab your attention when they need it on a busy night?

a. They just say, "Hey, Mom?"

b. They start nagging or whining.

c. They give the cat a bubble bath.

5. Look down at your nails-how are they holding up these days?

a. I make sure to keep on top of them because it's an instant confidence boost.

b. The polish is a little chipped, but they're not hideous.

c. The manicurist would need a weed whacker to deal with my cuticles.

6. What's the last part of your bedtime routine?

a. Slathering on some rich body b.u.t.ter before slipping between the nice new sheets I treated myself to b. Catching up on reading in the tub c. Checking e-mail, Facebook, and Twitter one last time 7. Everything is going wrong at work today. How do you calm down and regroup to make it through the day?

a. I step out for a short walk.

b. I take a deep breath and remind myself that in a few hours the day will be over. Till then, I just keep trying to fix anything that goes wrong as fast as possible.

c. I drain a double cappuccino, run damage control for the rest of the day, and apologize the next day to anyone I snapped at.

8. When was the last time you called your best friend or sister to catch up?

a. Yesterday. We try to swap stories at least once a week even with our hectic schedules.

b. Does texting count as an actual conversation?

c. When I wished her happy birthday-three months ago.

9. Your partner whisked you away for a BlackBerry/iPhone-free weekend at a country inn. How many times did you secretly check your messages?

a. None. The only electronics used were the toys in the bedroom.

b. None while we were there. But I used the whole drive home to catch up. That wasn't part of the agreement.

c. Whenever he went to the bathroom or stepped out of the room-just to make sure my in-box wasn't blowing up.

10. Your favorite thing to do alone is: a. Read a fabulous novel b. Check out all my saved-up Pottery Barn catalogues c. Alone?

If you answered mostly a's, can I please meet you? It's clear that you've brilliantly managed to find a way to savor your success and not let craziness from work bleed over into your personal life. You are excellent at fully engaging in what you're doing without mentally being dragged elsewhere. (And your friends and family appreciate it.) Plus, it seems that not only do you make time for yourself, you also know how to find the bliss in everyday moments. You're helping to keep the body b.u.t.ter industry in business, but hey, you deserve it.

If you answered mostly c's, I'm probably not telling you anything you don't already know: work and stress are getting the better of you. You must be working tough hours, or maybe you're under an extreme amount of pressure right now, or you may have more on your to-do list than seems humanly possible to manage. There's a good chance you also have kids under five years old! You may know you need to do something about your situation, but you feel so under the gun that you don't even try. You arrive home from work feeling crazed, and that sensation has barely subsided by bedtime (and checking your messages before bed doesn't help).

If you answered a lot of b's (with a few a's and c's thrown in), I can relate. I was a "b girl" for many years. B's mean that despite how busy your life is, you make an effort at least to keep things balanced-even programming in some "me" time. The trouble is, your approach is kind of catch as catch can, so you end up never allowing yourself to fully savor and enjoy. Skimming the Pottery Barn catalogue is good, but it's never going to bring you lasting pleasure.

In the next chapters you'll find some strategies for preventing work pressures from infringing on your personal life and increasing the amount of blissful moments. If you answered mostly a's, I bet you'll still find inspiration. If you answered mostly c's, I hope the advice will help you begin the process of taking back your personal life. You're going to need more than a few scented candles to make it happen, but once you start, you'll have momentum.

If you answered mostly b's, you may need the advice more than you realize. I suspect that most women fall into the b category. We think we are doing okay, but our efforts are only skin deep. It's great to have a wake-up call. Mine was when my husband gave me that ma.s.sage. Maybe this quiz will work like that for you.

{ Why You Must Absolutely Be the Boss of Your Personal Life, Too }.

As successful working women, we're good at managing people and projects and making things run as we want them to. We know how to delegate, ask for help, close out a project, and set aside time for what matters. But we don't always bring those great bossy skills to our personal lives. Thus we sometimes find ourselves stuck doing tasks we can't stand, dogged by unfinished projects (such as the overstuffed hall closet or the unopened Rosetta Stone), and with not nearly enough time for the activities that give us pleasure. Lately a professional friend and I were trying to arrange a lunch, and she sent me the following e-mail: "The twenty-sixth isn't good. How about the thirty-seventh?" It was as if her subconscious was telling her that she needed many more days in a month to fit everything in.

Did you take the quiz in the previous chapter? If you did and the score made you see that you're not savoring your success, it's time to make an adjustment. Because the opposite of not savoring is often mega stress and misery, and that not only keeps the pleasure away, it also hurts your health. Here are the best solutions I've learned.

8 Ways to Reduce Craziness and Stress 1. Stop using the phrase "I'm so busy." This is a tip from my longtime friend Judsen Culbreth, former editor in chief of Working Mother magazine and now an editor of Mobile Bay magazine in Alabama. As she points out, "words have this tricky way of becoming our feelings." Meaning that if you say you're busy, you will certainly feel busy. If you say you're crazed, you will feel crazed.

2. Regularly pose the question to yourself, "Why am I doing this?" Followed by "Does it have to be done at all?" If the answer to the second question is yes, ask, "Could anyone else do it?" These questions help you see that there is much you can actually let go of, allowing you to focus instead on your priorities. For instance, asking myself the first question forced me to realize that I was sending out Christmas cards because I thought I should rather than because I wanted to. How great it felt to let that task fall by the wayside.

3. Nail down your "no" phrase. It's so darn hard to say no. Therefore women end up saying yes when they don't want to simply because they can't spit the word out. Figure out a phrase that's going to work for you whenever you need to decline graciously, and rely on it every time. It should be concise (so you get it out quickly), polite (you don't want to be rude), slightly vague (you don't want the other person to offer an alternative for you to say yes to), and unequivocal (you want to sound sure of the decision). One phrase that works well is "Thanks for thinking of me, but unfortunately I won't be able to at this time." Do not elaborate.

And say no right away. Don't tell the person you'll get back to her because then not only will you agonize about the decision, you'll disappoint or annoy her because she thought it was a possibility.

4. Be open to reengineering. I'm sure you've developed some terrific routines for accomplishing personal stuff. But it's good to step back from time to time and question them-even the ones you have down to a science. Ask yourself: (1) does this work as well as it should? and (2) is there possibly another, better way to do it?

Judsen Culbreth's husband taught her about reengineering after she'd had her second child and was balancing being a mother and wife with a demanding job. "I asked my husband what more he could do to help now that we had a new baby," she says. "One of the things he picked was shopping for my older child's clothes. But instead of taking her to the store with him-always stressful-he took out a tape measure and measured her arms, inseams, etc. He wrote the information on a two-by-five card and took that to Macy's instead. He'd reengineered a task and made it far less crazy. I learned from watching that."

5. Don't be dogged by a long personal to-do list. Is there really no one to delegate a task to? Then deal with it as soon as possible. One of my biggest mistakes after my kids were born was that I allowed a monster to-do list to stalk me like the hound of h.e.l.l. The smartest thing I could have done was to occasionally take a personal half day and wipe everything off my list, but I never wanted to use my personal days that way. I would have been so much better off doing so and preventing that hound from relentlessly nipping at my heels every day.

6. Don't always see stress as a demon. Mika Brzezinski points out that stress isn't going away, so we should "embrace it, learn how to harness it, and make it work for us." Tell yourself you're going to convert stress into energy to power through a project so you get it out of the way.

7. Ask yourself if you need to be working as late as you do. Have you ever noticed how people love to brag about how many hours they work each week? There's the sixty-hour week and the eighty-hour week and even worse. Yes, many of us have ended up in downsized conditions and have no choice but to work longer. But are you doing it simply because it's become a habit or because other people in your office are doing it and you feel you have to follow suit? Test the waters and leave earlier. Watch the sunset at home.

8. Resist mult.i.tasking. Many studies have shown that when you mult.i.task, neither activity is done well or with true satisfaction. (I once tried to do a radio interview at my desk while reading e-mails and lost my train of thought!) 8 Ways to Bring on the Bliss 1. Figure out the things that give you great pleasure (or could give you great pleasure if you were already doing them), and find a way to include them in your life. When I was the editor of Redbook, my life was particularly zany. My kids were young then, and I dashed home from work each day just after five, fixed dinner, supervised homework, read to the kids, and then, after they went to bed, worked for several more hours. My husband and I had just bought an old town house in Manhattan, and I was also trying to contend with renovations that had left parts of the house in shambles. My idea of "me" time back then was watching Law & Order reruns at 11 p.m. I felt frazzled most days.

One afternoon, my eighty-something next-door neighbor asked me to attend a lecture with her at the Explorers Club. Because I admired her fiercely and knew she lived alone, I could not bring myself to use the "no" phrase I advocated earlier. The talk turned out to be on Turkey, and as the lecturer's slides flashed on the screen, I had an epiphany. With all the demands of my life, I'd let one of my great pleasures-travel-slip away. I made a pledge to myself to bring it back with at least one trip a year.

The key thing is to build good stuff into your schedule. Dr. Holly Phillips says that one of the activities that affords her the most pleasure is seeing her girlfriends, so without fail she has drinks with her friends on a certain night of the week.

2. Be in the moment. When your life is packed, it's easy to get caught up in thinking about what you need to do next or what happened just before. My yoga instructor, Angela Attia, who is also an extremely talented aerialist (and Stanford grad!), taught me something life-changing from the Tantric philosophy, the type of yoga she practices.

"We need to learn to be more present in every moment and fully enjoy whatever is there at that moment," she says. "It's all about bringing your mind to what your body is actually experiencing right now." So, for example, if you eat a piece of chocolate, you want to savor every morsel of it. If you walk down the street, you want to take a moment to notice some interesting piece of architecture or simply how warm your toes feel in your new socks. "We have to keep giving ourselves reminders to come back to enjoying all that our senses have to offer us," Attia says. "Because in between will be moments when life's mundaneness or hectic pace takes us away from that."

3. Ask for what you want. I talked a lot in part I about the importance of asking for what you want on the job. But you must also ask for what matters in your personal life.