Why Good Girls Don't Get Ahead_. But Gutsy Girls Do - Kate White [12]
b. make an appointment to see your boss and say that you'd like him to consider giving you a new title, with a raise to follow when he has the money.
8) You hear through the office grapevine that a colleague has called an important resource of yours, ostensibly just to checkout a lead. You
a. step into your colleague's office and say that you expect him to check with you before he contacts a source that you have cultivated.
b. bide your time, deciding that you will challenge him, but when you have actual evidence that he's been poaching on your territory.
9) On two separate occasions you find several of the people who work for you whispering behind partially closed doors. After asking yourself if something could be up, you
a. tell yourself you're being paranoid.
b. tell yourself something is definitely brewing and try to find out what it is.
10) You accept a new job that you sound perfectly suited for. Three weeks after starting, however, you realize that you've got far more to learn than you realized. As you lie in bed at night you think
a. I can do this, I can do this.
b. Oh, no. I'm in over my head.
SCORING YOURSELF
Give yourself 1 point for every b answer to questions 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9, and none for a answers to those questions. Give yourself one point for every a answer for questions 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10, and none for b answers to those questions.
If you scored 9 or 10 points, you're gutsy as hell, and I'm tempted to say give this book to a more needy friend. But since the title of the book intrigued you, there's a chance a good girl is lurking inside, and you may need reinforcement on your gutsiness (or some of your answers may have reflected how you would like to behave rather than how you generally do).
If you scored between 5 and 8, you've already developed some gutsy instincts, but you've got much more to learn.
If you scored under 5, your good-girlism is pretty seriously ingrained. You need help, but trust me, there's hope.
NO, YOU ABSOLUTELY DO NOT HAVE TO ACT LIKE A MAN
As I've talked about some of the ways gutsy girls do business, you may have begun to wonder whether acting gutsy really comes down to acting like a man.
That, after all, was the advice offered to women when they first poured into the workforce in the seventies. You may have read or at least heard of the mega best-selling book Games Mother Never Taught You by Betty Harragan. It burst on the scene in 1977, advising women that the key to making it in a man's world was to use the militaristic thinking and team-sport strategies that had worked so successfully for men. Much of the advice that appeared in the years afterwards stressed similar principles.
The trouble with that approach, as so many of us discovered Women don't feel comfortable acting or dressing like men. “When a woman tries to behave like a man,” says Barbara Berg, “she feels phony and alienated—even amputated.”
Gutsiness, to me, doesn't mean acting tough or macho or using phrases like “Let's hit ‘em where it hurts” or “Are they ready to play ball yet?” (though if you feel like it, by all means go ahead) It means trusting your instincts, going after what you want, and not being worried about what other people will think—in other words rediscovering the original gumption you felt at ten or eleven, before people did their best to derail it.
Acting like men did seem to pay off for some of the women who were in the vanguard of successful career women. Many of them probably felt it was a necessity, so they didn't seem like alien creatures. But I think a couple of factors have greatly diluted the necessity for being one of the guys. First, there's less of an emphasis in business these days on the military model. The buzzwords (and who knows if the gurus will be talking this way in ten years) are team work, empowerment, sharing the wealth. Also, as more women in higher positions have dared to act like women rather than men, it's made it far easier for the next generation of women to go in there and be themselves. New York Times