Why Good Girls Don't Get Ahead_. But Gutsy Girls Do - Kate White [47]
“That's easy,” said the woman “He'd be blaming the clients. I'd be blaming myself.”
In a study by the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL), executives were asked to respond to the statement, “Tell me about a time you tried something and failed.” All of the women responded in detail, but half of the men said they could not come up with a single example. “It's likely that both men and women make the same number of mistakes,” notes CCL director of leadership technologies Ellen Van Velsor, “but women agonize more over them.”
Countless studies on attribution have revealed that men tend to blame outside forces for their setbacks, whereas women assume the problem lies totally with them. Is it any wonder? Dr. Myra Sadker and Dr. David Sadker found in their research on schoolkids that teachers often explained away boys’ poor performance (“Maybe you were tired,” or “Maybe you didn't get enough sleep”), while rarely offering the same kind of out for girls.
Now it would be nice if you could just say to yourself, I'm not going to let it bug me anymore, but that's a tad unrealistic. One gutsy girl I know who runs a major division in a company says that she realizes she can't change years of ingrained behavior so she allows herself five minutes of self-flagellation and then she moves on.
What men do so well is find their own special words to position any setback. It's something society seems to program them to do. My brother Rick told me the most enlightening tidbit the other day. He was shopping for a new suit and after trying on a few jackets, it became clear that because he'd gained a few pounds he wasn't going to have much luck with a standard cut. The salesman looked at him with a smile and said, “I think you'd do better with the executive fit.”
Now when women gain weight we have to head for stores like Forgotten Woman. But guys get the executive fit.
They play the same kind of word game with setbacks. For instance, they never say, “My idea got shot down.” They say, “We decided to go in another direction.” Try this wonderful re-labeling game yourself.
What works for me, I've discovered, is to go on an information-gathering mission.
I learned this strategy during a night of newsstand hell after I'd been at Child magazine for about seven months. My first four covers had sold really well on the newsstand, and I was happy to know there were some basic principles for success. But one day, to my dismay, a piece of paper arrived from Circulation indicating that sales estimates for the last issue were being revised significantly downward and that projections for the most recent issue were very low.
That night I couldn't stand thinking about the situation any longer so I took the ten previous covers of Child, laid them on my bed, and began trying to analyze what worked and what didn't. Did girls sell better than boys? Were cute clothes better than trendy ones? Did a little drool on the mouth turn off the buyer or endear her? Did a big behavior line on top, like HOW TO TAME A TEMPER TANTRUM, help sell better than a health one, like ARE VEGETABLES SAFE FOR KIDS? No clear pattern was emerging yet, but at least my juices were flowing, and I knew that I'd eventually figure it out. Also, the research had given me something to do other than agonize.
The next day, I arrived at my office feeling galvanized. Do you know what I discovered? That there'd been a typo in the circulation news I'd gotten and that the two covers were actually projecting to sell very high. Fantastic news, but I swear that my greatest relief was not from getting the revised sales information What delighted me was that I had finally found a way to deal with bad news: Get more information.
You may be reluctant, as good girls often are, to poke around for fear of what you'll turn