Why Good Girls Don't Get Ahead... But Gutsy Girls Do (14 page)

1.
Different companies, different industries, and different parts of the country vary significantly in their dress codes. Those codes are often unwritten and not always clear.

2.
If you wear a red blazer to an industry conference, it's a safe bet to say that at least 60 percent of the other women in the room will have one on, too.

Though there are no hard-and-fast rules these days, these are the basic guidelines I believe a gutsy girl should dress by:

•  Always, always dress as if you were in the job you aspire to. This advice has been spoken many times before, but good girls don't always adhere to it. They fear that they'll seem too presumptuous dressing “powerfully.” Don't worry if a few of your co-workers give you a who-does-she-think-she-is? look when you walk in wearing a $400 suit that you spent your last dime on. The people making the decisions will be impressed.

•  If you're not good at dressing yourself, turn yourself over to someone who can do it for you. One option, of course, is to use the personal shopper at a department store—though buyer beware: many of them tend to go overboard. I tried the personal shopper route and I ended up posing for several weeks as a sixty-five-year-old matron from Greenwich. Connecticut. What finally worked for me was to find a couple of designers whose clothes always looked great on me and I never buy anything else.

•  Be gutsy enough to pack away the red blazers. Just as the navy suit and floppy tie formed a business uniform in the late seventies, the bold red or color-blocked jacket took its place in the fast-paced eighties. That kind of look may have gotten women noticed at one point, but now it's almost as much a uniform as the old one. And the accessories that get piled on with this look—pins, scarves, bracelets—can make you appear like an overdecorated room in a designer show house.Kendall Farr, who was my fashion editor at
Working Woman,
says that a far classier and more distinctive look is one of understated elegance. It starts with a simple but perfectly cut solid-colored suit in a fine fabric, and all that gets added is perhaps a great watch and a pair of antique earrings. Think of Mary Steenburgen in
Philadelphia.
It takes nerve to go the pared-down route because at first you feel underdressed. But it will give you a powerful presence.

•  Wear the clothes and accessories with the maximum style you can get away with in your company and field. You probably have a decent sense of what's considered appropriate for your firm, your industry, and your region of the United States. What works in New York can bomb in Dallas. The outfit that will dazzle them in advertising will get you banished in banking. I'm not going to advise that you be in the vanguard of breaking down existing dress codes in your company—it's really essential to stay within the parameters. But I think you should go absolutely as far as those parameters allow, rather than stay safely in the middle. Dressing with as much gutsiness as you can get away with will add energy to your image and make people notice and remember you.

I ran this theory by a woman who teaches management courses and she hinted that I was out of my mind. She said that a woman must dress conservatively and not do anything to stand out as different from “them.”

And yet, every place I turn, the women with clout have abandoned any kind of uniform. Linda Fairstein, the head of the New York County sex-crimes prosecution unit, has said that she believes her feminine suits by Escada and Calvin Klein give her more authority than “dumpy but sincere lady-lawyer suits.”

•  When in doubt, or when you need to look authoritative, do not wear pants.

•  If you need clout, wear high heels.

•  Never wear stockings that give your legs a fake suntan.

•  Wear makeup—and always freshen it after lunch.

WHAT YOUR BODY SAYS ABOUT YOU

A very successful entrepreneur told me that several months after she had started her consulting business, a client asked if he could videotape one of their sessions for reference. She agreed and then a few days later borrowed the tape because she'd begun to get curious about how she came across. What she saw horrified her.

“Through at least half the session, I was covering my mouth with my hand,” she recalls. “It was if I was saying, ‘I'm new at this and I don't have much faith in what I'm saying.’ ”

After body language was introduced as a hot topic in the 1970s, there followed dozens of books and articles on the subject, some of which I wrote myself because editors were always looking for pieces on the subject. Today it's not as hot and sexy a topic, and yet body language remains a powerful communicator of your feelings about yourself and how you're reacting to a specific situation.

Good girls especially have to be on guard about their body language. If you feel uncertain or insecure, it will show up in your posture, your gestures, your facial expressions. When I was in my twenties I felt like my body was a walking advertisement for the self-doubt I experienced in certain professional situations. One of my most hilarious memories involves going to a press event for Paul Newman's new salad dressing. I was sitting at a table, wolfing down the free hors d'oeuvres (something poor single girls always do in New York), when the press agent unexpectedly brought Newman over for me to meet. I jumped up in such an awkward manner that the strap of my purse, which was draped over my shoulder, became tangled around the chair, and once I was on my feet, the chair was actually dangling from my neck, like the world's largest pendant. “Please sit down,” Newman said curtly, looking at me as if I were a total doofus.

Even after you've developed a comfort level with your body in work situations, residual insecurities can sneak out in your gestures and movements. Once, during a rehearsal for a speech that I was dreading. I noticed in the mirror that I was literally wringing my hands as I talked. There's lots of fascinating information on body language, but these are the two most important points for good girls:

1.
Be the boss of your body language. So much of the time body language is
reactive
Your boss criticizes a tactic you take and your shoulders slump. A boisterous male colleague monopolizes a meeting and you start sinking into your seat. A client you're meeting with seems bored with what you're saying and you start playing with your hair. Develop an awareness of your body language: Is it in overdrive (you're using lots of hand signals and imaginary quotation marks)? Has it turned wimpy? Once you're more aware of it, you can modify it. Nancy Austin once told me she noticed over time that whenever she used one finger to point during a presentation, the men in the room became uncomfortable. She experimented and found that they didn't seem threatened if she pointed with two fingers.

2.
Dare to hold someone's gaze. In his classic book
Body Language,
Julius Fast said that of all parts of the human body that are used to transmit information, the eyes are the most important and can convey the most subtle nuances. And the most important technique of what he called eye management is the look or the stare. I learned the power of holding someone's gaze in a fabulous experiment. When I was a writer at
Glamour,
I was often given wacky assignments, like spending a night at a sex-toy party or seeing if I could meet a man at a health club (I refused to do “My Week at a Nudist Camp”). One of the most fascinating assignments was writing a piece about “eye power” because part of the research involved keeping a “staring diary” for two weeks. I had to stare at friends, colleagues, men on the subway, men in bars, even men coming out of porno movie houses, all in an attempt to see how people reacted. I learned from my research with Dr. Alan Mazur, Ph.D., a professor of sociology at Syracuse University, that staring rituals are part of our biological makeup and there are several rules about staring that we unconsciously obey (just the way baboons do).For instance, in a conversation between two people, the listener always feels an obligation to look at the speaker but the speaker often glances away as he or she talks, so as not to make the listener uncomfortable. One exception: The listener is less likely to maintain a steady gaze at the speaker if he has substantially more power.When a man and a woman meet or encounter each other, says Mazur, women are much more apt to be the first to avert their eyes because it's an instinctive way we display submissiveness. As part of my assignment I had to resist the good-girl urge to look away first. Instead, I would hold a person's gaze until he broke eye contact. What I learned from all this startled me. Maintaining eye contact didn't make me uncomfortable, as I had expected it might. Rather it made me feel powerful, in control— and people seemed mesmerized.Try this experiment for a day or two. As you greet people at work, pass them in the hallway, or talk to them at meetings, watch yourself and note how much of the time you are the first to avert your eyes. Then begin to change that pattern. When you shake someone's hand, hold their gaze as long as possible, allowing them to avert their eyes first. If you're about to speak at a meeting, let your eyes sweep around the table and briefly hold the gaze of each person. You'll discover that holding someone's gaze not only gives you a sense of power, but it also forges a stronger connection.One of the things that struck me about Ivana Trump when she came to lunch at
McCall's
after writing a piece for us was how strongly she held my gaze during lunch. She seemed to really
relate
to me. I laughed when, later, someone on my staff who sat at the other end of the table told me, “I felt like Ivana really connected with me. She looked at me through the entire lunch.”One caution about staring: be careful with your boss. Think of him as the dominant baboon in the colony and never attempt to stare him down.

HOW TO ENTER A ROOM AS IF YOU OWN IT

Whether you're walking into a conference room with ten people already seated or walking onto a stage to take part in a panel, it's hard not to feel awkward—and also hard to keep that awkwardness fully contained. When Liz Smith, gutsy girl par excellence, was a contributing editor of
McCall's,
I was struck by how fabulous she looked every time she entered a room. She was always the essence of poise and power. Several times she came to company cocktail parties and you would have thought a movie star had just arrived by the way people gawked at her entrance. I kept wondering what it was about her. Certainly her clothes played a big part. She wears these beautiful signature blazers—for day or night. Also, I think she's one of those people who come out of the womb with an aura around them. But I finally realized that there's something else that makes her seem so in control. She never, ever touches her hands to her face the way so many women do, particularly when they walk into a new or stressful setting. Studies show that women tend to engage in far more “self-related” activity than men, such as touching their face or pushing back their hair. When you touch your hand to your face or hair, you're announcing to the room that you're worried about how you look and how you'll come across, and everyone picks up subliminally on that insecurity.

THE MYTH OF TALKING TOUGH

Just as women were encouraged to dress like men in the 70s and 80s, we were also told we ought to talk like them too. In his 1977 bestseller
Success,
author Michael Korda said that “hitting hard” was the first rule for success for women and he issued this strong advisory: “Ambitious women must learn that they can't win by charm, persuasion and tactful pressure.”

Korda said women should try to sound even tougher than men. “Suggest radical innovations,” he said, “talk tough, accuse other people of timidity and ‘good guy’ behavior … take the hard line on every occasion. If a man suggests that the situation calls for a stiff letter, say ‘stiff letter, hell, let's sue.’ ” Korda and many other experts suggested that women completely play down their femininity when they spoke. They shouldn't talk about their feelings or personal experiences, or, God forbid, sound too sensitive.

There are several major drawbacks to this talk-like-a-man approach. As communications consultant Pam Zarit says, it's the equivalent of wearing a tight helmet on your head all day long.

And, as many women began to discover, this advice wasn't necessarily
right
—at least in many instances. Charm works, persuasion works, and so does tactful pressure. And more and more, the feminine perspective is perceived as extremely valuable.

When you let yourself speak naturally, it's both exhilarating and effective. My own liberation came through some work I did with Zarit.

I'd actually begun taking public speaking lessons after a disastrous presentation I made at
Glamour.
While an assistant in the merchandising department, I was asked to cover for a sick editor and give a short talk to store buyers on fashion trends for fall. Someone on staff who critiqued my presentation said I had come across like “a funeral director discussing coffin options.” It wasn't until I hooked up with Zarit, however, that I feel I hit my stride. The first thing she did was encourage me to talk from abbreviated notes rather than a prepared speech and to use lots of anecdotes, because she felt I sounded best when I was talking conversationally. In fact, she said, the executives she worked with who were the most charismatic speakers were those who didn't try to keep the unique aspects of their personalities under wrap for fear that they wouldn't conform to some professional model.

I soon found that this made me feel far more comfortable— and effective—as a public speaker. But something else happened, too. I began to use the same approach in one-on-one dealings. Instead of going by a script, saying what I thought a person in my position ought to say or what I assumed the other person wanted to hear, I became more and more comfortable saying what was on my mind.