Likeable badass, p.18
Likeable Badass, page 18
You’ll know your long-term priorities are clear when you can answer this question without hesitation: “How likely is it that risking some of my likeable badass reputation today will advance one or more of my long-term goals?” It’s hard to know for sure that anything we do today is guaranteed to benefit us tomorrow, which is why I phrase this question in terms of likelihood. If you think there’s a “good chance” that risking a little Warmth or Assertiveness now may benefit you in the future, then it’s probably worth it. If you think chances are “slim,” then you may want to save your status for another day.
There are two different exercises I recommend trying to help you clarify your long-term priorities. I think they’re useful in different ways, so I advise you to do both. But if one resonates much more than the other, it won’t hurt my feelings if you pick your favorite. I also encourage you to complete these exercises now. Waiting until a critical spending decision is urgent is a mistake. Unfortunately, at that point, your mind will be too clouded to develop meaningful priorities. Like Samantha experienced, you may have mere seconds to decide, without the luxury of time to contemplate your future.
Exercise 1: Your Retirement Party Speeches
Imagine your retirement party. It will be a splendid affair in a glamorous location, filled with friends, family, and colleagues. You will, as always, look fabulous and be having a great hair day. There will be speeches and toasts, of course. Many people will line up to say wonderful things about you. What do you want them to say? Think about those speeches and identify:
The top three contributions you most want people to mention.
A contribution is a mark you want to make on the world—anything that adds value to other people (customers, employees, family, strangers). You’ll likely derive personal benefit or a sense of accomplishment from these contributions, too. As a rule of thumb, a contribution is something that might be listed on a résumé or bio (even in the fun facts section), such as:
After more than twenty years as a successful attorney, she founded her first company—a bakery—in her fifties.
She takes pride in her perfect attendance record at her three kids’ games, recitals, and plays, never missing a single event in more than twenty-six years.
She was the CEO of Amazon.
She ran a yearly marathon for fifteen years to raise funds for the children’s cancer hospital in her community.
The top three characteristics you most want people to use to describe you (other than likeable badass—that’s a given).
A characteristic is an adjective that describes you or a quality you embody, such as:
Fun-loving
Forgiving
Open-minded
Decisive
I’ve been using this exercise with students and leaders for close to a decade, since I saw an interview with Dutch-born pharmaceutical executive Marijn Dekkers describing the value he got from a similar experience. Dekkers quickly advanced through the ranks of General Electric and Allied Signal, before being promoted to his first CEO role, at Thermo Electron, in his early forties. Michael Porter, a renowned Harvard Business School professor, sat on the company’s board and invited Dekkers to attend a Harvard leadership course designed for new CEOs. The first assignment of the program was for each CEO to give their “going-away speech”—the public address they would want to make years in the future at the company party held to celebrate the end of their successful tenure. Reflecting over fifteen years later, after he had left Thermo Fisher Scientific (as it had been renamed) to become CEO of Bayer AG, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, the speech Dekkers wrote at Harvard still stood out as “the best lesson” he ever learned. Preparing his parting words at the “beginning of his tenure, rather than the end,” he realized, gave him “clarity,” and served as a “tremendous guide for the ten years [he] was there.”
The retirement party exercise is inspired by Dekkers’s story. I use a retirement party rather than a going-away speech to broaden your aspirations beyond a single organization or experience. And I’ve changed the perspective from what you want to be able to say about yourself to what other people will say about you. Dekkers was using the speech to identify how he wanted to shape the organization—what he wanted to be able to say about his own contributions at the end. We’re focused on status, which is what other people think and say about us—not just what we did, but also who we are.[*2]
To start the exercise, I recommend identifying as many contributions and characteristics as you can think of. After all, people will certainly say more than three good things about you in each category, so it’s valuable to think about the full list. Then, once you have several ideas listed, narrow them down to your top three in each category. I force you to prioritize because tradeoffs in life are inevitable. You can’t be everything to everyone at all times, so you need to decide what you most want to be. A 100-item list of priorities is the same as no priorities at all.
I also think that surveying your friends and colleagues is a great way to get ideas about who you are and what contributions and characteristics you might want to put on the list. This is what happened to me—albeit unintentionally. Long before I was using this exercise, I faced the difficult decision of whether I should testify in a legal proceeding. Refusing to testify felt safer—if I stayed silent, I wouldn’t make any enemies. But if I didn’t speak up, someone I thought could be a threat to others—particularly women—might avoid punishment and even be rewarded.
This decision caused me a lot of angst. For a long time I was able to kick it to the back of my mind, but as the deadline approached, I stopped sleeping well, my hair was falling out, and I was staring at my computer screen for days pretending to work—still no closer to a decision. Out of time and options, I called a dear friend for advice.[*3] Her response remains one of the most influential things anyone has ever said to me. After reassuring me that there was no right or wrong decision, she said, “But, Alison, I’ve always thought of you as a very principled person, and I think it’s one of your best qualities.” As soon as her words hit the air, I knew I would testify.
Those words forever changed how I saw myself and have influenced numerous decisions since.
Principled.
It fit me. It was my word.
If I had to lose Warmth with some people for others to see me as “principled” (including myself), that was a trade worth making. Understanding that “principled” was part of my end story gave me the same clarity that Marijn Dekkers experienced from his going-away speech. It also gave me a rule for choosing between difficult options—when in doubt, choose the more principled route. And I never would have found my word, at least at that point in time, if I hadn’t heard my friend describe me that way.
Since that day, I’ve completed the retirement party exercise, and have identified my top three contributions and characteristics. If you’re curious, they are (in no particular order):
Contributions
Wrote a book (check!)
Was a fierce women’s advocate, giving women the science and confidence to kick ass in a biased world (in process)
Although unable to do a cartwheel, she was a lifelong, relentless cheerleader for her students—always willing to meet with them and support their careers, even decades after they graduated (ongoing)
Characteristics
Principled
Entertaining
Generous
Not every likeable badass I’ve met has done my version of this exercise, but I find that most successful women are very confident and decisive about how they use their status because they have figured out, one way or another, what they value. For example, Victoria Pelletier, the woman who earned a reputation as the Iron Maiden early in her career, realized she would need to be very “intentional and consistent” if she was going to break free from this image and rebrand herself as a likeable badass. She started to think about her legacy and realized, “If I had a tombstone, it’s not going to talk about the sales, revenue, and profit I delivered for the companies I work for, it would talk about what I stood for in the communities I served.” That realization led her to choose the key pillars of her personal brand, which helped her not only build her status, but decide how to use it. One of Victoria’s chosen characteristics is to be an “advocate,” especially for diversity, inclusion, and equal rights. Once she identified this, it became easier for her to speak up against injustice toward members of systemically marginalized groups, even if it risked her status. In fact, Victoria’s outspoken advocacy is what led me to meet her. A woman I know, Mary,[*4] sent me a message that Victoria was a likeable badass and I should interview her. Although they had never met in person, Victoria’s allyship earned Mary’s respect. When Accenture, where both Mary and Victoria worked, announced layoffs at the executive level, many social media posts emerged, including from current and former employees, about how white men were being disproportionately impacted. Mary, a Black female managing director who was laid off, found these posts “psychologically harmful,” but didn’t want to speak up and “be attacked for noting the privilege of white males.” However, Victoria, who has a large following on LinkedIn, immediately posted her disagreement, citing her power and privilege as a white woman to call out the explicit and implicit racial bias in her colleagues’ posts. Mary appreciated Victoria’s advocacy, which inspired her to recommend Victoria to me. But Victoria’s posts probably weren’t appreciated by everyone, especially the colleagues she was contradicting. Victoria knew her views would cost her status with some people, but that didn’t give her a moment of hesitation. Because she knew being an advocate for equality was one of her defining characteristics, the choice to speak up in that moment was obvious—just as choosing “principled” as one of my values made testifying an easy choice for me. In fact, Victoria’s clarity on her personal brand, combined with her value of advocacy, inspired her to write a book to help others do the same, Influence Unleashed: Forging a Lasting Legacy Through Personal Branding.
Clarifying your contributions and characteristics also helps you decide when not to speak up. One of the biggest forms of discipline I’ve learned through this exercise is the value of disagreeing with purpose. I really like to be right. I mean REALLY like it.[*5] In my less experienced days, the joy of “winning” an argument—any argument—was intoxicating. But it was also killing my Warmth without any real upside. Now, before I disagree with someone, I pause for a moment to ponder what benefit or contribution could result from my counterpoint. If, like Victoria, I can state how the disagreement moves me a step closer to one or more of my retirement party goals, I do it. If not, I keep my mouth shut and save my status for another day.[*6]
Exercise 2: The View from the Rocking Chair
After your retirement party (which was amazing, by the way), you begin to enjoy a new stage of life. You start and end each day sitting in the rocking chair on your front porch. Look around you. What do you see? In your mind, draw a detailed picture of your life at this moment. For example:
Who, if anyone, is rocking next to you? Who comes to visit?
Where is the rocking chair? Is it in a different location than where you live now? Is it on a farm, a beach, a yacht?
What are you doing in the chair? Knitting, day-trading, meditating? What are you thinking about, and not thinking about?
When you get up from the rocking chair, how will you spend your day? What hobbies and interests do you pursue?
The origin of this exercise is a conversation I had when I was in my early thirties with my dear friend and colleague, Mabel Miguel. I was newly married, and confided in Mabel that I was uncertain about whether I wanted children. Mabel, by this point a mother of two grown kids, confessed to being similarly ambivalent about motherhood at my age. When I asked her how she eventually decided she wanted children, she explained a version of this exercise to me. Mabel had expressed her uncertainty to a friend, who told Mabel to close her eyes and imagine herself in her rocking chair. “Look around,” the friend said. “Who do you see?” As Mabel scanned her mind’s eye, she realized that there were lots of people around her. “As much as I love my husband,” Mabel realized, “we weren’t the only two in that picture.” After hearing her story, I pictured my own rocking chair and found that I, too, was surrounded by family. Fast-forward fifteen years, and I’m now the proud mother of three awesome likeable badasses in training. I can’t say that I would never have had kids if not for that conversation, but it certainly gave me needed clarity.
I realized that this same exercise could be broadened to make decisions about status. Looking at the full picture of your life—where are you, who’s with you, what are you doing—helps you make decisions today toward that future vision. Although I don’t draw a strict work/life delineation between the two exercises, my experience is that the retirement party exercise is very helpful for thinking about professional aspirations and the rocking chair exercise is useful for thinking about personal ones.
In Samantha’s case, the rocking chair exercise was particularly helpful as we analyzed, postmortem, whether she had “done the right thing” by letting Matt’s insult slide. When I asked her what was important to her, she replied, “Making as much money as I can at this point in life.” As I dug deeper, I could see her view from the porch. In her future, she wanted to be financially secure enough that she could take care of herself and her aging parents as a single woman. She wanted to be able to leave her industry and pursue a career in hospitality technology before retirement. She wanted to travel and eat all the best food all over the world. But to afford this vision, she felt strongly that she needed to maximize her income over the next five to ten years. Once we established these aims, I asked her which choice—preserving her Warmth with Matt by staying silent or preserving her and Kim’s Assertiveness with the clients—best helped her achieve this goal. Put in this context, she was able to answer quickly: Preserving her relationship with Matt was more important. She liked her current job, and thought she was well compensated. If she eventually switched jobs in her industry, she would benefit from Matt’s support. And she certainly didn’t want to risk Matt becoming an other-demoter for her, badmouthing her behind her back because he was mad. “That settles it,” I reassured her. “You did the right thing.” Given two bad choices, Samantha chose the one that best supported her view from the rocking chair.
If you had been in Samantha’s situation, you may have responded differently. Again, the choice of how to use your status is up to you, and you alone. You deserve to have the future you want. It doesn’t matter if your future looks different than someone else’s, but it does matter that you recognize what you’re working toward. The clearer you are on where you’re going, the better you can use your status to help you get there.
For me, the rocking chair exercise has been helpful in making career decisions that impact my family. From my porch, one of my clearest visions is having strong relationships with my three children when they’re adults. I want them to like me, not just love me. I want them to enjoy spending time with me, not just do it once a year out of obligation. I want them to seek me out for advice because they value my opinion, even when they no longer need it. I want to travel with them, shop with them, drink wine with them, and play poker with them. I want their spouses to like me as much as they like their own mothers. This clarity has proven immensely valuable in deciding when to prioritize my job over my family, and when to do the opposite.
These types of choices—job vs. family—are particularly fraught for women because we have to navigate the “motherhood penalty”—the tendency for people to judge mothers as less Assertive than nonmothers.[*7] Aware of the motherhood penalty, I know that every time I make a decision that highlights my mom status and prioritizes family over work, I risk further eroding my Assertiveness. In these moments, I return to my view from the rocking chair. I’ll ask myself whether the decision I face is likely to impact how my grown children feel about me and I base my choice on that answer. For example, I’m pretty sure I missed all my kids’ “firsts”—first laughs, first words, first steps. Many mothers prioritize being there for those moments or feel guilty if they miss them. I didn’t even try to stick around, and it didn’t bother me one bit. I knew they wouldn’t remember those things, and therefore my presence or absence in those moments was irrelevant to how they’ll feel about our relationship as adults. I also felt sure that the first time I saw them walk, talk, or laugh would be amazing, whether or not they’d done it before. So I went to work and learned about most of my kids’ development from birth to age three from their wonderful daycare teachers. For me, it wasn’t worth risking any Assertiveness with my colleagues and clients to be there in those moments. I was (and am) perfectly content with being average (or below average) on any aspect of parenthood that I don’t think will matter twenty years from now.
However, when my husband and I considered a move to Chicago for his job, envisioning this same future helped me make the choice to pick family over career. I didn’t want to leave my faculty position at the University of North Carolina and I knew most people in my field would see working remotely as an unorthodox decision. I felt confident that being less present in the hallways because I had—gasp!—“followed my husband” would be a career-limiting move. As much as I loved—and still love—my work, though, the move was an easy decision for me. I knew that my rocking chair wouldn’t be in North Carolina—it would be in Chicago. And, it being one of the largest cities in the United States, I knew that the chances of living near my grown children were greater if they were raised in Chicago. I didn’t care if I had to spend every ounce of status I had built with my colleagues if it meant even a slightly better chance that my adult children would visit me more often.
