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If you hesitate before timidly approaching somebody new at a party, you’ll be flabbergasted at how Jenny Wood met the man who was to become her husband and father of their two children. She noticed him on a New York subway train – he looked her type, artsy – and decided if he got off at her stop she would find the courage to say hi. He got off before that station, however, and after momentarily acceding to her fate – it was not meant to be – she bolted after him, squeezing through the closing subway car doors and when she caught up handed him her business card.
“Wild courage will change your life,” she writes in her new book, Wild Courage.
Before you dismiss her – and her career advice – it’s worth keeping in mind that during her 18 years at Google, after working her way up from an entry level job to an executive post, she founded a career advice program, Own Your Career, that had tens of thousands of participants. “When things worked out,” she told them about her own career, “it was because I had the courage to do pretty much the opposite of what we’re always told to do. To speak up when I was supposed to keep my head down. To disagree when it would have been safer to go along with the crowd.”
She says we’re all timid on the inside. Even her. She has realized fear will always be her companion. But ambition lies on the other side of that fear so we all must push through the fear to achieve success.
“Fear is there to keep you safe,” she writes. “To grasp the prize, you’re going to have to reach, stretch and get pretty uncomfortable.”
Her work at Google and now as a career coach and speaker has led her to formulate nine traits that will fuel your courage: Weird, selfish, shameless, obsessed, nosy, manipulative, brutal, reckless and bossy. Some will seem particularly challenging or off-putting, so let’s focus on those.
Weird is chasing an attractive man as he leaves the subway car. But, she says while you might not do that, we are all weird in different ways. Weird need not mean wacky. It’s a sign you have figured out who you are, a willingness to be authentic and sometimes break with convention. And it attracts attention. In a series of studies known as the red sneakers effect, it was found people confer higher status and competence to nonconforming rather than conforming individuals, like those who wear flamboyant sneakers. So being weird – in a smart way – can pay off.
We value selflessness for evolutionary reasons: Self sacrifice makes sense in a tribe. But she stresses there’s also a need to be selfish, to acknowledge that you are as important as anyone else and must work to make sure your needs are met. You must be your own champion. You must say yes to the big opportunities and spurn the small, picayune meetings and to-do items that might please others but are obstacles to focusing on what’s truly important.
We spurn manipulative people who play politics in the office. But she argues you must be manipulative, in the sense of building influence through empathy. “Getting people to do things is the only way something gets done! Does refusing to influence remove influence from the equation? No, it just leaves more room for the unscrupulous few to run the show,” she says.
Don’t leave the longevity of your relationships to chance. Relationships are living, breathing things. Invest time, effort and thought in them or they will crumble. Keep in mind, of course, that real, sustainable influence is built on mutual benefit.
And don’t shun power and politics. Don’t recoil at those words as if they are evil. “It’s your responsibility to figure out the flow of power in your organization,” she advises. Whose buy-in do you need to fast track your project? Who do you need to consult with before acting on an idea? What’s the best time of the year to get a new idea approved?
Be manipulative. And be reckless. Err on the side of action at the office (or in a subway car).
Quick hits
- It takes considerably more energy to change an impression than to make one, so venture capitalist Sahil Bloom warns we need to pay close attention to early interactions with someone. A trap is to try to sound impressive to stand out, which can lead to providing a long boring narrative about your background. Limit yourself to your name, primary professional focus or interest and something related you have been focusing on or are excited about.
- We often are drawn away from tasks we’re working on because new, seemingly more urgent issues and information pop up. Productivity specialist Marc Zao-Sanders says if you don’t have an hour-to-hour level of urgency to your work the key is to prevent such diversionary, non-pressing information from reaching you by putting your phone in another room, hiding your inbox and muting notifications. Then, focus.
- Author James Clear believes the two-step process for exceptional results is: Spend a little time each day thinking about the highest leverage activity available to you and then spend a little time each day working on it.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.