by Megan Hustad
What’s so difficult about that? Well, if you’re as angst-ridden as I was as an underling, and if you feel like an outsider amongst insiders, as I did, being extra superduper helpful to colleagues farther along in their careers than you are is very difficult indeed. And what if your superiors have reached their level of incompetence, and you’re already overworked and underpaid? Extending yourself any further seems senseless. Rooms with No View, a book about women’s experiences in publishing in the early seventies, suggested that if workplace sexism—or class privilege, or whatever—started to feel a bit thick, it was helpful to keep perspective. One editor commented that at her progressive office the “women need have no fear of being patronized for their ideas or initiatives—they are given the same support as men’s. This may, of course, mean no support at all.” It’s not you that’s dysfunctional, it’s the entire industry. Which is reassuring, for a few minutes.
Should you find yourself stymied for no apparent reason, what do you do? Before you start hatching a plan, or distributing blame on others for your failure to get anywhere, Gurley Brown advised that you honestly assess the amount of volunteer work you’re doing: “Was the last time you worked overtime without pay when you put up prom decorations in the high school gym? Do you manage to be frantically busy (writing a letter to your cousin) when a co-worker is stuck with a mimeograph assembly job?” Gurley Brown’s books are filled with epithets to describe the “whiner-shirker-pill” underlings who just didn’t get this. Just as the Eskimos have fourteen words for snow, so the go-getting girls of Gurley Brown’s universe push forward past girls she terms slobs, drones, drips, turnips, squirrelly little pests, and scaredy-cats. Slugs was her preferred term for the go-nowhere girls, and they were much like pills in that they vocally protested they were always really busy and put upon, and used that as an excuse to act selfishly.37
The worst thing to do when you’re stuck is to make the mistake of thinking that a powerful boss is also an empowering one. People can have power over you—and very little power over their own dark thoughts and fears, and therefore don’t have it in them to help anyone else in any meaningful way. Sex and the Single Girl’s approach to these bad bosses was withering. “Usually you have to work your way through some toads. Shiny bright junior executives are the worst,” Gurley Brown writes. “They’re afraid to send you to the accounting department to cash their expense check for fear you’ll pick flowers on the way.” If a girl found herself with the wrong sort of boss early in her career, that was to be expected (because most junior people don’t work for the firm’s top brass). At a certain point, however, a girl should be able to find herself a boss she liked—“a rich, successful, beautiful, kind, wonderful, lovable employer with fabulous friends.” These criteria automatically eliminated most bosses younger than thirty-five, she ventured in Sex and the Office, as most were so neurotic and scared that it was hard just getting along with them. Gurley Brown wanted girls who found themselves working for loser bosses to fire them—in other words, quit. (Judging from her track record of seventeen secretarial jobs in thirteen years, we can assume she adhered to this philosophy with some vigor.) If a boss was too unsure of his own power to be benevolent, a girl was wasting her time waiting for him to change. These bosses only directed their energies upwards, so that their bosses would see them keeping the lights on late into the night, and wouldn’t spend any effort advocating for powerless people below them.38
This was Gurley Brown’s gloss, essentially, on the Dale Carnegie self-absorption standard. Bad bosses thought about themselves—and about you, perhaps, only in the moments when you were gulping down Harveys Bristol Cream Sherry with them. This type of bartering—I’ll do this if you do that—is not just about sex. It colors all exchanges with insecure bosses: you get approval only when you make them look good. The Peter Principle framed the problem this way: If your superior was competent, he or she would evaluate you based on your output If your superior had reached his or her level of incompetence, things looked very different. What mattered then was how well you laid low and didn’t upset anyone or draw attention to problems.
It’s this dilemma—being at the mercy of a boss who’s clearly in over his head, but on whom you, as a junior employee, are dependent for a promotion—that is toughest to handle. Gurley Brown suggested all kinds of private rebellions to help take the immediate psychic pressure off. Remembering a young woman who would seat herself at the conference table with a “little red alligator notebook” in which she’d take “smashing little red alligator notes,” Gurley Brown recommended you bring similar props to meetings, because then you could tend to your own business while also picking up points for style and diligence. She also suggested that girls who got antsy in meetings (because no one cared what they had to say) do Kegel exercises. Her larger point being that one shouldn’t just sit, stare, and nod dully at the appropriate intervals, or doodle, but that it’s possible to use their time for one’s own ends.
Whatever strategy you employed to help you cope, stomping one’s feet was a no-no—because it was pretty much guaranteed not to work. For instance, a friend of mine once went to her boss with the hope of convincing him to take her more seriously—“as a colleague, not just a little helper.” She did this stoically, she thought, and with heroic restraint (she was really very angry by this point); she simply told her boss she couldn’t keep doing what she’d been doing for two years already, she was bored, she was ready for more. She hoped this would force a reevaluation of her abilities. It had no effect, at least none that was encouraging. His response? “You know, maybe we should have lunch sometime. Maybe next month, after my vacation?” “There’s a way in which you can perform a task for someone that lets them know that you are really the master and they the slave,” a former colleague once told me. When I asked him to give an example, he just smirked. But he (in his midforties, and boss to dozens of people) was hinting at something interesting, and it’s not far removed from what Gurley Brown was saying about acts of deference. Let’s say your boss, Miranda Priestly, asks you to get her daughters the new Harry Potter book so they can read it on the train en route to grandmother’s house tomorrow. The book is not available for sale anywhere because it hasn’t yet been printed. But you wriggle and plead and miraculously manage to wrestle a copy of the manuscript away from the publisher. When Miranda comes in the next morning and sees the rubber-banded manuscript on her desk, she hides her surprise that you actually pulled this off and demands to know why the manuscript’s just sitting there, why it hasn’t already been sent out. You inform her that you already made two copies, one for each daughter, and had them neatly bound and shipped off earlier this morning. The manuscript on her desk is the original, just for safekeeping. You stand straight and smile brightly. You ask, “Will there be anything else?”
Gurley Brown’s disdain for slugs who fail to grasp this dynamic makes sense when seen in the light of her hardscrabble background. The eager-beaver helpfulness she prescribed undoubtedly came easier to someone who hadn’t been raised to feel mundane tasks were beneath her. (She also seemed to understand that shiny, chirpy femininity, when coupled with wfter-competence and Swiss-Miss efficiency, can come across as more powerful than most tough girl posturing.) She was born in Green Forest, Arkansas, and when her father died young, leaving very little insurance money, she and her mother and sister Mary moved to Los Angeles to a house—literally—next to the tracks. Then Mary’s polio set in, before foundations like the March of Dimes were around to help. Later in life Gurley Brown would say that “Needing to Make Up for Things” drove her constantly, like a possessed taskmaster at her lissome, Pucci-clad back.
All that and a perverse pleasure in wrestling with garden-variety jerks. Gurley Brown’s patience and willingness to indulge creeps—at least for as long as it served her needs—is fairly rare. But it’s worth emulating, if only for the sake of not letting the shame spiral further erode your self-esteem. The following are some of the better ways to channel your
resentment over professional scuttling:
Do change the way you think of your job. If you begin to think of yourself as a self-employed person, and define your current employment as Making Your Boss Look Good while gathering up whatever wisdom you can in the meantime, it may alleviate some self-inflicted distress.
Don’t tell everyone about it. Be selective about whom you confide in. Conferring with colleagues can help you see your situation more clearly, but if more than two other people in the company hear that you’re really very annoyed, you may be compromising your position. You’ll go from a contented-but-eager-to-go-places junior to someone who is officially “frustrated”—a death mark in most offices. Two is the critical number; once three or more people know, everybody knows. (I’ve seen this happen several times.) What happens next is something over which you have absolutely no control.
Do use *1 feel“ phrasing. This sounds like marriage counseling, but it works in the office. When describing an unsatisfactory work situation, don’t ascribe motives to anyone but yourself. Don’t claim (publicly) that a senior employee means you harm, or is deliberately trying to stall your advance. Best to demonstrate that you realize the limitations of an unhappy arrangement, aren’t too soured by the thought of it, and that you look forward to the next stage.
When it comes to venting in writing, type as many bilious, angry sentences as you like, then save them in a drafts folder overnight, then reconsider, cut half, cut another half, reconsider again, and then—maybe—send them to their intended audience. No one has ever regretted not sending an angry e-mail. Variations on this theme appear in nearly every success book ever published.
Do learn to recognize signs that your boss may not be completely comfortable in his or her own skin. Taking too long to make a decision is one big hint that your boss may have reached his level of incompetence. Dragging out meetings with excessive chitchat is another. So too is leaning heavily on procedure, or insisting that “well, that’s the status quo, that’s just the way things are done around here,” without taking the time to give you a more compelling explanation.
Don’t sink so deep that you make an issue out of a box of raisins. Gur-ley Brown offered this story after she’d occupied the corner office at Cosmopolitan for some time. Working late one night, she got hungry. Ravenous, as she put it. So she went to the kitchen, rifled through the fridge—nothing. She started going through her employees’ desks. This was pathetic, she realized, but hunger was hunger. Her search turned up the remnants of a box of raisins—twenty-six raisins in all—in the desk of a girl named Lydia. Gurley Brown snatched the box and made a note to herself to replace it the next morning.
She forgot. Lydia, frantically searching for her 11:00 a.m. snack the next day, was not impressed when the editor in chief informed her that she’d eaten it. Lydia made it clear she was annoyed. Gurley Brown was less than impressed in turn. What the girl should have done, she said, is made a joke of it. Lydia now shared this secret with Gurley Brown, her boss’s boss, one that involved Gurley Brown having done something bizarre and uncouth, and Lydia could have used that secret knowledge to cement a friendship with her. Instead Lydia turned into a scolding kindergarten teacher. In Gurley Brown’s next book, she gets quickly dismissed with the phrase “we simply can’t be stuffy, snippy, selfish, snapping-turtle little bitches and succeed.”
Gurley Brown was probably part of the last generation of American girls weaned on the idea that personal dignity was a matter of knowing when to make allowances for the lack of same in others. As Agnes Morton (an Emily Post bandwagoner) asserted in her Etiquette: Good Manners for All People; Especially for Those Who Dwell Within the Broad Zone of the Average: “Only clear and unmistakable evidence of intention should lead one to infer a slight. It is not only more polite, but more self-respecting, to ‘take offense’ slowly
Do freeload. The manuscript for Sex and the Single Girl was typed on paper lifted from the L. A. advertising firm that Gurley Brown was convinced was going to fire her. She was further adamant that you accept all offers of free food and drink when you’re a financially strapped underling. And that you find out who’s in charge of the supply closet, and become that person’s friend. “I never did anything but freeload as a young person and can’t fault anybody else for taking advantage of older people willing to be exploited.” In the modern workplace, other potential buffets include the postage meter, catered-lunch leftovers, and the expense account (if available). Companies should understand that, short of embezzlement, these compensations are simply the cost of doing business. After all, there’s no meritocracy if only those born rich can afford to work for a pittance.
Do be charming. You may not be going anywhere interesting career-wise for a while, but that’s no reason to let yourself go. Dysfunctional organizations offer good training grounds for refining your skills because, weirdly, insecure and anxious people often react most strongly to charm. Which is not to say they’ll like it, or that it will prompt them to open professional doors for you, only that their reactions to you will be clear. Turn on the charm in front of toady junior executives—male or female—and pay close attention to their faces. You can always apply the things you learn at your next job.
And for all its cutesiness, Sex and the Single Girl includes the most intriguing definition of personal allure I’ve come across:
If you can sum up what charm is, I think it’s total awareness.
A charmer has her antenna up and valves open at all times. With sensitive radar she detects what the other person wants to hear and says it. And she senses what he doesn’t want to hear and refrains from saying it. Charming people, either men or women, are usually warm-blooded, affectionate and compassionate, but they are also thinking ahead all the time.
Then Gurley Brown offers an example. It’s worth reprinting in full:
I had lunch the other day with a charmer, accompanied by her mother. Two of the girls in the party had babbled ten minutes or so about their new office manager whom the mother didn’t know. Presently the charmer said, “You know, Mother, he’s kind of like Joe Winslow at the bank… sort of Prussian.” Mother was back in the conversation. This particular charmer, so accomplished she should package it, puts everything in terms of you. “You would have loved it.” “You would have fainted.” In describing a gown she saw at the opera she says it was a little deeper than your red velvet coat. She remembers what you told her last time and asks questions this time. It’s appalling the things people can forget you told them… and never ask you about in subsequent conversations.
It seems Gurley Brown got the hang of it. Here’s how the novelist and freelance writer Nancy Weber, who wrote for Gurley Brown at Cosmopolitan (even though she found the magazine “mostly unreadable”), described her editor’s brand of charm:
She is a maddening woman, all the more so because it’s impossible not to like her. Back in the days when I was writing for Cosmo with some frequency, Helen called to ask me to do a piece on Why Lying Is More Elegant Than Telling the Truth—4,000 words, and could I turn it in by 10 o’clock the next morning? You’re the Only Person in the World Who Can Do It, she said, and I unmade plans for dinner, and did it. The next morning she had decided that Truth Was More Elegant, and because I hadn’t used an agent, or my head, I didn’t even get a kill fee. I no longer write for Cosmopolitan, but if Helen called me right now and put on her Iron-Butterfly act and told me I was the Only Person who could do a piece about why anthologies on writing are dangerous, I would probably pull this piece out of the typewriter to accommodate her by ten o’clock tomorrow morning.
Do remain aware, nonetheless, that someone will always hate you. The
hating can’t be avoided, especially if you’re finally going places. (“A little turnip who spends most of her time backcombing her hair will feel outraged because you have the job she feels she deserved.”) Understanding how prevalent resentment is, and how some people might enjoy disliking you, and how little you can do about it sometimes, gets you h
alfway toward not letting the hatred keep you awake at night.
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A slow start might be better than rocketing to the top, all things considered. Gurley Brown once told a story of a colleague who used to make her feel totally inadequate. They worked together at a radio station—probably KHJ in Hollywood—when they were both really young. The day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, this girl was busy establishing herself as the next Martha Gellhorn, out on the roof of the station trying to spot bomber planes and filing reports. She worked through that entire night, while Helen wanted to crawl under her desk in embarrassment for being so relatively ordinary. Helen didn’t see this girl again for years, and then bumped into her one day—at the Laundromat, where the former crackerjack was now working. For Gurley Brown, it led to a strange, self-consciously petty feeling of triumph. Like little firecrackers going off inside you… pop, pop, pop•
It’s probably worth mentioning that I recently ran into the guy who said maybe his boss enjoyed humiliating people, a few weeks after he had found a new job at a different company. “I feel like a different person,” he said. He looked it, too.
Interlude
* * *
Why Most Everything from the 1970s Doesn’t Help
THERE’S NO GOOD office politics advice from the 1970s because everything written then presumed that people were I dumb.39 Not just dumb, but slobbering bundles of infantile 1 need. The psychotherapist Eric Berne can be blamed for starting the trend in the mid-1960s by publicizing a concept he called “transactional analysis,” which held that people were forever walking around seeking “strokes.” Strokes, he said, were “the fundamental unit of human interaction,” and just as infants needed physical touch in order to survive and thrive, so too adults were hooked on getting stroked, though in a more metaphorical, psychological way. Unless you were unusually well adjusted, or had spent years in therapy, you’d always be unconsciously scanning the room for someone to tangle with.
