How To Bloom Where You're Planted

Published: March 29, 2017, 6:08 p.m.

b"With Joann Lublin,\\xa0Wall Street Journal's management news editor, columnist, and author of\\xa0\\xa0Earning It: Hard-Won Lessons from Trailblazing Women at the Top of the Business World
Bloom Where You're Planted\\xa0
Joann Lublin, the Wall Street Journal's management news editor, columnist, and author joins Steve to talk about her book \\xa0Earning It: Hard-Won Lessons from Trailblazing Women at the Top of the Business World and its exploration of the careers of businesswomen and what they can teach other women about making it in business. Steve keys in on one of the ideas Lublin writes about: \\u201cblooming where you're planted.\\u201d The phrase originates in the story Joann tells about Avon CEO Andrea Jung and her early years as an employee of Bloomingdale's. In her mid-20s, Jung was working as the store's swimwear buyer, where she had already enjoyed some success. When the CEO asked Jung to meet him for a chat, she excitedly hoped that she was about to be tapped to run the glamorous \\u201cready-to-wear\\u201d department. Instead, the CEO asked her to take over the neglected \\u201cintimate apparel\\u201d division, which was if anything a demotion in Jung's eyes, even as the CEO pitched the idea as an opportunity to revitalize a stagnant department in her own vision. The department had been run by the same man for 30 years and was staffed entirely with men, all with more time in the company than her. She knew she would have to overcome a mountain of skepticism and defensiveness. Despite her reservations, she accepted the challenge.
On her first day in the new position, she recalled a poster she had seen in the HR department that read \\u201cBloom Where You're Planted.\\u201d It seemed to propose an attitude of accepting certain limitations while seeing in them the possibility of a new type of success.\\xa0 She realized at that moment that what had seemed like a career detour or setback could also be thought of as a chance to prove her value to management by turning around the fortunes of a failing enterprise. And turn around the department is exactly what she did, introducing a number of bold changes even when met with resistance from other employees. During the two years she was in the position, her innovations took hold, transforming customer\\u2019s expectations of what \\u201cintimate apparel\\u201d could be and, in turn, the department took off.\\xa0 Jung recalled the experience as a \\u201ccareer-defining moment,\\u201d crediting it with helping her deal with situations she ran into at Avon years later where she again had to \\u201cbloom where planted.\\u201d
Calculated Risk in the Workplace
A common theme in the stories of women in the workplace that Lublin chronicles is being thrust into situations where they felt like they were \\u201cin over their heads.\\u201d This kind of scenario often has more to do with lack of experience than lack of talent or aptitude. Lublin notes that surveys have shown that men are promoted more frequently based on a perception of their potential to do a job, even one outside their realm of experience, while women are evaluated for promotions based on the specifics of their previous achievements. Lublin believes that many women who might assume leadership positions are thwarted from doing so because their skill sets and backgrounds don't exactly match the new roles they're striving for, a standard not applied consistently to men.\\xa0 One antidote to this unfair and ineffective systemic bias, Lublin suggests, is that women could begin taking more calculated risks. In Andrea Jung's story, her calculated risk was sticking with a less-than-ideal job that she didn't want and putting forth her best effort because she saw opportunity there.
Of course, some kinds of risks are riskier than others, and some of what Lublin calls \\u201cmission impossible\\u201d risks contain the possibility of a failure that might even damage one's career."