Part 9 (1/2)

I also advised Jennifer not to have regrets. She was making her own decision, and it was one she could be proud of. No one was forcing her to leave.

Now Jennifer told me that she had been working part-time for six years and was about to return full-time. The irony of the situation was that her new job was to replace the other woman, who had indeed been promoted, just as Jennifer had feared. But that woman was expecting a baby herself, and was taking a few years off to stay home.

I don't mean to suggest that every story has a happy ending. Of course it doesn't. My point is that there was a time when none of these tales of the business world ended well for women. This is a healthy indicator of change.

A sequential career means that when you're ready, you can return to work you love able to see new possibilities, open to new ideas. It had never entered my mind to enter television. But when I did, I saw that my experience in politics had prepared me well for my new job-it taught me to think like a politician. When I dealt with Capitol Hill, I was able to understand how the subtleties worked without having to ask.

A lot of young women feel that if they leave a full-time job, their former equals will end up far ahead of them when they return. This harkens back to the ten-year-plan issue (see Chapter 3: Set the Right Goal). If you think everything is part of a long-term strategy, and each move is an incremental step up the ladder, you miss the fact that almost anything in life can be a learning experience. A side road only becomes a dead end when you forget that side roads often lead to exciting new places.

There are times, however, when you want to leave your job, not because it's time to raise a family, or because you've fallen in love with someone who lives across the country, or because you must take care of your aging parents. Sometimes, you just want out. Other times, the powers-that-be make it clear they want you out. A recent study shows that the average American will hold eight different jobs over his or her lifetime.

The signs are everywhere: The good a.s.signments no longer come your way; you're left out of important meetings; the boss stops asking for your opinion; the smart women in the company no longer see you as their mentor but have found someone younger.

Or there are internal signs: You resent your boss, you can't stand your hours. Soon you're playing the same recording over and over in your head-the one that goes, ”I hate what I do. I hate my job. I hate my career.”

If these are your thoughts as you wake up in the morning, you need to take action.

Guys plan for these moments. In fact, just as they develop a strategy to make the team, they develop one to leave. They've played enough games to know that you have to be ready to make a proactive move whenever necessary. In the world of television, whenever a network is in trouble, it always seems to be the men who are quick to get out the resumes, to make the new contacts, to call up the headhunters. They're ready to sell themselves at a moment's notice.

Think of it this way: Men and women approach jobs the way they approach their relations.h.i.+ps; men, who are polygamy-oriented, always look for multiple opportunities; women, who are monogamy-oriented, want their job to be long-lasting. We can become so attached to our company that sometimes we refuse to leave even when we're miserable. This may make us seem like wonderfully loyal employees, but it can also turn us into victims. We want to stay and prove ourselves, but in the meantime they push us too hard and pay us too little. We're miserable, we're indignant. But we often don't go anywhere.

Why? Probably because we find risk so frightening.

But leaving is often the only right thing.

And it often pays off. My friend Jo in telecommunications hated her job for years. Her particular tape-”I do all the work and my boss gets all the glory”-ran through her head every morning on the way to work and every evening on the way back. She was well paid, but mistreated, and embittered.

Jo braced herself, entered her boss's office, and told him she had found another job. She then joined a start-up company where she was extremely happy-for a year. The company went belly up, and she was jobless, back at square zero.

Or was she? Here was her (and our) worst fantasy come true; no different from the received wisdom that says if you leave your husband or partner you'll be alone in the world.

But the reality was, Jo had a new job in a month-and her new employer hired her exactly because of her entrepreneurial nature. After all, she'd left a major company to work with a start-up. And, she brought with her everything she'd learned in that tough start-up year.

She took a risk. The worst happened. She still won.

Leave when you know you must. But leave intelligently. Too often, when we do reach the breaking point, we take action impulsively. ”I'll get back at them,” we think. ”I'll cook their goose. I'll just walk out right now and that will show them.”

You can't storm off the field. A little boy who walks out on the team is so scorned by the other players that he learns his lesson: If you're on the team, you stay there until it makes sense to go. When you leave your company in the lurch, your a.s.sociates will consider you disloyal, untrustworthy, a quitter. That is not a reputation to cultivate.

Instead, come up with a sensible plan. Call up your contacts. Take tests. Send out your resume. See a headhunter. Read the employment section of the newspaper-but not wishfully. Read it purposefully. If you see something interesting, respond. When you line up the new position, tell your boss considerately and intelligently. Let him know how much you have learned from working with him-but that now, it's time for both of you to move on. If you were careful about picking the right boss (remember-a good boss is more important than a good job), he should understand the fait accompli without making you feel guilty.

Be advised that if you're unhappy, it's unlikely that your job performance is solid. Tell yourself you're doing the company a favor by gracefully orchestrating your exit and by giving your boss the chance to bring in someone who can do your job with fresh enthusiasm.

A good boss wants to know if you're miserable. Personally, I have a rule for all my staff: If I'm not the first one to know when people are unhappy, they're in trouble.

As risky and unpleasant as it may seem, if you plan your escape well, you may be making the least risky move of your career. Both you and your company will prosper from it.

GAME HINT: One way to leave well is to stop thinking of your current job as The Big Career-that can make you feel even more frustrated as your discontent grows. Tell yourself it is simply the means to an end. In other words, it is just The Paycheck.

Think: This isn't the right place for me, but I need to pay the rent (or save for graduate school or create a retirement fund) so I can't just walk out.

When you regard the job as a financial boon rather than a lifetime commitment, it becomes much less loaded with meaning. That makes it easier to come to work and eventually, to go.

Nineteen ninety-nine was a big year in professional sports. Or at least it was a big year for athletes to leave them. Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, Cal Ripken, Jr., and John Elway all retired from their professions of basketball, ice hockey, baseball, and football respectively. Two of them may have been the best ever to play their games, but that's an argument for another book.

Apart from greatness, what all of these men definitely have in common was that they were not forced to retire. While none of them was at the top of his game, each could still play better than most of his peers, pull down a huge salary, and make his fans deliriously happy. Each also understood it was time to make an exit.

There is seldom a good reason to linger once you can no longer play your best game. That's true for football and hockey, and it's true for business.

Our careers progress in stages: first comes the heady entry-level job, when you're like a child in a candy shop and everything is exciting. Following that comes workplace adolescence, when you're on your way up, but you don't know how far you'll go. Eventually, as you reach adulthood, you're at the top of your game.

Then one day you notice that it's becoming more of an effort to come to the office, that you don't push to be included in exciting new projects, that you're not interested in proving yourself, that your attention is increasingly focused on interests outside the workplace. You're no longer a young lion going in for the kill. The only thing you're killing is time.

How many of us have the self-awareness to know the game is coming to an end? And how many of us are fully prepared to make that break when it appears inevitable? You know that Michael Jordan has spent the last decade making sure his financial house is in order (admittedly an easier thing to do when you make 50 million dollars a year). Is yours?

For most women, the answer is no. Planning our financial futures has meant having our husbands or partners take care of it, just as our fathers handled the money for our mothers. Even most of us who aren't in a relations.h.i.+p are still hoping that some White Knight will come charging along and save us from thinking about insurance, investments, retirement, and estate taxes.

Please! White Knights went out with girdles and bouffant hairdos. Unless you're very lucky, you alone are responsible for your financially secure old age. Even if you have a partner or husband, you can't be certain that he will be around to take care of you when your career is over. Why take the chance?

From the very beginning of the game, start planning to end it. You make sure your home is in order. Get your financial house together, too. The process takes many years, and the variables are constantly changing.

Maybe today you think you'll retire at 60, maybe tomorrow you'll make that 70, or 55, or 80. You can make continual adjustments, but you have to be absolutely sure you can afford to retire when the time comes to do it.

Buy one of the many books about financial planning. Talk to savvy friends and colleagues. Start collecting names of skilled advisors. The monetary aspect of the retirement game is something no women can afford to neglect.

If most of us have a difficult time dealing with the financial issues connected to our postcareer lives, we find it even more daunting to confront the issue of status. In other words, your job is not who you are. Your job is what you do.

Sound simple? It's not. Men have been in business for years, and few of them have learned this. I've seen hundreds of men face retirement, and even the smartest among them, my own father included, never truly mastered it.

Over the years I've learned that, to most of the world, I am not Gail Evans, but Gail-Evans-Executive-Vice-President-of-CNN. I don't exist without the rest of those words that follow my given name.

Sometimes I fall for this error myself. I've come to depend on that hyphenated phrase to land hard-to-get dinner reservations, to make a big impression at social events, to cultivate contacts and sources. It's an identification that works, it gets me into tough places, it makes people pay attention to me. I can't pretend I don't like it.

But do I truly know that those strung-together words are not who I am? I won't know that fully until I leave my job, and become just plain Gail Evans.

Resolving this issue should be a woman's gift to the workplace. We like to say that our ident.i.ty as a woman is defined by all of our various relations.h.i.+ps: as a mother with our children, as a friend with our community, as a lover with our partner. I have noticed, however, that as women have become more powerful, we've begun to emulate men when it comes to wrapping our ident.i.ty around our job, giving up other means of valuing ourselves that have historically provided us with perspective.

But as we rise in the business world, along with the possibility that we will handle retirement the old-fas.h.i.+oned way, comes another prospect: that we will rewrite the rules of business, and particularly the rules for retirement. As long as we keep in mind our gift for valuing the totality of our lives, as long as we don't believe that we are only as good as our jobs, we can turn retirement, even retirement from highly successful careers, into a great adventure. Instead of feeling bereft, we can make it a time to investigate other parts of our personalities: Maybe we will go back to work part-time and mentor young women. Maybe we will return to our families. Maybe we will discover hidden talents and start new careers.

Let's take advantage of our discovery that careers can be sequential, and not only simultaneous, and make this sequence of our life the best it can be. Why shouldn't we use all our gifts as women to make retirement every bit as productive and empowering as our work years?

THE FINAL TWO RULES.