Cowgirl Power

by Gay Gaddis

  We decided that insight was valuable enough, so we snuck off and went to the island of Vieques on a mini-honeymoon. When we arrived at the hotel, it looked like something out of The Night of the Iguana. Everything was overgrown and there was weird statuary everywhere. We finally met the owner and he asked how many nights we were staying. We said two. He said, “After two nights here, you will come back to me begging on your knees to stay longer.” He was right, we stayed a week. He also told us that if we conceived a child while we were there and named the child Irving after him, he would pay for his or her Harvard education!

  When we sat down for our dinner, he brought out the wine list. Number 1 was red. Number 2 was white. The list read, “Please order by number.”

  Get Comfortable with Risk

  Lee’s mother, Isabel, and I hit it off immediately, because she was, among many other things, a real cowgirl. Somehow we just clicked and she became my greatest champion and advocate, as my mom was. In her younger days, Isabel was an expert horse trainer. She could brand, work cattle with the best of them, and field dress a deer without ruining her freshly polished nails.

  I was in South Texas one weekend in 1989, the year I started my company. While visiting with Isabel I saw a little blue-and-white-enamel box on her living room table. On the top of the box, in elegant cursive, was this phrase: “Everything is sweetened by risk.” I was drawn to that box, and picked it up and held it. It spoke to me—with a comforting message at a time of enormous risk with my new company. Isabel saw me holding the box and, at the end of our visit, she gave it to me.

  I still keep Isabel’s gift on my desk. Every time I look at it, I am reminded of the lessons that she taught me that day: that without risk there is no gain—that if you never take risks, you will miss out on a lot of the sweetness that life has to offer.

  “Everything is sweetened by risk.” That has been my experience. When I first started the company, I told people that I ate risk for breakfast every morning. The interesting thing that happens to risk takers is that you learn a lot of lessons that people who don’t take risks never learn. Smart risk takers tend to take lots of small risks. Small risks are not going to take you down. But lots and lots of small risks can yield very powerful advancements. You learn how to mitigate risk. You test the waters. You take incremental steps. You learn from failure, but you do not stop advancing. And you gradually get better at it. With each risk you take, your gut learns a lesson. Spend much of a lifetime taking risks, and your instincts will be really, really good.

  Risk is a fundamental part of a successful life. You take a risk by accepting a new job, by deciding who you spend time with, by what you do and where you go. Avoiding risk means that you will miss out on life’s biggest thrills, lessons, and accomplishments.

  Risk tends to come at you quickly. Learn to get the facts, think it through, listen carefully to your gut, and make a decision. Do not overthink it. Do not worry about it. Make the call and move on. Some of the best decisions I have ever made were made on the spot, literally within moments.

  Knowing when and where to accept levels of risk is a huge source of personal power. Taking risks sets you up to fail or advance. Not taking risks leaves you with the status quo, at best. Every time you take a risk, you are testing yourself. Be brave and take a chance to jump ahead of the game.

  Give Your Power Away

  One of the most effective things you can do as a manager is to give your power away. If you give your people the power to make their own calls, everyone will be stronger. What I have learned is that you have to explicitly grant authority for it to be effective. If you specifically grant power, your people will be much more likely to use it.

  In our company, two of our most important jobs are the creative director and the account director. They are powerful positions because they have the authority to decide if a piece of work is good enough to be presented to our clients. The creative director works with the creative teams to develop ideas, to improve on them, to rework them. The account director focuses on whether the idea is the best choice for our client strategically and economically. At the end of the day, they both make the final call about whether it goes out the door.

  Giving that power to a person who has earned it is one of the most thrilling, rewarding things I get to do. When I promote someone into one of those two positions, it means I have total faith that the right decisions will be made.

  Give your power away. Move people up. Empower them to make their own choices. As I have done this over the years, I have been fired from every job title at T3 I ever had because the people I promoted were better than I was. Hire great, capable people and they will take your job, which for me has been a wonderful thing. Right now I feel pretty safe as CEO and master connector.

  Turning Over the Books

  Shortly after starting T3 I realized that doing our books wasn’t the highest and best use of my time. Because we were crawling out of a deep recession, there happened to be a program sponsored by the government that put willing people who had been laid off for no fault of their own into a training program. The program helped them with interviewing skills, networking, and learning how to transfer their talents into a different industry.

  It was through this program that I was introduced to a woman who could potentially help with our accounting needs. She was unassuming, but confident and capable. I hired her and, to my great surprise, half of her salary was covered by the government program for six months. It gave the employer only half the risk of a new hire. We both had skin in the game.

  As we got to know each other, I realized that she had grown up in a small town in Central Texas and shared the same ethics and grit that our company did. Her family had lived around the world when her father was in diplomatic service, but she spent most of her life on her family ranch in Texas. She is as honest as the day is long and stands by her word.

  A note about her family: Her mother is one tough, hardworking character. After losing her husband, she never flinched at the ranch duties, including the task of cutting and baling her own hay. At one point she decided to sell her hay-baling equipment, and we sent our ranch foreman, Hardy, to go take a look at it. At the end of the inspection, he offered to buy it and they made a deal. He recalls that her handshake almost broke his hand. Wow—she is a cowgirl with a capital “C”!

  Long story short, her daughter, who was shepherding our accounting through rapid growth and changes in the ad industry, was growing into a powerful leader at T3. Again, not the top-down authoritative type, but building her team on accuracy, results, goodwill, and camaraderie. Hers is the longest-tenured team at T3.

  Today that young staff accountant is now the CFO of T3. Step by step she earned the right to join the C-suite. She is a cowgirl and the Rock of Gibraltar to me and my family.

  What You Don’t Do Is More Important Than What You Do

  I heard Ann Moore give a speech, and she used this Nelson Mandela quote, “No is a complete sentence.” I learned that valuable lesson early in my career in the advertising business.

  Small clients without vision and adequate budgets soon make you feel like you are being nibbled to death by ducks. We say no to nine out of ten client inquiries we get. We have developed a ten-point new business filter that has been in place for years. We go through the checklist every time a new opportunity presents itself. The first question we ask ourselves is whether we would want to work for the company. A no immediately ends the conversation.

  No empowers you. No allows you to laser focus in on what is important. No simplifies your life. In 2000, Austin was full of Internet start-ups rich with venture money. They clamored to our office all claiming to have a $12 million budget and demanding that we get their ads placed in the Super Bowl—even though it had been sold out for months. We had so many of them coming and going that we could not get any real work done. We told all but one of them no. And the one we did take was a mistake. But my CFO and I got tougher than nickel steaks and we collected every dime they
owed us. It took months, but we prevailed with persistence.

  When life gets complicated, stop and prioritize what the most important things are that you do. Look at the bottom third of the list and see what you can cut and where you can say no. As you build your personal power, raise a family, and succeed in your career, you must draw the lines. It is so easy to get overcommitted. It pulls you away from where you need to focus.

  No is a complete sentence. Don’t give long reasons and excuses. It weakens your power. Just say no.

  Facing Life’s Plateaus

  Recently, I was talking to a young woman in New York who is building her career. She confided in me that she loved her team but she had started to feel like “the smartest person in the room,” and was worried she was no longer challenged or pushed to make it to the next level.

  Wow, could I relate. I told her that throughout my life and career I had these same feelings. I started to describe these times when I felt like I was standing on a plateau and bored with the status quo. Sure, it was comfortable, but it gets to be stifling.

  These are the times that if you stop and think about it, you are about to grow. If you are willing to take the next leap of faith, interesting and exciting things are around the corner. Sometimes this means that you have to surround yourself with new, fascinating people who can help you grow and learn. Other times it means you have to challenge everyone around you to step up with you.

  Yes, it can be a bit scary, but what if you don’t take the risk to be a bigger, better you? You will never know unless you are willing to walk through the fog for a while until you see the light of a new day.

  Rely on our cowgirl role models—just think of them. Cowgirls think big. What have you got to lose?!

  When You Fail, Watch Who Has Your Back

  Condoleezza Rice once said, “When I talk to students—and I still think of myself more than anything as a kind of professor on leave—they say, ‘Well, how do I get to do what you do?’…And I say, ‘Well, you have to start out by being a failed piano major.’ And my point to them is don’t try to have a ten-year plan. Find the next thing that interests you and follow that.”22

  If you are out there in the world making things happen and enjoying your power, you will face failure. It happens. Failure is the downside of risk. I always tried to minimize the impact of failure and climb back on. Deal with it and move on.

  But watch who has your back. If something bad happened to us at T3, a few people would always stick their heads in my office and check on me. If we needed to talk through tough issues, they would always stay late. If we needed to make tough decisions, they provided insight and good counsel. They never let their emotions cloud a good decision.

  They never overreacted or underreacted. They were grown-ups and I appreciated and valued their support. Thankfully, most of those people are still with me today. These are the wonderful people who have built their own power and know exactly how to use it to celebrate the good things and help us all through the inevitable challenges.

  Once I was in a board meeting of an organization where I served as the chairman. On one particular day, one of the participants decided to challenge me. She hurled accusations and assumptions about my point of view that were both unfounded and vitriolic. In the heat of the moment I was dumbfounded, but actually held myself in check for a moment because I didn’t want to lose control in front of the entire group. The immediate reaction would have been to try to dispel her comments, snap right back at her, and get the upper hand.

  However, my inner cowgirl said silence is golden. And, to my delight and surprise, I didn’t have to say a word. Another person in the meeting took on my accuser and put her in her place for being so outrageous. In that moment, I felt incredibly powerful, because I had gained the respect and trust of another team member. And that wonderful person had my back. Believe me, I will have that saint’s back too from now on! And anyone else who is falsely blamed for anything.

  Who has your back?

  Think about who these people are in your life. Go give them a hug or call them on the phone. Right now.

  When a cowgirl gets thrown in the rodeo arena and breaks her leg, she already knows who will run in, pick her up, and carry her out while the crowd applauds.

  Lessons Learned: Cowgirls Are Fearless Leaders

  Women typically have different ways of leading than men. Women listen past words and discover unspoken emotions. Women see around corners. They are the glue that builds great teams, and that is many times more important to women who do not seek to lead from the top of a corporate hierarchy.

  Embrace change, although it can be hard. It is where you will find the biggest opportunities. Don’t fear failure; it is a crucial part of learning, building confidence, and your long-term success.

  Stop and take time every now and then to do nothing or something rote and simple to give your mind a break from overstimulation and the stress of trying to excel.

  Always connect people in helpful ways. Expect nothing in return. It will make your heart full and your days filled with meaning.

  Cowgirls at British exhibition in 1924

  (Brooke/Stringer/Getty Images)

  Chapter 11

  Cowgirls Are Doing Just Fine

  Let’s dial back to 1924 and see our fine cowgirls lined up at the British Empire Exhibition in London. Cowgirls, including Mabel Strickland, Bonnie McCarroll, Fox Hastings, and Tad Lucas to name a few, were right in the thick of things. These cowgirls were talented athletes and strong individuals but they were also part of a tight-knit team of women who cared about and supported each other. They helped each other put together better performances, and some married the brothers of other cowgirls. They took care of each other’s children and nursed each other back to health when things went awry in the arena.

  The exhibition in London was the largest show of its kind ever held, with British royalty in attendance. In addition to the American cowgirls and cowboys, fifty-six nations of the British Commonwealth and Empire were represented. The purpose was to stimulate trade, strengthen bonds with the mother country, and bring closer contact with one another.

  Mabel and Bonnie did more than just show up. They took home the Lord Selfridge World Championship Trophy. Cowgirls were doing just fine then and today.

  Through the years I have had and still have so many wonderful friends. They are true treasures in life. Count each of your friends as a precious gem, just like the cowgirls did on the rodeo circuit. “Got your backers” is what we call them at T3.

  Ann Dennison Normand has been more than a friend all of my life. She is a wonderful sister in every sense of the word. Ann has been with me through each tough time in my life and is always there to celebrate the victories. Educated as a teacher, Ann later went back to school and became an Episcopalian priest. As one of the first women to take on this role, she eventually became the canon to the bishop in Texas. In business terms, it would be like a chief operating officer. She still travels with the archbishop of Canterbury and recently spent an afternoon with the pope.

  Ann and I laugh at all of the things we have accomplished, each step of the way, cheering each other on. Recently, I cheered at her wedding ceremony to an Episcopalian Bishop as she started another new chapter in her life. The Reverend Dr. Ann Dennison Normand is a cowgirl, and I have photos of her in her full priest regalia on horseback to prove it!

  Cowgirls find their place in life, whether performing for royalty, visiting with the pope, or sitting on the back porch watching a sunset. They take control, make good judgment calls, and take responsibility for themselves. They understand when to push and when to let go. They understand the ebb and flow of life. They get it. They make things work. They stay positive. And, most important, they stay true to who they really are. And, for a cowgirl, nothing is more important.

  Cowgirl Power

  Cowgirl power is a mind-set, a big idea that can help women in business today think about their roles, decisions, and careers in different w
ays. Cowgirls take responsibility for themselves and set new rules. We can create our own programs, find new ways to work, build lifelong relationships, and find meaning and satisfaction in our work.

  As I began to understand and take control of my personal power, I learned to wield it for the benefit of others. Build your personal power so that you can begin the good work of empowering others. Leading by the empowerment of others is a stunning accomplishment. Your power can be the source of power for hundreds of others. Those hundreds can enable thousands to grow and be empowered.

  Cowgirl power is there for you. There are no limits to it. I know you can redefine personal power in ways that empower you every day to give you much more control over your own life.

  Go Find the Cowgirls

  Look through your organization and find the cowgirls. I know they are there. Think about congratulating them for what they do. Encourage them to steal some of your power. Then get the hell out of the way! You can improve your culture, your product, your engagement levels, and your retention rates. Call me and thank me as soon as you get it done!

  Thank You from the Bottom of My Heart

  There is a saying in Texas that the best sermons are lived, not preached. I hope I have not preached too much. I’m passionate about women and business because I’ve lived it. I know what is possible. And I know what a wonderful gift a successful career can be personally and for your family. Find your own path. It is uniquely yours, but it is there if you open your mind and heart and begin the journey.