Alice Sisty was destined for a career as a teacher. After one year of study, she went out west to a dude ranch and fell in love with a horse named Spot-Tail. She didn’t want to leave him in Nevada, so a plan evolved where she could keep the horse if she rode him from Reno to New York on a bet. She won the bet.
The ride brought her a great deal of attention, and soon after she decided to be a rodeo rider and forget that teacher’s training. This classic photo of Alice performing her “Roman Jump,” standing on two horses jumping over a car, just screams fearlessness.
Alice was five-foot-two and barely 105 pounds with her show gear on. Did anything make her tremble in her size 4 boots? Not much. She attempted incredibly dangerous stunts and succeeded over and over. She won high points in such events as bronc, steer, and relay riding, winning all-around champion of cowgirls in Madison Square Garden in 1932, making her a leader of her peers.
After marrying Milt Hinkle, the head of the rodeo, she was asked if she was ready to settle down. This was Alice’s reply: “I should say not. I’m happily married, but I’m afraid I wouldn’t be if I had to give up my saddle for a kitchen range and a washing machine.” I had to laugh at this. The only thing this fearless leader feared was getting stuck with the household chores!17
Alice Sisty was daring, bold, and a leader.
Cowgirls openly embrace leadership because of the way they have been taught. They view leadership as an opportunity to help people, to move them in the right direction. Cowgirls see leadership as an opportunity and responsibility to pass on the values that they have been given. They understand how to empower and inspire people in ways only a cowgirl can do.
When we think of leadership, we immediately think top down. We think of strong individuals. We think command and control. We think of leadership as always framed in masculine terms. But when you ask both men and women what kind of a leader they would prefer to work for, you get more feminine words. Words like “compassionate,” “organized,” and “honest.”18 When was the last time you heard a male leader described as compassionate, organized, and honest?
This is a deep vein for cowgirls to mine to find their personal power. This is where you build long-lasting alliances. This is where you build and earn loyalty. This is where you fill your buckets with goodwill.
My mother-in-law was a protégé of J. Frank Dobie, a famous Texas folklorist in the 1950s and 1960s. Dobie wrote tales of South Texas that he had heard from old cowboys. When asked if the stories were true or not, he would always answer, “Well, if it isn’t true, it should be,” with a twinkle in his eye.
That statement has stayed with me throughout my career and sums up my view on how women should think about leadership roles. It means we should always reach for our dreams, and just because it is not true today, doesn’t mean that with hard work, determination, boldness, and connections you cannot achieve what would seem like the impossible. But in the context of leadership it means more to me; it means that when you step into a leadership role, you take on the responsibility for making dreams come through for everyone in your organization. You take on the responsibility to make things better and, as a woman, you get to define what “better” means. I did not realize it at the time, but that is exactly what I did when I started T3 & Under.
One of the great projects we have worked on with UPS is their “Wishes Delivered” campaign. This is where there is a well-deserving person or organization in need, and UPS surprises them and fulfills their wishes. It has been heartwarming to see schoolteachers get a delivery of needed supplies for their classrooms that were otherwise unfunded. Our role is to make sure all of this is captured on video, and we help them tell the story. Here is the definition exemplified where UPS says, “Well, if it isn’t true, it should be.” And they make dreams and wishes come true.
From my perspective, shifting into leadership roles is one of the most powerful things you can do. Leadership means enabling people to be the best they can be—to encourage people, challenge them, and kick them in the butt if they slack off. As leaders, women have high standards for achieving results. But they can lead with compassion, building a nurturing and supportive environment that is a better place to be for both men and women. That environment will undoubtedly yield remarkable results.
To me, leadership is the power to do good for everyone. That is why I spend my time encouraging women to step up and lead in the workplace.
Corinne Post, associate professor of management at Lehigh University, decided to see if it could be proven that women make better leaders. She looked at team leadership and women who served on boards. What were the things that make women better leaders? Her hypothesis was a familiar one: that more work in large organizations was being done by teams and that women are more relationship oriented than men. So, would women make better leaders because of their heightened sensitivity to foster collaboration and trust?
She looked at eighty-two teams with more than eight hundred people at twenty-nine leading research and development companies. The study was supported in part by a National Science Foundation grant. Here is what she learned:
My experience is very much in line with the findings of this study. Women have an innate ability to build high-quality relationships across big, complex groups, often in multiple locations. In my experience, women are more sensitive to other people’s nonverbal reactions than most men. Women can see around emotional corners and see things men often miss. They will explore and understand the problem and then set out to fix it, down to the last detail.
I have seen this play out over many years at T3. Our people work on big, complex teams. It is not unusual for there to be fifty people or more working on a project when you add up agency people, clients, and third-party players, and they are usually in many different locations. I have watched our women leaders be the glue that holds these teams together, helps them grow and achieve success over and over again. They are incredibly powerful cowgirls.
Some people do not like change. I love it! If I can get my arms around it, I’ll give it a big old hug. Why? Because I have learned that with almost all significant change, opportunities emerge if you look for them. Of course, this is not always true, but for me it has been true more often than not. Sometimes when things change I can almost smell opportunity.
Deal with change head-on. Do what needs to be done. But when you can catch your breath, look under the rocks for the underlying opportunities, because they are usually there.
Some change comes at you like a hurricane. I remember in the very early days of the Internet we had a management meeting and were talking about where the business was going. Someone got up and started drawing on a whiteboard. He drew a big circle and labeled it “Internet.” He drew lots of other little circles around the big one and connected them with lines to the big one. The little circles were named TV, radio, magazines, newspapers, direct mail, etc. That scribble on a whiteboard changed our business forever. Be open to both incremental change and to tectonic change.
Throughout my career I have had clients ask me if I could do something, and I would answer, almost without exception, yes. Some of those requests were for things I had done many times before. But sometimes, it would be for something we had never done before. This is where the idea of embracing ambiguity is so powerful. This is where the skies open, the sun comes out, and you see forever.
There is always a first time. Some people would say, “No, I cannot do that because I don’t have any experience.” I spent all of my career saying yes, often knowing full well that we had never done it before. How did we pull it off? Because at T3 we built a culture based on constant learning. We are a learning organization. We have the skills to learn new solutions fast. It motivates our people. Many of them are quick studies and can become experts on something almost overnight, making them invaluable.
When my husband brought the first Apple computer into our office, the creative staff threw up their hands and said the world was about to end. Computers in those days did not kern type well, and there were those annoying spinning stars and happy faces hopping around the screen. Later, he brought the Internet into our business, and again the Luddites screamed to high heaven that it would be the end of us. Then, when he installed a video production studio designed for creating low-cost videos for the Internet, they thought the end of the world was at hand. Actually, each of those changes represented massive opportunity for our company, and the fact that we were an early adopter in each area served us well. I had the ability to calm the masses and hold their hands when Lee wheeled in the change agents.
Speaking of Luddites, I once had a client who ran a rehabilitation hospital in Central Texas. We did all of our work on either telephone calls or personal visits. The CEO absolutely refused to allow a fax machine on the premises. He said it would ruin everything because he would be forced to make decisions too fast, that he needed time to mull things over. One day he asked us to take on a major opening of another hospital, and the work volume and deadlines intensified. We got it done in record time because I snuck a fax machine into his executive assistant’s office and did business with her all day, every day. He never knew. Every smart cowgirl knows that there is more than one way to skin a cat. Now some of you say, “What’s a fax machine?”!
When opportunity rises up in front of you, grab it and ride right at it. Be open to doing things you have never done before. Do not allow yourself to live in a rut. Develop the skill to figure out new stuff. Do not be constrained by what you know today.
One more tamale story: It was called the “Great Tamale Incident” when President Gerald Ford did something he had never done before. When he visited the Alamo in 1976, he started to bite into a tamale that was still wrapped in its corn husk. San Antonio Mayor Lila Cockrell said, “The president didn’t know any better. It was obvious he didn’t get a briefing on the eating of tamales.”20 Veteran CBS news reporter Bob Schieffer recalled that the president “nearly choked.” Apparently, one of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas got to the president quickly and removed the corn wrapper before returning the plate to him. Mike Huckabee said, “Every newscast in Texas all weekend long, all they did was show Gerald Ford not knowing how to eat a tamale. To this day I am convinced that it was that gaffe with the tamale that cost him the state of Texas. Carter won Texas and Carter won the presidency, and it may have been a tamale that did it.”21
Lesson learned; if you are going to try something new, get briefed first, carefully unwrap it, and then take a big bite.
When I was a little girl, I was at a dance with my parents. A tall, lanky Texan named Buck Echols came over and asked me to dance. I was surprised and flattered. I stepped on top of his boots and, as we danced, he told me, “Always remember, Gay, that your first dance was with a Texas Ranger.” And yes, he was wearing his hat, his badge, and his gun. In those days, no one was more respected than a Texas Ranger. I remember it like it was yesterday.
When I went to the University of Texas in Austin, I drove back and forth to Liberty often. These were the days of CB radios and my handle was “Sunshine Girl.” I was notorious for having a heavy foot on the gas because I thought my CB buddies would protect me from the Texas Highway Patrol. But they didn’t. I got a lot of speeding tickets. When I did, I would call Buck Echols and tell him what county it was in and the name of the presiding judge and ask his opinion if the fine was fair. At the time, ticket costs were arbitrarily set by each judge. I would rant and rave about how unfair it was that the fines fluctuated so much. Buck would laugh, remind me of our dance, and somehow the charges against me just vanished. That was my first lesson in the power of networks.
When I think about networking, I am reminded of what my mother’s teacher told her after she lost her arm to cancer as a young girl, “You can put yourself out there and be all you can be.” That, to me, is the perfect definition of networking.
It means that you are willing to make a major investment in becoming a player in your field. That takes time and effort. It means that you get your numbers up, that you are talking to enough people to make your chances of success go up dramatically—to make your own luck. If your market is local, the chamber of commerce might be a good start. If your market is national, then it means attending national conferences, trade shows, and conventions. Focus only on opportunities that can scale, do not waste your time on things that do not have lots of potential to grow if you do a good job.
Be strategic about where you spend your time. I never was very active in advertising organizations because there was no one there who could ever hire me. Instead, I’ve always gone to conferences where there is a broad cross section of potential clients. I focus on diversity events like Women’s Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC) and media events like TED, Fortune’s Most Powerful Women, and other thought leadership conferences. I also like smaller events, where you really have an opportunity to get to know people. C200 has lots of these and they are always great. Over the years, I have earned the right to attend these high-powered events. Earlier in my career I started small and worked my way up.
When an opportunity presents itself, act fast. I heard the senior vice president of e-business at Allstate speak at an Allstate Supplier Diversity Exchange about the kind of partners they were looking for. As soon as he finished, I walked up to him and introduced myself. I quickly explained why I thought T3 would be a good fit for Allstate. His team vetted us, asked for a meeting, and they are now one of our largest clients.
Networking is not about asking for favors and advice. It is about building solid relationships with helpfulness and reciprocity. If I can help you, I’ll do it without any expectation of getting anything in return. But, if at some time in the future, you find a way to help me, make an introduction or just call up and ask how I’m doing, then we both win and the bonds get stronger.
What do you want to accomplish with your network? The answer to this question will change over time. Early in my career I focused my network on finding job opportunities. Later, the focus changed to finding clients. Then it shifted again to learning from successful, powerful women. And now, it is focused on finding powerful ways to help others.
I have several buckets of networks. Some are business relationships. Some are governmental and political connections. Some are volunteer groups. Others are experts in fields in my own industry, and the surprising thing is how many times they overlap.
I love the words “be all you can be” because that is the “why” behind networking. “Be all you can be” is a decision you make about how to live your life.
My cowgirls loved to perform in front of huge crowds. Cheers and applause just egged them on to take bigger risks and be more outrageous. They made the choice to play on a big stage, and many of them became the superstars of their day.
The reason to build a network is to help people see who you are, understand what you do, and look for ways to make connections and be helpful. The question becomes, how big is it “to be all you can be”? Is it in a small East Texas town? Is it in a big city? Your state? Nationally? Globally? Each one is a decision. The question becomes, how do you want to distinguish yourself and to whom? There are many ways to do this.
I blog regularly for both Forbes and Fortune magazines about the entrepreneurial spirit. In the process of writing those posts, I interview all kinds of entrepreneurs. One was a fourteen-year-old boy who was promoting his lawn-mowing business. Another was a fascinating woman who uses horses to teach teams how to better relate to each other. We post many of these articles on LinkedIn. I tweet about business events and use Facebook and Instagram just for fun. I speak nationally and globally. I lecture at quite a few universities. I have built a pretty big platform. It has been a conscious choice because I love being center stage, just like my cowgirls—and, it has been a great way to build my business.
Let me be clear. This is not about bragging and inflating your ego. This is where you build your own brand. This is where you make your mark about who you are. If you don’t do it, who will? Think about how big a field you want to play on and go do it. You are in control, and you can make that field bigger or smaller at the right times in your life.
If you want to distinguish yourself, put yourself out there. The bread crumbs you leave along the way can and will appear years later.
Oh. Here is my pet peeve on networking: Do not send me a request to connect on LinkedIn without explaining why you want to connect. I get these stupid requests such as someone in Norway wanting to join my network without any explanation of who they are and why they are interested in me. That is just plain lazy.
Sitting around the kitchen table when I was growing up, the conversation was most likely to include whether or not it was going to rain. My father’s surveying business ebbed and flowed based on the number of days they could be in the field. My godfather’s rice farm and cattle ranch literally could be made or broken by getting rain at the right time of year. Perhaps this understanding of how essential rain was to business made me want to be a rainmaker. If I could make it rain, then everyone would be happy, prosperous, and celebratory. What a great thing to do!
Early on in my career I looked for ways to help grow business in every company I worked for. Sometimes it was easier when the economy was good and business was flowing freely everywhere. But what separates the girls from the cowgirls is being able to make it rain when there is a drought and business is hard to come by.
These are the times you must be resourceful. Not only do you draw on your network but you must also be persistent, not a pest. I have found that most people don’t bring in new business because they simply fail to follow up. And I don’t mean just sending cookie-cutter e-mails. I mean, real, meaningful follow-up. Do something that will help your potential customer in his or her career. What insights can you offer that no one else has taken the time to think about?
Another fortunate thing I have been able to do through the years is draw on other happy clients to refer us business. This is all about the buckets of goodwill because of honest, hard work I have earned. It means I am willing to do the same for them when they need help. Remember, it is all about reciprocity.
Rainmaking is about literally showing up. In person. At their doorstep. Of course, not a surprise drop-in, but taking the time to go where your potential clients are, and inviting them to review and critique something new and cool you are working on. No pressure, just looking for their opinion. I cannot think of anything I have ever done that has won me more respect and power among my team than to bring home the bacon! Or, of course, to make it rain.
Not long after Lee and I got married, we took a trip to Puerto Rico and attended a seminar for advertising agency people to help them learn how to attract new business. The speaker taught us one important lesson: “If I call your five top prospects and ask them which agency really, really wants their business and they don’t name you in the top two or three, you don’t even have a new business program.”
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?!
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.