Career Advice from Powerful AWC Women

In the previous post, Jo-Ann Huff Albers alluded to important career advice she had received from prominent women in communications through her membership in TSP/WICI/AWC. She shares that advice here.

My membership in TSP/AWC provided a network of professional friends who gave me great advice about getting ahead. Three of the most helpful came from Gloria Biggs, Gannett’s first female publisher of a daily newspaper (Melbourne , Florida, that morphed into Florida Today); Marjorie Paxton, TSP president (1963-67), who was a predecessor as editor and publisher of Public Opinion in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania; and Margot Sherman, my immediate predecessor as president of Women in Communications Inc., first woman graduate of the University of Michigan journalism department, who became senior vice president and assistant to the president at McCann-Erickson advertising agency and the first woman to serve on the agency’s board.

Gloria Biggs – Write Notes to Men

Biggs, speaking at a TSP or WICI meeting (cannot remember which), gave attendees what became to me the most important career-advancing piece of advice. “Write notes to men. They don’t have a tone of voice. Men grow up tuning out female voices: ‘It’s time to come in and go to bed.’ ‘Honey, please take out the garbage, etc.” Not only did that help me get credit for my ideas at work, it eliminated having my husband say I didn’t tell him something.

I used this to my advantage when, after I had been told by Jack Heselden, VP of operations for Gannett Co. Inc., “Well, kid, I believe we can do business,” after he interviewed me for a possible editor/publisher position in the late 1970s when The Enquirer became a Gannett newspaper. By then I was Kentucky executive editor, the first woman in the paper’s its 141-year history to head a news department.

I figured it might take two years for the right paper to come along for me – one needing a publisher with news experience that was within easy commuting distance from Cincinnati, where my husband was head of the city’s building plan examination division and wanted to get in 25 years of service there.

So I decided to apply again for the Carnegie Mellon fellowship. I was accepted. My editor – the same one who refused a leave of absence for me years before sent my request for a 10-weeks leave, without pay – to Gannett HQ. It was approved there. I wanted to be sure the people at HQ didn’t forget about me wanting to be a publisher and what I learned in Pittsburgh would help me when I did get the assignment. So-o-o I started sending a weekly report to the editor with a copy to John Quinn, head of the company news operation. In my first report, I told of the four other fellows who were there at company expense. (Later I received the pay I offered to forgo to get the editor’s approval.)

When I returned to Cincinnati, I asked the publisher to approve a self-guided, on my days off, development program to learn what went on in advertising, circulation and production. In May 1981I was named editor of Sturgis Journal in Michigan with a promise of being made publisher within a year. The publisher title came eight days later!! Since then I’ve said I never got to know how good an editor I would have been.

Marge Paxton –
It’s easier to get forgiveness than prior approval.

Sixteen month later I was transferred to Chambersburg, and that brings me to the advice from Marj Paxson. She went from The Philadelphia Bulletin to Gannett as the assistant managing editor at the Idaho Statesman in Boise, publisher and editor of Public Opinion in Chambersburg and in 1980 was named publisher of the Muskogee (OK) Phoenix from which she retired in 1986. Marj gave me advice by example.

Early in her time in Chambersburg, she started taking her tiny Chihuahua dog, Tiger, to work with her. He got dog biscuits in accounting, water in the pressroom, etc. When Marj told her mother about this on the telephone, her mother gasped and said, “Marj, what will THEY think? Marj responded, “Mother I AM THEY.”

When Marj had dinner with the former owner and other executives of Muskogee Phoenix, one of them told her that female news staff at the paper didn’t wear pants to work. Marj was introduced to the newsroom the next day wearing a pants suit. She was one of the first to confirm to me that it’s easier to get forgiveness than prior approval. Most of the men to whom I reported were so sluggish in responding to plans of things I wanted to do that I had to proceed on my own when a decision had to be made.

Margot Sherman – Bring More Value

Now I’ve come to Margot Sherman’s advice. When I was complaining about the unconscionable things my immediate male superior was doing, she said, “Jo-Ann, don’t kid yourself that upper management is unaware of his behavior. As long as he is more valuable to the company than those he supervises, he will stay there.”

Of course, the higher one goes as an employee the more “at will” your service is, which means no reason is needed to fire you. I had not been named a publisher by him, and it took him four years to “get” me.

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