But I couldn’t be happier. For one thing, it’s a sign that my company, Brazen Careerist, is doing well. Remember when the company was running out of money and my electricity was getting turned off? There was no one worrying then that I was the wrong person for the CEO position. No one cared because it looked like we were going under.

But then the media started talking about how we could be LinkedIn for Gen Y and we started moving fast. I don’t worry about of money anymore, and we are moving at a faster speed because we can see where we are going, how we’ll make money, and how we’ll grow the community.

1. Know where your strengths are.
The thing that makes me great is my writing. I have spent my whole life writing, constantly trying to figure out how to earn money writing. My favorite thing I’ve ever written is this blog. I adore the conversation, I adore the format, the never-ending research, and the self-referential links, because that’s how my mind works: connecting random stuff together all the time trying to figure out the best path to happiness. Blogging is my dream-come-true media.

But I also love building companies. So I was in heaven for two years turning my blog brand into a social networking company.

I am great in that phase of a business–thinking, philosophizing, finding holes in markets, finding holes in ideas. I never give up. I always have another idea, and I don’t mind feeling lost day after day, week after week.

2. Watch where you gravitate.
But now the company needs to run fast, to execute a model we have confidence in. I am not fast at execution—I do not keep ten thousand things in my head at one time. Here’s a good example: I flew to DC to talk with investors and had about five hours to retool our presentation to incorporate a new marketing plan. I spent two of those hours writing a blog post.

And the more responsibility I had for running a large team, trying to hit many goals at once, the less work I did. Honestly, I just didn’t know what to do. I was outside my core strength.

And I know this:  the first sign that you are outside of your strengths is when you can’t make yourself do the work you need to do.

3. Find people who complement your strengths.
To get out of germination mode and reach our launch, I needed to surround myself with people with complimentary skills. I spent two years looking for business partners before I found Ryan Healy and Ryan Paugh. The way I knew it was a good fit is that as soon as I suggested we partner, they said yes, and then had a million ideas of their own.

Then, when the company was stuck financially, I found a new board member who runs a company with $150 million in revenue. He met with me every week for six months to help me focus on cash flow.

When the company was clearly moving too fast for me to keep up as CEO, I badgered another board member to be CEO. He told me a number of reasons why that wouldn’t work – he had had two huge exits and he wasn’t planning to be CEO again, and another company wanted him to be CEO,  and he wants to watch his kids play football. These are all good reasons that I overcame, and I got him to agree to be interim CEO.

4. Do what differentiates you.
So I’m going to be Chief Evangelist. This is a great job for me, because basically, I keep blogging, and talking to the media, and I go to SXSW with my fake tan.

Most of all, I am certain I’m right about Brazen Careerist. LinkedIn is a place to display your network, not build your network. Facebook is too personal to use as a platform for managing your professional life. The way to build your network is through conversation, and Brazen Careerist is a great tool for that network-building conversation that gets you control over your career. (And hey, you should sign up!) I can talk about this all day.

5. If you really can do the job, you’ll be doing it already.
Recently, I did a live chat on the Washington Post web site, answering fifty questions in sixty minutes about how to use social media to help your career.

The chat was fun, and people asked interesting questions. It was great exposure for Brazen Careerist. But during that hour I couldn’t help wondering: Who is making sure we’re hitting marketing numbers? Who is going to hire the new head of sales?

Now I have an answer: Ryan Healy.

In any office, employees gravitate to the job each should be doing, no matter what the titles are. Sometimes we gravitate to a job and it’s not available, and we go nuts doing something we shouldn’t be doing. Sometimes we gravitate to that job and it’s such a good fit for us that we do it even without a title.

Ryan Healy has been running day-to-day operations of the company for a while now. Without the official authority. Because he’s great at it. While I am thinking of ideas and philosophizing, Ryan is always asking, “What are we getting done?”

A lot of people say they should be doing a job they do not have the authority to do. Here’s some news, though: You’d be doing it already if you were great at it. Ryan Healy is now Chief Operating Officer at Brazen Careerist because he’s already shown he can do the job. That’s how you get serious promotions:  doing the job first, in an outstanding way.

Okay. So what you can expect from me is more blog posts, because when my blog traffic goes up, it’s good for Brazen Careerist. And you can also expect to see less of me feeling frazzled and crazy and fighting with Ryan. Because I’m not anymore. I’m back in my sweet spot, and I feel so lucky to be here.

There is absolutely irrefutable data to support the idea that good-looking people do better in life than everyone else. Gordon Patzer, in his book, Looks, draws from a wide body of research to describe the advantaged life of a good-looking person from the time they are a baby (good-looking babies get better parenting) to the time they are in sales (the whole sales team performs better if there are more good-looking people on the team.)

As a result, I have jumped on the plastic surgery bandwagon. Super-smarty Chelsea Clinton got plastic surgery before she entered the work world. We should all do that. And while I haven't taken my own advice, I do find myself pinching and pulling at my nose to see what it would look like after a $10,000 investment.

But wait. Before you take out a loan to straighten your nose, maybe you should just start thinking like a tall person. Being good-looking means having the right mix of a lot of things, and for you, being tall might be the final keystone to hold it all in place. (Wondering if you're already tall? Fast Company has the answer: over 6'3" for men and over 5'9" for women, which, by the way, makes me half-an-inch into the land of the tall.)

Tall people make $789 more per inch per year, and are 90% more likely to ascend to the CEO chairs of Fortune 500 Companies, according to Arianne Cohen, author of The Tall Book. She scoured the sociology, psychology and workplace research to determine why tall people succeed (she herself is 6'3"). And Cohen discovered that the behaviors tall people display can be mimicked by anyone in order to get the career benefits of being tall.

Here's what Cohen says to do, based on the research she's gathered:

Be unforgettable. Due to evolutionary programming, when a tall guy walks into a meeting, everyone registers that he's there, and remembers what he says. This is a huge boon for someone who's also an ambitious, talented worker. So be noticeable. Figure out a way that when you walk in the room, everyone registers it. You can do that through interesting (but professional) clothing, cracking jokes when you walk in, etc.

Act like the boss. Tall children, from a very young age, are deemed the "leader" of their friends. Other little kids literally look up to them and often treat them as they would a slightly older child, and as a result, they're more likely to function as the leader for the rest of their life. Even as interns, other office workers give them the physical space and attention usually reserved for a leader. So act like a leader.

Find a way to look down on coworkers. Literally. An eye cast down is a really powerful behavior — it's the body's way of signaling a power imbalance in your favor, and you can create that power imbalance with some attention to your positioning. Thus, stand whenever you can when coworkers are sitting, and avoid walk-and-talks and casual standing around the office where coworkers are looking down at you.

Guard your personal space. Close friends hold conversations 18" apart; friends 2-3' apart, and bosses and employees four feet apart. Coworkers naturally give tall people four-or-more feet, which means that from the beginning, they're treated with boss-like reverence. You can mimic this body language — simply send out the physical vibe of professionalism, not chumminess, even in casual conversation. You'll see that people step back, and give you more space.

Don't be shy. Tall people often build an oversize personality to fit their oversize bodies. In the workplace tall people are more likely to yell or make demands or pull off a tongue-in-cheek toast to the boss. Socially, they take chances, and those chances are rewarded.

Focus on image rather than competence. Tall people aren't actually better workers, but in surveys, their bosses think they are. Which means that though competence matters, the perception of competence matters much more. So stop spending so much time on your work, and start spending more time on this list of ways to look tall.

I know this first hand. Because the insult Ryan Healy loves to hurl at me most is that I’m a bad team player. At first I thought this was a joke: Of course I’m a bad team player. I am part of gen x – the most disenfranchised, neglected generation in history.

But as CEO of Brazen Careerist, I work pretty hard to be better at being part of a team. Not only to appease Ryan and his gen-y cohorts, but also because I think effective leadership in today's workplace is about teamwork and following, not about standing out.

Here are five traits of leadership in the new millennium — traits I try to practice myself:

1. Make yourself a source of information

The key trait in a leader is the bravery to put forth an opinion and maybe be wrong. Jeffrey Kluger, writing in Time magazine, reports research that we value leaders not because they are smarter or right more often, but merely because they speak up. We want to be lead by people who take a shot at the answer – right or wrong. So if you want to be perceived as a leader, speak up. Often.

This means you need opinions. Today news is commodified, which means (newspapers are dying and) the real information we can offer is a layer of opinion and synthesis on top of the news. So you need to take a risk and put out some opinions that matter in order to be seen as leading people. Your peers, rather than some special gatekeeper will determine if the opinions are right or wrong.

2. Expect your ideas to resonate due to merit not rank

Gary Hamel has a great post on his Wall St. Journal blog about the impact of Web 2.0 on the workplace. The first thing he points out is that in the Web 2.0 world, all ideas are on equal footing. Which is to say that your rank doesn’t matter as much as what you put forward.

He writes: “When you post a video to YouTube, no one asks you if you went to film school. When you write a blog, no one cares whether you have a journalism degree. Position, title, and academic degrees—none of the usual status differentiators carry much weight online. On the Web, what counts is not your resume, but what you can contribute.”

3. Get good at following

I’ve been thinking a lot about Barbara Kellerman’s book, Followership: How Followers are Creating Change and Changing Leaders. Kellerman argues that in order to learn how to be a good leader, you need to also understand the art of good following. Her research shows that the best followers have historically paid more attention to their peers than those holding rank above them. So it makes sense that leaders in the new millennium will look to their peers to elevate them rather than doing it by climbing up some external ranking system.

4. Get good at selling from the inside out

You cannot force an idea down peoples’ throats. That top-down sort of leadership disappeared when the corporate ladder disappeared. This means that leadership is all about sales: selling a vision, and a common goal, and making meaningful connections. Leaders do this to convince people to keep going even though there is no promise of a safe future.

Today leaders sell by being part of the team. A great example of this is cheerleaders. Cheerleaders are infamous for being amazing salespeople and part of that is that they know how to work as part of a team instead of barking orders and insisting on being the leader.

5. Be authentic in situations where authenticity is most difficult

Authenticity is the new way of selling –rather than using the force of BS. And the leaders of the new millennium are judged by their ability to convey their true selves. Tony Hsieh, the CEO for Zappos is renowned for maintaining a popular Twitter feed that rings as authentic and fun. Mark Zuckerberg gets into the most trouble when his interviews seem stiff to the point of inauthentic.

One of the best ways develop your own leadership potential is through public speaking training. The best type of training for speakers isn’t to memorize speeches and make rote eye contact, but rather to learn to be your true self in front of people. First you learn to do it in front of a few people – no small feat – and then you learn to do it in front of a lot of people. (I learned this at TAI Resources.)

Of course, you may discover that you are not really a leader. But the best thing about deciding to become a leader is that you learn what your strengths are and what your weaknesses are. And in the new millennium, the distinction between leader and follower is so fluid that the distinction between your strengths and weaknesses is probably more important, anyway.

I saw her husband hold the baby when she talked about family. I saw her husband give the baby away when she talked about how strong her marriage is. I saw the strain in his face when he smiled. He is a stay-at-home dad, and she didn't mention that. He just quit his job after twenty years at work. She didn't mention that.

I can relate to all of that.

I could follow yesterday's post with a post clarifying my disdain for her. Believe me, I hate her politics. Her politics are so foreign to me that I don't think I've ever even spoken in person with anyone who honestly believes rape victims should not get abortions.

But really, I've been like her. Like when she signed up for the PTA to make her kid's school better. I tried that. It sucked. The lack of power and influence you have in the PTA sucks. It's the tip of the iceberg of why it sucks to be at home with kids if you are a woman who is a leader — when there is no one to lead, but leading is in your DNA.

On some level, I admire her. I understand how women with big jobs and young kids manage: Compartmentalize, prioritize, multi-task. I am great at that stuff, and so are all the women I know who have big jobs and young kids.

But there is a spot about Palin as VP that mystifies me: Travel. In my life, I have found there is no way to have time with kids when you travel because there is no chance to carve out time; you're just not there.

And you can't average it out—kids don't add up the cumulative time over a month. Maybe an older kid does, but not my three-year-old. Three days away from a three-year-old is a lot. Even for a three-year-old who is supposedly used to it, like mine. Every time (even now) when I'm gone, my husband, who is sort of my ex-husband but not yet, is right there, in the house, taking care of my sons. And it still feels bad for it not to be me.

So I love watching Palin because she makes me believe that I can handle all the travel I do. She is so pretty and capable and somehow, if I ignore that her daughter is pregnant and her husband is lost and her special needs child does not have a mom who is meeting the doctors and therapists and specialists involved in the child's treatment. If I ignore that, I think that I can travel five times a month and not have a nervous breakdown from the sadness of leaving my kids.

I want to be that. I want to be the CEO who can travel all the time. Because I get invitations to travel to appear on TV, and to travel to deliver speeches, and to travel to wrangle investment in the company. And recently I have been that CEO: I traveled every week for twelve weeks, sometimes twice a week. And everyone said, how do you do it? And I said I don't know. Because I didn't know if I was pulling it off or pulling my family apart. I wasn't sure.

And then I took a break. And when it was time to start traveling again, I had a panic attack. I was driving with my kids to the farm and I remembered how I would be traveling again and I started crying uncontrollably and I snapped at the kids and I drove the car to the farmer's house and told him to drive up and down the dirt road for a few minutes while I called my friend who is the only friend I know with both a venture-backed company and the mom responsibilities for a young child, and I told her I can't do it anymore and she told me she doesn't know why I didn't have a breakdown earlier.

She said stop with the speeches and the media and the sky-high aspirations. And after a while I stopped crying and I said okay. And I got back in the car. And I drove to the farm. And we played with chicks and baby pigs and cooked over an open fire.

And then I resumed my travel schedule.

Because I am trying to figure out what's right. And canceling everything is not what's right for me. I did the PTA. It sucks. And I've done travel every week. It sucks. I don't know how Palin will do it.

But part of me wants to watch. Will she take her baby? (I've done that. It's impossible to focus.) Will she travel with a nanny? (Done that. It's awkwardly intimate.) Will she cut back on travel? (Done that. People started doubting me.) What will she do? I want to see because I need some new ideas.

The clock struck twelve. The century changed. Nothing happened.

I feel like the same thing is happening with the hoop-la over the baby boomer exodus. HELLO OUT THERE! Do the people who write the press releases about baby boomer retirement not understand that this is the most overleveraged generation in history and they will work till the day they die?

The new glass ceiling is the gray ceiling. And how do you get a leadership job from baby boomers when they won't get out of the way? Act like them. Sure, this means working 60 hour weeks, because that's what baby boomers do. But it also means exhibiting the leadership qualities that baby boomers look for when they promote people.

Jo Miller teaches people how to make the shift into corporate leadership positions. She conducted interviews with more than 1000 people and she identified the 12 skills that are most essential to have if you want to get promoted into leadership roles. Her top four are:

1. Exuding an aura of credibility and authority with your presence

2. Making your accomplishments visible, instead of working hard and hoping the work will speak for itself.

3. Becoming a person of influence

4. Building a powerful network with the key players in your organization.

To see how many of the 12 skills you have, you can take this test.

Jo focuses on coaching women because she says that men do these things more intuitively than women do. She teaches a seminar on how to get these skills at companies like Intel, she has an online course, and she does one-on-one coaching for people who want to develop these skills.

This week's Coachology offer is 90 minutes with Jo. You'll be a good match for her if you are in a corporate job and you want to get to the next level but you are sort of stuck. She can help you get unstuck. You should already have good emotional intelligence because that is what it's going to take to make the changes Jo will recommend that you to make.

If you're interested, send an email to me with three sentences saying why you want to work with Jo, and she'll choose a winner. The deadline is Sunday, August 5.

Based on his research, he wrote a paper called Connecting Across Generations in the Workplace. I could reference that paper every day. Here are some gems:

Gen X will finally have their moment: The shrinking workforce actually creates more demand for Gen-X than Gen-Y. The baby boomer retirement will create a 2% drop in the workforce among 24-34 year olds, and a 31% drop among 35-45 year olds.

Women will drive change in the consulting business: Women have more consulting-oriented skills than men do, they will make up the more than 60% of the workforce by 2010, and they will only work at companies that accommodate their need for flexibility.

Deloitte backs up the revolution with data: Deloitte's data shows it is men and women in Generation X and Y. "The real revolution is a decrease in career ambition in favor of family time, less travel, and less personal pressure."

I wrote about Stan in Time magazine, I wrote about him in the Boston Globe, and I put the articles on my blog, and every time I'd mention him, there was no link, which is so annoying to me. I scoured the web for a link to his paper, and I looked for his bio. Nothing.

I am not the only online publisher who is annoyed. I wrote about his study for my Yahoo Finance column that runs tomorrow, and my editor emailed me: "Why are you linking to Deloitte's home page? Where's the study?"

Nowhere, of course. Well, on Stan's desk, probably. And in a lot of CEOs' in boxes. But not online. And to a significant portion of the world, if it's not online, it doesn't exist.

So I've solved the problem. You can now download Connecting Across Generations in the Workplace right here. And I think this encapsulates where we are in the publishing world: A blogger publishing a document from the Fortune 500 in order to be able to link to it from future blog posts.

I told myself that I should be doing book events, not going to coaching sessions. I told myself that there is no way I could learn enough to justify two days of not answering the onslaught of email I get from my blog.

But every day I would see the "cancel TAI" on my to do list, and I didn't cancel. You can learn a lot about yourself by looking at the stuff you don't do on your to do list. Deep down I know that if I want to have a life where my job is to connect with people then I have to devote time to learning to be a good at genuinely connecting with people. I need to make room in my schedule for my big-picture goals. And TAI teaches people to connect. So I went.

When I got there at 8:30 am the first day, I had residual pissiness. And I stayed at my mom's apartment in New York City the night before. I used to be the type of person who could not get along with my mom long enough to spend the night at her apartment. But I decided I was too old for that, and now we get along. The price I pay is that I didn't tell her no when she made us a big breakfast even though I said I didn't have time.

So I was late for day one of my training. There were eight of us. We sat in a front row of chairs. Behind us was the professional peanut gallery of people who critique speeches.

Gifford, the facilitator, told us to write for ten minutes describing our best speaking experience. "If you finish early, just keep writing," he said. "Just write anything."

I was relieved. Great. I wrote for about six seconds about my best speaking experience and then I wrote stream of consciousness. A writer's dream.

I don't know how I could be so dense, but I didn't realize that we'd have to use what we wrote as a speech. At first I thought I could quickly rewrite something before it was my turn to speak. But I was totally captivated by Gifford helping the speakers before me.

Each person who spoke was a little bit terrible, to be honest. I mean, we are talking about stuff that is not that interesting, and we don't really even know who each other is. But Gifford found a way to make a small change in each person that totally transformed them into an engaging speaker. So it was fascinating to watch this happen.

He changed one person's tone of voice by having him do ape calls to the audience. He changed someone's body language by having him hold his hands behind his back. He changed someone's eye contact by having him play catch with the audience while he spoke. You'd think each of these things would make a person look insane, but Gifford knew the perfect thing for someone to do to learn a new skill about connecting.

When it was my turn, I had nothing to do but read what I wrote. I described my favorite speaking experience: My stepmother's funeral. (I know, funeral. I know. But let me tell you something, I really captivated the mourners.)

Then I stopped.

Gifford said, "Did you write any more?"  

He has me read it, of course. So I stood there in front of the room reading my stream-of-consciousness stuff about  how I don't want to be in the room and I hate group activities and I wish I were blogging.

And this is what Gifford did. In a matter of minutes he showed me how to take my speech about how I don't want to be learning to give a speech, and make it engaging. He showed me how if I admit to my feelings and say them honestly, and with integrity, people will actually like hearing the speech.

All this in the first hour of a two-day training course.

We spent a lot of those two days "learning to land". Everyone in the room knew that we were supposed to look at the audience when we talk. But there are so many different ways to look at an audience. Most people look without connecting. They don't actually talk with a person because landing your eyes on someone and really talking to them is really, really hard.

And the amazing thing is that you'd think that if you are talking with just one person then the rest of the audience feels left out. But in fact, the audience feels more connected to you if you are connecting with someone – anyone – in the audience. One of the most valuable things about this coaching is that you understand what people do as an audience member so that you are better able to read an audience.

My favorite part of the class is that the room was full of people who are high up in their organizations and respected by their peers, yet here they are doing things that are very difficult – like, giving a speech about an essentially boring topic and trying to make it meaningful by connecting with people. Everyone looks awkward learning something new. I liked that part about all of us becoming vulnerable together.

I am a much better speaker from this course. And, because the course focuses on authentic communication, I am better at talking with people one on one, too; I notice more often the times that I am talking with someone but not totally engaged.

But there's one more thing I learned from this experience. We need to make time in our life for coaching. Mentoring is one of the big differentiators between the people who get what they want and the people who don't. And coaching is mentoring on steroids – very specialized and very effective. This is why I have the Coachology feature on my blog, because coaching has made such a huge impact on my life, and I want to share it with you. It makes a huge difference. And even yours truly, Coachology girl, almost didn't make time for the coaching. So focus on the big picture goals in your life, and get coaching to meet them faster and better than you could do on your own.

That said, this week's Coachology offer is a big one. You will get a scholarship to the two-day session at TAI. The session is August 9 and 10 in New York City, (you have to get yourself there). You don't have to be senior management in an organization, but the other people in this session will likely be mid-level and senior managers at large companies. So you should be able to feel comfortable with these people, because you will be giving speeches to them and hanging out with them for two days. To benefit from this experience, Gifford also cautions that you need to be a decent speaker to begin with. This course is for moving your communication skills to a high level. This is not training for the basics.

If you want to do this course, send an email with three sentences telling me why you want the coaching and why you know could succeed in it. Deadline is Sunday, June 24.

But here's the bottom line from all this corporate discipline hoopla: Senior executives must lead their personal lives in accordance with the values of corporate boards. Their personal life is no longer their own, according to Shelly Lazarus, CEO of Ogilvy & Mather.

Thank goodness these boards do not value fathering, or else there would be no one to run the Fortune 500. Because there appears to be little room for parenting if you're at the very top.

Fortune magazine ran an article about Howard Stringer, CEO of Sony. He is married with two children and is quoted as saying at company meeting, "I don't see my family much. My family is you."

Fortune ran a profile of Jeff Immelt, chief executive of GE. Immelt said that he has been working 100-hour weeks for the last twenty years. He also said that he is married and they have an eighteen year-old-daughter.

I can't decide which is more pathetic – the way these men approach their role as a parent, or the way that Fortune magazine writes about it without any commentary.

How can there be no mention of the fact that these CEOs are neglecting their kids?

We have a double standard in our society: If you are poor and you abandon your kids you are a bad parent. But if you are rich and you abandon them to run a company, you are profiled in Fortune magazine.

I now quote a government publication aimed at low-income fathers:

"All children need emotional and financial support from both parents. The campaign goal is to convey…the importance of family life and to encourage fathers – whether married, divorced or single – to become involved in their children's lives… Responsible fathers are men who actively share with the mother in providing physical, emotional and intellectual needs for their child."

This standard applies to Stringer and Immelt. Just because they're rich doesn't mean their kids don't need to see them. How is Stringer providing emotional support to his children when he is telling his employees that he has replaced his family with his employees? And I question how someone can spend 100 hours a week working and still find time to actively share in parenting responsibilities.

Fortunately, respect for this sort of parenting outside the board room is dwindling as baby boomers disappear from the parenting picture and Gen-Xers take their place. Sylvia Hewlett presents research to show that while baby boomers are willing to work extreme hours, younger people scoff at the idea of doing that for more than a year. And recent polls (via Hole in the Fence) show that men are sick of the long hours and want more time with their kids: Almost 40% of working dads would take a pay cut to spend more time with their kids.

It'll be a great day when CEOs are dismissed for neglecting their kids. Meanwhile, employees, beware: CEOs like Stringer and Immelt have a negative effect on your own ability to keep your personal life intact, because work-life policy starts at the top and trickles down.

When you are looking for a company to work for, look at the CEO. If you find out he's having sex with four different women, you don't have to worry – he's about to be fired. But if he works insane hours, you can bet that you will be expected to do the same, on some level. And my gosh, if he refers to you as his family, run!

Even if the benefits of a promotion were more notable, it's hard to imagine them being worth the trouble a promotion causes. Development Dimensions International (DDI), a human resources firm, reports that, "When given the opportunity to rate life challenges in order of difficulty, 19 percent of all US leaders [polled] rated being promoted as the number one greatest challenge, superseding personal stressors like coping with bereavement, divorce and relocation."

First of all, you have to figure that the majority of these people found getting a promotion so stressful because their stay-at-home spouse takes care of all the other stuff. Of course relocation is not stressful for an executive. He or she works in the New York office on Friday and the Seattle office on Monday, and meanwhile, the spouse is moving the kids and all the stuff. So, in fact, relocation is probably a negative on the stress scale for executives because they finally get a little relief from that nagging feeling that they should go home for dinner.

But even putting those issues aside, a promotion is very stressful because you have to start excelling at a different kind of job. Matt Paese, a vice president at DDI, says that the top three reasons that promotions are so stressful are:

1. Things get more political

2. There is more ambiguity and uncertainty

3. You don't have as much personal control and you have to get things done through other people.

So, look, I think we can conclude here that if you don't want to deal with office politics and delegation, then you should say no to the promotion. Robert Hogan, famous organizational psychologist thinks that you either have the personality for management or you don't. Unfortunately, he finds that, "Managers are rarely promoted based on their talent for leadership.  

Steve Fishman wrote a nice piece about this problem in New York Magazine, titled Boss Science. In this article, Hogan describes the five traits of personality: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism. What makes the best leader? Openness. "Open to new experiences, new ideas, new people. He's not dogmatic. He likes diversity. He's not a routinized taskmaster barking orders down the organizational chart." (If you want to know your own traits, take the Hogan Assessment.)

It turns out that it's much more important to be open than to be intelligent if you want to succeed as a leader. And conscientiousness is good for being the person who does stuff, not the person who leads. Agreeable is a good trait for a great team player, bad trait for a boss. Neuroticists are good when you need to hear about the worst-case scenarios, all the time.

Don't despair if you're not all about openness, though. The Harvard Business Review reports this month (paid) that the thing that really makes your workday good is feeling like you've made progress on your goal, and having your manager acknowledge that progress. So better to have the kind of work you are good at, and get praise for it, then move into a management position that you do not have the skill set to thrive.

So forget about that promotion. Don't let someone else define your career path for you and then promote you through it as if their vision for your life is your vision. Instead, figure out what work you are best suited for, and request it. This is the best path for you.

I confess, however, to really liking Dan Savage's Q&A column. But I think he makes up his own questions. Which makes me feel free to do a Q&A column where I make up all the questions myself.

Question #1

Dear Penelope,
What should I do to look more like a leader?

Signed,
Penelope’s old boss

Dear Sir,
Stop biting your nails! Remember that Monday team meeting when you tried to get us excited about sales goals? When we asked about looming layoffs, you started biting your nails in between the it’ll-be-okay sentences. I remember you putting your fingers in your mouth, trying to get one more millimeter. Bloody tips. I knew I was going to be laid off.

You are a nice guy, and so smart, but you seem to have no knowledge of how you come across to other people. Biting nails does not convey self-confidence. And no one wants to be lead by a nail-biter. People who bite their nails at work amaze me: Do you think biting nails is any more appropriate than pulling out hair at work? It is psychologically the same thing: compulsive, nervous, unrestrained.

Do people keep up this habit when they are feeling great about themselves? No. In other words, leaders don’t do this stuff (and if so, never in public). You think nail biting is small, innocuous. But really, you kill your credibility. And you did it way before the layoffs, mister.

Question #2

Dear Penelope,
How did you do so well in business when you got an F in my chemistry class?

Signed,
Penelope’s high school chemistry teacher

Dr. Mr. X
First of all, you were so incredibly good looking that you must believe that I really did want to get to class. I just couldn’t fit it into my schedule. I had a free period before chemistry and all my friends had a free period during chemistry. I was compelled to think of those two periods as a double-header block of time to hang out.

And thank you for trying to give me a D, really. Your efforts were valiant, especially when you gave me the smartest guy in the class for a lab partner.

Fortunately, study after study shows that kids who do poorly in school can do very well in the real world. The things that really matter in the real world are not chemistry lab tests (unless you want to be a chemist.) The things that matter are perseverance, passion and risk-taking – all attributes that, quite frankly, I exhibited as I ditched chemistry class.

Question #3

Dear Penelope,
You are so talented and insightful, but I am just a little more talented and insightful. So I’d like to mentor you. Can you please send your phone number to me so I can start investing my time and energy in you immediately?

Signed,
Your Fairy Godmother

Hold it. Why does no one send this mail? Getting a mentor is hard, even for Penelope, who constantly writes about how important it is to get a mentor and is always on the prowl. This shows why the Q&A exercise is a good one for everyone: If you write enough letters you’ll discover what you'd most like to receive in the mail.

And you will realize that it will never arrive. But before you can reach any goal in this world, you have to know that you want it. So take the first step, and write yourself letters until one strikes you as especially important. And that will help you to focus on what you really want right now.