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58 It’s Not a Glass Ceiling, It’s a Sticky Floor

again early in her career, when she was working her way up through
the ranks at Arthur Andersen. In a work culture that was known at
the time for being difficult for women, she managed to win a pro-
motion to the next level of senior leadership, the crucial stepping-
stone to becoming a partner. She expected to make adjustments, learn
new things, and work hard to come up to speed in this important
new high-profile role. But a year into the job, something wasn’t right.
“For the first time, I wasn’t enjoying my job,” she says. She realized
that as a rank-and-file accountant she had been used to her work hav-
ing an ebb and flow. “There would be the busy season where you would
have no life, but at some point, things would slow down.” Since becom-
ing a manager, she seemed to be in one unending busy season and she
was getting tired of always being at the office.
She says this sudden and acute dissatisfaction made her begin to
understand that she wasn’t going about her job the right way and
had to rethink it. She realized that as a manager she needed to make
better use of her staff, to delegate and reorder her priorities so that
she would be able to both excel in her new role and go home at night
on a regular basis. Anita said, “I knew something had to change.
And this pushed me to realize that I could not do my direct reports’
jobs for them. I went about setting new expectations for them in
terms of my role and made a conscious decision to delegate and do
more coaching and mentoring.”
In other words, she consciously made the transition from staff to
manager and gained better work-life balance in the process.

Get Focused!

There’s a good reason why so many of us set New Year’s resolutions!
We need a starting point for setting and working toward a desired
goal—an excuse for a fresh start. For years my resolution was always
to slow down, work less, and play more. For my best friend, it was