Women Rule

When you conjure up an image of a c-suite executive, you probably don’t envision a smiling, friendly person. At first, Kate Lewis didn’t either. And that was a problem as Lewis started taking on jobs in the publishing world with greater and greater responsibilities: By nature, she has a smiling, friendly disposition. But she didn’t see very many people like that in the corridors of power. “In the magazine industry, there are a lot of—there’s an image, right, that you need to be a high-fashion person, that you need to have been a journalist in the trenches,” said Lewis, the chief content officer for Hearst Magazines. As a young, ambitious woman, she emulated them—thinking doing so was key to her thriving in the notoriously fast-paced New York publishing world. Instead, she had a realization that changed everything: What if being herself—that smiling, friendly person—actually made her a better leader? “I found my success when I became who I am. And that’s hard,” Lewis said during an interview for POLITICO’s