With all of that said, we were obviously pretty thrilled to receive advance copies of her upcoming book,
I Shouldn't Be Telling You This, and then get the opportunity to pick the editor's brain about all things career and Cosmo, and speak honestly about the challenges facing women at work today, that Atlantic article that said we couldn't have it all, and all of the workplace mistakes you might be making right now. So, if you're planning on angling for a promotion anytime soon, skip this Q&A at your own peril.
What's the thing you're most proud of from your 14 years at the helm of Cosmo?
"I think just taking a brand that has really been brilliantly executed and bringing it into the 21st century and having it be number one for 14 years. I know that can be tricky, and I was lucky this brand, it was very unambiguous as to why readers came to the magazine, and though the brand did need to be freshened up and reinvented to some degree, the expectations of readers to be excited, to be inspired, to have very candid sexual content, those were all really clear to me.
How much of your decisions at the magazine were about the research, and what the readers and the numbers were telling you versus trusting your gut?
"One of the things about Cosmo is it’s a huge money maker; it’s in the top five most lucrative magazine brands in the world and the most powerful brand at Hearst, so you'd better go in there and give consumers what they want because if you don’t, you’re going to start losing money. But at the same time, you can’t just rely on consumers to tell you what they want because they know what they don’t like, but they can’t always tell you for sure what they will really do like.
How do you choose to walk away and hand those kinds of decisions off to someone else? What did the process of deciding to leave Cosmo look like for you?
"I do really try to think things out and really listen to my gut and almost project and say, 'How will I feel about this a month from now?' and 'How will I feel the moment I make the decision?' because I think sometimes you can romanticize things. I loved Cosmo so much and I really enjoyed my time there, but I started to realize that 14 years is a long time, and now, there’s a window for me to do something different and fresh. I think all through your career, there are these windows that you have to kind of be aware of because they can slip away from you if you’re not paying attention. And so once I started to think about this window and that I needed to do it sooner rather than later, I let my gut just try to speak to me as I projected, 'Okay what’s it going to be like to not have 55 fabulous fun people around you every day who you work with?' and 'What’s it going to be like working out of a home office on the third floor of my brownstone in New York instead of a beautiful tower building.' And because I’d already done a lot of writing a novel in my little office, I felt it would be good and I would know what to expect, and though there might be a few curveballs here and there, I wouldn’t be unhappy."
So, speaking of windows that you need to jump through, do you have any regrets as far as openings or opportunities you didn't go for throughout your career?
"Well, actually I wish I had known about the window theory before. One regret I have is that I had the opportunity to take a job at seven months pregnant and go to run Working Woman, and I did it really in part because I thought this may be easier for me having a newborn, but there turned out to be so much work to do there in terms of modernizing the magazine that it ended up being really overwhelming, and I really regret that I didn’t have that almost interrupted time with my daughter when she was little. But, that was just one window I didn’t need to jump into based on the fact that I was this star young editor at that time at my company, and I probably could’ve just stayed there and had something else very quickly down the road when I was a little bit more ready. So, I think you have to know when the windows are open, but also ask yourself, 'Is this really the right moment to jump through this based on my own feeling of readiness?' I don’t think there’s anything wrong, as that Atlantic article showed, with saying maybe we have to be serial achievers, and then there are some things that you save for a different moment in your life. And maybe that window will still open or there will be another kind of window."
Well, speaking of that Atlantic story, in your book, you talk about how the conversation about "having it all" was a thing of the past, but now, Dean Slaughter, and so many writers who have responded to her article, are bringing that idea back into the conversation. Do you feel at all like it's a step backward, to be talking about whether or not women can have it all?
"Well, I liked reading the story and I empathized with her. I would’ve been tempted to flip it around to say it’s not that we can't have it all but because the tug of motherhood and the real desire to be with our kids and invest in them, I think there are moments when you might have to make a choice to temporarily let go of something and postpone it; to buy into the idea of being a serial achiever.
Photo: Courtesy of HarperBusiness
Your advice is all about "going big" and not being meek in the workplace. That really resonated with us, but for people who are just joining the workplace, they get a lot of flak for being entitled, and that kind of advice seems dangerous. How do you counter those preconceptions?
"Well, first of all, as entitled as they may feel, I don’t think that they’re as good at asking for what they want sometimes, as you would think. I also think they tend to sometimes go about it in the wrong way — they make it a lot about themselves and not enough about what the needs are of the organization. When I was at Cosmo, I did a round table with interns four times a year, and it would just be an opportunity for me to talk to them about career stuff. I remember at the last one I did, one young woman raised her hand and she said, 'For my first job, I just want a guarantee that there’s nothing boring about it. How do I make sure that happens?' And I kind of laughed and said, 'That used to be called paying your dues.'
So, what do you think it really takes for a young staffer to really set herself (or himself) apart when that's the expectation from most bosses?
"You know there was this really talented girl at Cosmo — she is so talented and she will run a website or be editor of a magazine one day. But, I remember there was one time where I was giving a dinner party, you know we used to give dinner parties for really interesting women, Fearless Females, and I would have people cooking and serving, but it was nice to have someone at the door who was related to the magazine, so occasionally I would ask an assistant editor to just greet people when they came in.
Another thing we loved about your advice was the moment where you talk about "bitch envy" and how you need to look inward and see where any envy you feel toward co-workers who might be succeeding is coming from. But, how do you foster that kind of healthy competition without cattiness?
"Well, I try to do it in a healthy way where people are rewarded, promoted, and praised for achievements but you also try to foster collaboration. There was never a system where...if you pulled one over on somebody, you didn’t get rewarded for that, but I do think that when you have a really collaborative workplace and you have a lot of people being friends together, I love it. In fact, when I was at Glamour in the '70s, when I left, there were six women who went out to dinner with me to celebrate. We went to a Turkish restaurant and after that, I called us the Turks. I just got an email from one of the Turks saying that they want to do, at the original Turkish restaurant, a celebration dinner for me for leaving Cosmo.
That kind of female camaraderie is so priceless. Particularly when even today, as women writing about things like fashion and sex and relationships — women's issues, across the board — it's so easy to be seen as frivolous or anti-feminist. Tavi recently told us a story that confirmed these ideas, but do you think that we're making progress as far as those attitudes go?
"I just feel that today it doesn’t matter what some people’s attitudes might be about that. It’s all about how you live your life — if you love looking girly or if you love dressing in orange platform heels, in most places today that’s not going to work against you, and it’s all going to be about how you do your business, how you present yourself in terms of your ideas, how take-charge you are. I think today you just see so many women looking how they want to look and not wearing some uniform.
Photo: Courtesy of HarperBusiness