It was a one-of-a-kind evening at the New York Women in Communications (NYWICI) 54th Annual Matrix Awards celebrating women writing their own rules and breaking the status quo. The 2024 Honorees: Kristin Chenoweth, EMMY® and TONY® Award Winning Actress and Singer, Nina Garcia, Editor-in-Chief, ELLE, Hearst Magazines, Meredith Kopit Levien, President, and Chief Executive Officer, The New York Times Company, Jill Cress, Chief Marketing & Experience Officer, H&R Block, Rakia Reynolds, Founder / Executive Officer, Skai Blue Media, Nancy Reyes, CEO of the Americas, BBDO and Jennifer Lowney, Global Head of Communications, Citi.

I sat down with Nancy Reyes, CEO of the Americas, BBDO to talk about being a rule breaker and her passionate work in empowering women for leadership, having conviction in excellence, and helping women take up more space. As Reyes aptly put, “We lose too many women on the way to the top”.

Congrats on being chosen as a NYWICI Matrix honoree for Rule Breakers. Can you share a pivotal moment in your career where you took a bold risk, broke a rule, or wrote your own rule that ultimately led to significant success or a positive change in your career trajectory?

One of the things I’m most proud of is something that actually happened seven or eight years ago at the height of the Times Up movement. I spent a lot of time talking with the women in the company that I worked for then. I wanted to know how the movement affected them and how they felt. What they said to me was, more than anything, they had trouble finding their voice and feeling confident in a room. They expressed they are often in rooms that are mostly men it’s like they just don’t have a voice and this makes them not feel good about what they are saying or presenting. So I started a program called Circle of Women that helped to provide professional women with executive coaching. Executive coaching is typically provided to executives, but what about the people that are coming up? Can we change those rules? Can we break that convention of thinking that you must wait until you’re at the top? Because we lose so many women on the way to the top. So we provided leadership coaching for all of these women on the cusp of leadership. 50% of them were people of color like me. Circle of Women helped build a pipeline of women for leadership positions. We took something that’s typically reserved for a privileged few and you gave it to people who society has said are not supposed to have it. That was a pretty important moment for me.

You are not shy about your passion for mentoring young and diverse talent with initiatives like Circle of Women. What advice would you give to other women, young aspiring women early in their career, who want to follow in your footsteps and become a leader in their industries?

I can inspire more with truth than anything else, which is that even though we’ve made a lot of progress, there are a lot of doors that still exist that we can’t open. And I would just say, don’t assume that the door can’t be opened because it’s closed in your face. Assume that you’re going to have to push and break it down to get through. And once you do, just be there with confidence and with the knowledge that you deserve to be there and you’ve earned the moment to be there. I think so many times what happens in this business is that women and people of color feel like somebody did them a favor, and that’s why they’re in the position that they are in, which makes it worse. I think what we need to feel and know that we should be here. Of course, we should be here. It’s not our fault that the system is messed up and broken, but you know, we have to assert ourselves and we have to be here with a lot of confidence, belief, and conviction in our principles.

You know, often, as women of color, we have to be twice as qualified to even get in the room and then we still feel that imposter syndrome.

Oh yeah, it’s true. I’ve always tried to be a student of whatever room I was gonna be in. I always wanted to feel like I knew what I was talking about. I would study it, I would rehearse it, I would flip it around in my head to make sure that whatever I believed, I believed strongly and irrefutably because I find that once you deliver in that way, it’s almost impossible to argue against conviction.

You’re known to talk about the “importance of having a woman’s voice and input in the creative process”,  Can you expand on that?

There are a lot more women in this business now and everything that makes us female is working to our advantage. We need more talented people-led businesses. We need to see the whole picture. We need to make sure that we’re growing responsibly and including everyone. We have a diversity of thought, of opinion, of structure, and those are all things that women are naturally really really good at. But I think we sometimes underestimate the power of our business skills and how much we can use one to help the other. We should always ask: is there a different way to drive businesses there, a different way to express creativity? Is there a different way to convince businesses and brands to apply creativity and imagination to their business? These are areas where women excel. We’re naturally innovators. We’re natural problem solvers. We’ve always been faced with against-all-odds situations. I mean, look at what women and women of color have to face in the world. So how do you apply these strengths to the businesses that we work with today? And I think that translates easier for women than it might for men. I don’t know. I can only speak as a woman of color, but I can say, “You know what,  I’ve been through a lot so yeah, I can tackle this”. I can be creative about how to problem solve, about how to get out of it, about how to present a different outcome to what’s in front of me. Absolutely.