Advancing Women Leadership in Asset Management: Kim Lew, Columbia Investment Management Company

For Women’s History Month, Nasdaq is spotlighting women who are advancing inclusive growth and prosperity within the asset management industry.

We spoke with Kim Lew, Chief Executive Officer and President of Columbia Investment Management Company, exploring the opportunity for growth and how diversity will drive outperformance. 

As CEO and President, what does your day-to-day work entail? 

It often feels like my job is to be the traffic cop for the organization—I keep the flow of information going to the right place at the right time. However, before I settle into my job as a traffic cop, I work with the board, administration and team to set an overall strategy for managing the portfolio, which are the lanes and the traffic rules. Without setting these overarching rules that drive decision-making, managing the traffic would be impossible, and mayhem would ensue, but with them, it then really becomes about managing the traffic, which comes from many different directions, including the university, the alumni, managers, investors, peers and experts.

As a result, I have very few average days. They are each really different, but if you are asking me to think about what the average looks like over the course of a year, I would say that I spend about 25% of my time on university-related activities, 10% of my time meeting new managers from my referral network or from the university network, 30% on investment meetings with the team (internal or external), 15% on administrative /organizational issues and the final 20% on team development. Investing in the team is the most valuable thing that I do because it creates the most leverage. The best thing I can do is give them the tools to be great investors and support their efforts to source and conduct high-quality due diligence with knowledge of the traffic rules and lanes.

How did you get started in the institutional investment business? 

My first institutional investing job was at Prudential Capital Group, where I was investing in privately placed debt. My first job as an allocator was at the Ford Foundation. I had the great fortune of being introduced to the Director of Research at Ford, who convinced the CIO to take a chance on me, and I became the Technology and Insurance equity analyst.

What is one of the most valuable lessons you’ve learned during your career? 

It was said first by Louis Pasteur, “Chance (luck) favors the prepared mind.” It is never lost on me that so much of my career can be attributed to being in the right place at the right time and getting an opportunity that others have not gotten, but I would not have been able to take advantage of those opportunities if I hadn’t been focused on learning as much as I could about as many things as I could so that I could both see the opportunity and understand how to tackle it. I have also learned that sometimes you just have to jump. Taking on new roles and responsibilities isn’t interesting if there isn’t something about it that you have never done that will challenge you to step up to the next level. Therefore they should make you feel just a little anxious, but great things happen when you push through the anxiety armed with the tools to figure out how to be successful.

Historically, there has been a dearth of women in senior roles within the industry. What are you and your firm doing to increase diversity at the senior levels? 

Prior to my joining Columbia, there were two women in the senior leadership group, which by my count includes eight people. All three of our current analysts are women, and there is a significant opportunity for growth. Looking just at the investment professionals on the team, seven of 14 are women, but they are clearly concentrated at the lower investing levels. I am committed to supporting each of them so that they can grow into senior leadership positions. 

Furthermore, I am on the Board of Girls Who Invest, which is committed to increasing the amount of assets managed by women. Success for this industry also requires us to invest in diverse investors, and we are increasingly backing funds led by women investors. I strongly believe that outperformance will be driven by diverse and creative investing ideas that are generated from people with unique experiences. We are not increasing diversity because it is the fair thing to do (although it is); we are doing it because, over time, it will be required to continue to produce the highest risk-adjusted return.

What advice would you give to other women looking to succeed within the investment industry?

Failing is not failure if you learn from it and it makes you better. We have to give ourselves permission to not be perfect because if you don’t, you won’t try hard things. I tell my daughters all the time you have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable because the really good stuff happens on the other side of that discomfort.

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