Kelly Fanning on Redefining Leadership—and Balance—for Working Moms

Newsweek

01-08-2025

While women have made significant strides in the workplace, inequities still remain. One of those areas includes the burden of home and career life balance that women undertake.
Women make up nearly half of the U.S. workforce but still take on a larger share of household responsibilities. The 2022 American Time Use Survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that women spend more time on average on household activities and child care than men.
The Gender Equality Policy Institute's analysis of the ATU survey found that women who work full time do 1.8 times as much housework as men who work full time. Women who work part-time do 2.5 times as much housework as their male counterparts. Among full-time working parents, women do 1.6 times as much child care and household work as fathers. Part-time working mothers do 2.4 times as much child care and household labor as part-time working fathers.
Kelly Fanning is on a mission to change corporate culture by normalizing those struggles that many working moms face.
Fanning started her career at Johnson & Johnson, where she rose in ranks over 15 years from field sales to corporate leadership. She said that starting from the ground up in retail was the origin of her passion for consumer products, telling Newsweek that this experience brought her close to the shopper.
About a decade into her career, she moved out of the field into the corporate side of the business. That path was through marketing, which meant getting her MBA at Northeastern part-time from 2009 to 2011. Fanning said this move was the biggest career step she had made.
"When I went into marketing, that's the center of running the profit and loss statement, or the P and L, for the company and so it was an incredible opportunity to see the inside of an organization in a way that I had never seen before," she said. "But it also refilled my passion for the consumer, because it's so insight-based and consumer-based when you build a marketing campaign."
She worked as a sales strategy manager and senior brand manager before becoming the director of marketing and sales strategy in 2016. After a stint as the chief of staff and strategy initiatives for the North America president, and the birth of her second son, Fanning took on the role of senior director of consumer strategy for the skin care and beauty division of Johnson & Johnson.
In 2019, Fanning left the company to work at Bayer for about five years. She said she was brought on to turn around teams. But she missed the culture and the beauty industry she fell in love with. After reaching out to her mentors, she left Bayer for The Estee Lauder Company as the senior vice president and general manager for Clinique, North America. She now oversees brands like Clinique, Origins and Dr. Jart+.
Women's Global Impact: Kelly Fanning
Women's Global Impact: Kelly Fanning
Newsweek Illustration
With two young sons and a husband who also works full-time, Fanning knows a thing or two about balance.
"A lot of the times when I speak at events, I give some perspective [that] both the spouses can do it," she said. "You can both have great careers and make it work. Along the way, you make sacrifices and you tend to race to the calendar for first-come, first-served."
She is also the first to admit that being a working parent, while rewarding, is not easy.
Her passion for her work in brand marketing drives her, even in those more difficult moments. She commutes into New York City from northern New Jersey because it's important for her to be in the office. But that also means she might miss a school play or a baseball game.
"I've learned too late in life about finding the balance of passion and performance," she said. "I think about it in the sense of debits and credits – there are days where I'm the best leader [at work] and I'm not as great as a mom, and there are days where I'm the best mom, I can't put in as much [at work]. It's all about the longer-term performance on both."
In corporate America, many women believe there is a culture that appears to treat working mothers and fathers differently.
A PEW study found that women earned an average of 85 percent of what men earned in 2024. Of the women surveyed for this report, 45 percent said a major contributor to the prevalent wage gap is the choices that women make about how to balance work and family. Women, according to PEW, are more likely to feel "a great deal of pressure" to focus on responsibilities at home, when compared to men.
Fanning is no stranger to this feeling and makes it a point to be open and direct with managers and colleagues in the workplace. When she interviewed for her current role, she asked how commuting and family commitments would fit with the job expectations.
She has been honest about having to leave in the middle of a meeting to catch a train back home or pass something off because she needs to attend her son's graduation at 9 a.m.
"I think that you have to be strong enough to protect your time, to protect your schedule, and you have to be really open with others that, whether you're a working caregiver or whatever it is, everyone's time is the most valuable thing we have," she said. "We have to be able to push back and not worry and overthink it."
Maintaining that balance means making the most of her time. Because it is limited, Fanning said her 30-minute impact might have to be as much as another person's one-hour impact.
Being open about the struggles of being a working parent has also led Fanning to be passed over for opportunities like traveling for a work trip because colleagues thought she wouldn't want to be pulled away from her family. She noted that this type of behavior is more common with women in the workplace, as they are still seen as the primary caregivers.
"I want to make the choice not to travel, versus someone else making that choice for me," she said. "And it's really important that as female leaders, we speak up to that in particular [because] not asking me to go on that trip wasn't done because they didn't want me to go. It was done because they thought they were doing me a favor, so I didn't have to say no. And I always want to be seen as having the ability and the strength to say no."
Fanning wants to take the stigma and the guilt out of those decisions because she said the choice to attend a family event shouldn't feel like a hard choice. As she's moved up in leadership, Fanning has led by example and been vocal in the workplace to support other female colleagues and establish an inclusive, supportive and flexible culture.
"Culturally, to have managers and leaders who say, 'no, go [to the graduation]' is so great and reinforces the positivity and takes that [stigma] away," she said. "It's super important to shape that culture and make it the norm."
There have been times when Fanning has repeated in several meetings that she won't be available on a certain day because she has a family obligation. That way, when an expecting parent is faced with that choice in the future, they feel comfortable making it.
Something Fanning often shares with peers is to take the aspects you love about leadership and culture from previous organizations and implement those bits where you can at your current job.
"One of my biggest jobs as a leader is to set a culture and tone in which I want to work in," she said. "You can pay it forward and make the next organization, the next generation better."
Mentorship has played a major role in Fanning's career. She remembers when she felt insecure about her ability to meet the challenge of a new role, and a mentor told her, "They would never have put you in that job if they didn't think you could do it."
"I think sometimes you feel like you're going to fail, and when you realize that an organization, your leadership team, is there to make you succeed, just that shift in mindset, I wish I would have known that earlier in my career," she said. "So often you feel like 'oh my gosh, I'm going to fail, what if I fail?' and if you could flip that to say 'they put me here to succeed. What is it going to feel like when I succeed?' It's such a pivot on that emotion that I love to share with the next generation."
Fanning will join Newsweek at this year's inaugural Women's Global Impact forum. The August 5 event, hosted at Newsweek's headquarters in New York City, will bring together some of the world's top female executives and connect them with rising stars across industries and job functions.
For more information on the event and entry guidelines, please visit the Women's Global Impact homepage.