Fran Hauser – President, Style & Entertainment group, Time Inc.

Recession creating more work and taking a toll on your balance? Here’s how a top Time Inc. exec solved that problem.

By Taylor Mallory

As many staffs get shorter, work days for many of us get longer – and when you’ve been busting your butt from 9 to 5, taking home a stack of work every evening only adds to the anxiety. Ever thought, “If I could only spend more time at my desk and less in meetings and on e-mail, I might not have to take work home every night.” That’s what Fran Hauser, president, digital for the Style & Entertainment group at Time Inc., did.

“Life/Work balance starts with being as efficient as possible with the time you have at work so it doesn’t seep into the rest of your life,” says Hauser, who oversees the digital products of the PEOPLE brand, Entertainment Weekly, InStyle and Essence, reaching more than 13 million monthly unique visitors. “E-mail and meetings are the biggest time sucks at work, so I found ways to reduce those.” She and her team agreed on e-mail best practices that cut her inbox in half. “That was life changing.” And those pesky weekly meetings with her eight direct reports “were becoming routine status updates where we were going through their to-do lists every week.” Now they get on her calendar when they need her help or have an idea that might help grow the business. “Then I can block time out on my calendar for seeing family and friends, playing tennis and doing yoga and philanthropic work – things I enjoy.”

Here she talks to PINK about style, leadership, working in a changing industry and her big Italian family.

PINK: It’s a challenging time to be in publishing. How are you staying strong in an industry that’s experiencing such upheaval?
Fran Hauser: The people really standing out right now are those who innovate and come up with great ideas – and can then see them through execution. Like all other media businesses, our revenues have been impacted. I’m lucky to be working in digital media, which is still growing, just more slowly than before. When the company reorganized last November [laying off about 600 staffers], we were fortunate enough in my group not to lose many people. But we still have to make sure every advertiser’s campaign works harder than ever before. We’re launching more creative solutions that integrate advertisers into our content. For instance, we created a program with Target that ties its value messaging into relevant areas of our sites. What makes this program unique is the collaboration between sales and editorial to develop content that both provides valuable information for our users and also serves as an excellent marketing platform for Target. We developed custom modules that feature a video and five Target products – and then tie back to our editorial content, something that hasn’t really been done before. And we’re doing more advanced targeting for our clients – based on demographics, behavior and context. We have a whole team, which we’ve built on in the past year, focused on making sure the campaigns deliver on all of our clients’ success metrics.

PINK: To what do you attribute your professional success?
F.H.: In large part, to my parents. They were both raised in southern Italy, where very little value was placed on education. My mother made it to fifth grade and my father to third. They moved to the U.S. shortly after I was born, and each of them built successful businesses not speaking a word of English. I started doing invoicing, even calculating sales tax, for my father’s business when I was in first grade and did it throughout high school. God only knows how many mistakes I made. I learned so much about the importance of responsibility and hard work from them at a young age. That stayed with me. It set the foundation for who, and where, I am today.

PINK: Who inspires you?
F.H.: I have such a natural curiosity about what it takes to be a good leader, so I’m constantly watching and learning from people who do it well. Like Anne Moore, [chairman and CEO of Time Inc.]. She’s been able to lead this company through this major transformation we’re going through in publishing – and with such confidence that it trickles down to the rest of the organization. Whether she’s doing quarterly management meetings with 200 to 300 managers or smaller senior management meetings, her attitude is just incredible. She’s positive and excited about the future and tells how we’re well-positioned well despite the turbulence in the industry. I try to do that with my team. It’s natural for employees to feel scared or threatened, so it’s important they see confidence in their leadership team.

PINK: What are you wearing right now? And who are your favorite designers and styles this summer?
F.H.: I’m wearing a Diane von Furstenberg black wrap dress – perfect for work. I love Chanel and Hermes. Both offer such beautiful signature pieces that will never go out of style. For every day, I like Theory, Vera Wang’s “Lavender” label and J. Crew. One fashion trend I’m loving right now are long-sleeved mini dresses.

PINK: What do you do to relax and rejuvenate your spirit?
F.H.: I love to take cooking lessons. I play tennis with my friends every Sunday and do Korean yoga (which focuses on unblocking energy) with my husband every Saturday morning. We make sure to have dinner together alone or with friends at least a few times a week, and we try to get to the movies at least every other week. Also, I always take my full vacation. I’m taking a week in July to spend time at home and relax. And then in August, my whole family (mom, brothers, sisters, nieces and nephews) is taking my father, who’s turning 70, to Cape May, New Jersey, where we spent all our family vacations in my childhood.  I have a huge, close Italian family. We see each other at least once a week for Sunday dinner at my parents’ house.

PINK: What’s the best business advice you’ve ever gotten?
F.H.: Keep things simple. If you’re in sales, for example, this can mean that instead of walking into meeting with a 30-page deck, you walk in with one page. In finance, it means being able to distill complex principles into a simple model. If you’re trying to get a new product green lit, be able to say what it is and how it benefits consumers in one sentence. People are busy and overwhelmed, so you have to keep it simple if you wan them to hear you. Make it easy for them to say yes!