Like My Mother Said

“I owe a lot to my mother who was a primary school teacher. Even when I became a career executive she would never stop asking what I wanted to do after that. She would say to me: when will you become General Manager or CEO? When she passed away in 2011, her questions became by questions." In her nearly 25 years at Henkel, Mara Panajia managed to reach those positions. Today she is President and CEO of Henkel Italia as well as General Manager of HCB. In 2021, she was cited by Forbes among Italy’s 100 most successful women.

Mara’s story begins in Reggio Calabria, “where I woke up every morning and saw the sea,” and takes her far from home, to the foggy Milan of the ‘90s, a city in the process of becoming which looked very different from today's international metropolis, but was already full of promises. The young Panajia's ideas were clear: to study marketing. “As a child,” she says, “I was passionate about advertising and labels, I liked reading the ingredients to better understand products. However, I only discovered at the university what marketing was really about. After completing Liceo Classico, following the advice of my father and my older sister, I chose Bocconi in Milan instead of engineering in Rome."

At the age of 18, Mara Panajia packed her stuff and left for Milan. “Those were years of growth and maturation: I lived alone and I learned what it meant to be independent, from paying bills to doing laundry and obviously managing studying and exams.” She graduated with a degree in Business Administration and a major in marketing in 1993. Then she made the leap into the world of work. She says, “I started in an auditing consultancy then moved to Danone where I remained for five years, from 1995 to 2000. I was in charge of cost control and then marketing. From that period, I remember the adverts with the Inzaghi brothers, an idea that worked perfectly and launched the model with two testimonials." She joined Henkel in 2000 as brand manager for the Laundry Care marketing unit, which led her to manage a major consumer brand like Dixan. The next step was to become marketing manager and then marketing director of Laundry Care. Roles that were the springboard for her career inside the German multinational, where she was promoted marketing director of Laundry & Home Care for Italy, Greece and Cyprus between 2008 and 2012.

What is not on her CV is that in those same years Ms Panajia got married and became mother to two children: Andrea and Emma. “I was very happy to have given birth to a little girl, since I was used to living in a family with many women: from aunts to cousins. In that period, however, my mother passed away, when my little girl was just 6 months old. A major loss that pushed me to react and make her teachings, which I had grown up with, my own. I always say that when I returned from maternity leave I asked my boss what I would have to do to get his job." The answer was twofold: first an experience in the sales area in Italy then a transfer to Germany in the Henkel headquarters in Düsseldorf. Here Ms Panajia held the role of corporate vice president of international marketing. It was not easy,” she says, “because my children were still babies at the time. I was divided between Italy and Germany and had to fight with the sense of guilt of not being able to be there for them. I would leave on Monday and return on Thursday, and then worked remotely on Friday. Salvation was having a husband to rely on and a nanny."

At the end of 2018 she returned to Italy to lead the Henkel Laundry Home Care division, in the position of general manager up to her current position. Panajia describes her leadership as gentle: “Once upon a time such style would have been confused with weakness, but I remain convinced that in our work it is human relationships that make the difference. You become good at your job with experience but I think it is more important to be able to build relationships and give your time to someone else. This is why I mentor younger managers and try to lead by example." Also because, according to the top executive, more women at the top – thanks to family leaves and policies to support families – are good for companies and society as a whole, which has made giant strides since the ‘90s, as she remarks by saying: “It's always nice to know that today's little girls can see a woman to be President and CEO as normal.”

translated by Alex Foti