Make a strong introduction
Kirby knew that many employees would still be attached to the prior positioning of Ulta, so she went right at the issue on her first day.
“I did not believe that was a long-term winning strategy,” she says. “And my first day on the job I knew people were going to be embedded in that past, so after I got through the this is who I am, this is the vision that I want to paint for us, this is why I want to paint it, I said to them, ‘Not right now, but over the next few months, I’m going to ask you to make a decision, and the decision is, after you’ve had more time to process this and spend some time with me, whether you can share this vision with me or whether you can’t. And if you can’t share this vision, I’m going to ask you to move on to a place where you share that company’s vision, because what I cannot do is have people stay who don’t share the vision because there’s too much work to be done.’”
Over the next few months, Kirby dealt with the hard decisions at the highest levels of the company.
“A few months in, there were people who had not been able to make the decision to leave the company that clearly did not share the vision, and I needed to have some tough conversations,” she says. “And I did.”
Kirby says it’s fairly obvious who is just hanging on if you spend a good bit of time floating through departmental meetings.
“It was very clear in day-to-day meetings who was grasping the new vision and who was completely open to trying to mold the strategies around the vision versus those who were just struggling and wanted to stay in the past,” she says.
Basically, those who lack commitment to big overhauls aren’t won over. Take the merchant side of Kirby’s business as an example. She wanted a large marketing campaign around loyalty programs and newspaper inserts.
“If the merchants were not willing to do what it took to decide what was on every page of those books, what it looks like and redo that two or three times … that was a pretty good indication that they were not on board,” she says.
On the other end of the spectrum, you’ll see people throw themselves into the vision. The search word Kirby says you should be using is entrepreneurialism, as in those taking your vision to their own tasks.
“It was clear to see those people that were buying it, because they were working with me day in and day out and gained a passion to be innovative in the beauty category,” she says. “The word I use in here is actually entrepreneurial, and what I’ve always looked for in the team is to find people that are intuitive about their business, who are passionate about the business they are working on — and passion can be passion about product, but it can also be passion about the numbers if they’re on the finance team. Because out of the passion comes inventiveness, and so out of those desires, we have filled the ranks of our organization here in the corporate office with creative and/or entrepreneurial business leaders.”
As she looked for that entrepreneurial spirit, Kirby was able to deal with turnover and embrace the remaining members of her team and then begin to assess the holes she had.
