Prepare for battle
Kramer and his leadership team felt like they had a good chance to win the PR battle by going public with what the lenders were doing to them. But he didn’t want his employees to read about this crisis for the first time in the paper.
“I wanted it to come from us,” Kramer says. “So we put together talking points and I had a town-hall meeting and basically communicated to my team in L.A., here in St. Louis and in New York.”
He tried to project optimism, but he didn’t make it too rosy.
“I didn’t give people a sense that we were invincible, because I didn’t think that was the right thing to do,” Kramer says. “Without getting into a lot of detail, we were very open and honest.”
In this kind of situation, it’s not about providing every last detail about what your company is facing. It’s about giving them a broad sense of what’s happening and what you’re doing about it.
“I’d stay at a very 30,000-foot level,” Kramer says. “I think too much information can be negative too. I wanted to tell people what’s the potential in front of us. I wanted to focus on the potential outcome that we believed had the highest success rate for us. I wasn’t lying, because after the meeting with the attorneys, we did have a high probability of getting through this thing.”
Once again, emotion plays a role. When you’re talking to your employees, they are looking to you to figure out how they should behave.
“If you don’t have passion and you get thrown a curveball like this, I think it would be really difficult,” Kramer says. “My advice would be if you have somebody on your leadership team that is more passionate and they have also been speaking from a leadership position where it’s not the first time the organization would have heard from them, I would put them in as the point person in terms of communication. People feeling that they are being communicated to warmly, honestly and from the heart is more important than who is doing it.”
Kramer says if you’re the type of leader who can’t bring a strong message to your people, it truly is a time to set your ego aside.
“If you’re not passionate and you’re not raring for a fight, in some cases, I just don’t know if you’re going to win,” Kramer says.
With his employees in the loop, Kramer wanted to get in touch with all his key customers, suppliers and manufacturers to let them know what was happening.
“Basically, I got on the phone with them and told them, ‘Hey, there is going to be some press that is going to come out,” Kramer says. “This is what we’re fighting for.’ It was the same process. It was just stating the facts and showing them your heart. More importantly, I just wanted them to hear from me.”
Kramer spoke to his peers, the CEOs of customers, while his COO talked to the manufacturers Kellwood works with.
“Most of these people, we had long-standing relationships with,” Kramer says. “Everybody goes through ups and downs. If you stand by people when they are going through a down, they are going to stand by you when you are going through a down. ”
