Get people on board
When times start to get tough, it’s well known that the complainers come out and start to kill morale. So you have to get out and let people know you’re still leading them and the fight is against an external enemy. That takes a degree of leadership, not management.
“Leadership and management I see as two different things,” she says. “You can have a good manager that is technically good at managing things, but the intimacy that you have to have with people to be a good leader needs to occur consistently and you need to be able to draw an influence across a wide behavior over groups of people.”
Drawing that wide influence comes in steps. But, good times or bad, you better start by being visible on a daily basis. But taking the next step toward getting people to trust you as a leader is tricky. When it comes to getting more in touch with people, many leaders start by asking about personal things, but Krings doesn’t go there. She wants to avoid generic questions to be more sincere, and she also doesn’t want what the kids call TMI: too much information.
“I do think a leader has to be very careful in what kind of intimacy they ask for from their folks,” she says. “So I will ask them things about how comfortable are you feeling in your role. ‘Do you feel we’ve done a good job getting you the right training; what’s missing that we could do to help you,’ and if they say, ‘Gee, I really need extra blah, blah,’ I say, ‘Well, have you told your team leader?’ And so now I’m saying to them, ‘You’re accountable for that,’ and if they haven’t [told their team leader], then it wouldn’t be unusual for me to call a team leader over and say, ‘Let’s have a chat about how we can help Suzy Q a little better.’ So they see an immediate response and that can also help to diffuse people talking about things that don’t matter.”
When times get tough, you have to further build that rapport by sharing details candidly.
“[What] we have always committed to our associates is that for anything that impacts them, they will know what we know, when we know it, and the message is as important as the timing so you can control any rumors, or in the absence of communication, they’re going to draw their own conclusion.”
But while being candid, understand that empathy, not sympathy, is what employees want.
“You can’t appear to be sympathetic; empathetic would be more appropriate in that we’re all in this boat together,” she says. “And help them to understand our perspective on things. ‘This is what we’ve done; this is why we’ve done it. This is what we need you to do to make it successful. Here’s why we think it can be successful; here’s the result we’re looking to achieve.’ If there’s any kind of associated compensation or reward to that, tell them what that would be — it could simply be you get to keep your job. I like to do these sort of emotional talks about how it impacts you and then I like to focus on the statistics, because that helps take some of the emotion out. ‘Here’s what we’re expecting to achieve on a P&L-type level.’ Coming up through the ranks, I’d heard very often people need to have a pat on the back, but that’s a tough thing to do without it feeling condescending or insincere. You don’t need to tell them, ‘Hey, you did a great job,’ every other day. That will be addressed in a lot of different ways. To help it be more sincere, use good examples as examples of what to do as opposed to calling people out for bad examples.”
