How the Kohl's CEO Is Navigating the Covid-19 Pandemic
January 31 2021 - 10:29AM
Dow Jones News
By Ellie Austin
On March 20, Kohl's CEO Michelle Gass temporarily shut the
retail chain's 1,162 department stores and announced soon after
that it would furlough 85,000 of its roughly 100,000 employees. The
store closings lasted between seven and 17 weeks, depending on
location.
At a recent Future of Leadership event hosted by The Wall Street
Journal, Ms. Gass discussed how she and her team tried to support
staff at all levels of the company during these and other difficult
decisions of the past 10 months. They aimed to lead by example to
prevent burnout while working remotely and found innovative ways to
communicate, she said.
A former Starbucks executive, Ms. Gass, 52, joined Kohl's in
2013 as chief merchandising and customer officer and was promoted
to the top job five years later. Having worked directly with former
Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz as his chief strategist during the
2008 recession, Ms. Gass was no stranger to the challenges of
navigating a high-profile business, with stores and staff scattered
across the country, through periods of uncertainty.
Ms. Gass shared her blueprint for ensuring that Kohl's weathers
the global health crisis both financially, and with its company
culture and morale intact. Edited excerpts from the
conversation:
What were your strategies for communicating tough news to your
employees in the early days of the pandemic?
I realized quickly as things were changing by the hour that
these were not decisions I could communicate by email. I needed to
be present. The associates needed to be able to see me. A few days
into the pandemic, I said to my team, "OK, I need to be on video,"
and I ended up doing video addresses to the whole company every
week for a number of months. For me, it was about instilling a
sense of calm, confidence and clarity. I didn't have all the
answers, but I could speak to what I knew on any given day and be a
realist, while also highlighting the progress we were making.
When furloughing a large number of people, how do you ensure
they continue to feel like an integral part of the company so that
morale and productivity doesn't suffer on their return to work?
We maintained health benefits for all furloughed associates and
made sure they had access to my video messages. That was really
important. I wanted to share the optimism that we were preparing
for the day when our stores would reopen. I also wanted them to
hear how we were pivoting our business to lean into curbside
pickup, for example, so everyone knew that we would emerge on the
other side, operating in a new way.
When you were at Starbucks, it was reported that you used to
arrive at the office at 6:30 a.m. and stay for 12 hours. How are
you helping your corporate employees set boundaries around
work-life balance as they work from home?
It's something I think a lot about and I'm a big believer that
people need to embrace a balanced life. We check in a lot with our
employees and do listening sessions. We have a very empathetic
culture and I encourage all my leaders to model that. For me, the
fundamental principles of great leadership are humanity, empathy
and being courageous.
What will the long-term impact of the pandemic be on the skills
and characteristics we expect from future generations of business
leaders?
If you look at millennials and Gen Z, they have a different
expectation of how they work. They're used to having technology at
their fingertips at any time of the day and with that comes access
-- access to information and access to their leaders. The leaders
of tomorrow will have to be really flexible in how they think about
the working day. When we're all back in the office, you might want
to go to a yoga class in the middle of the day, and that's great.
What matters are outcomes and results.
Write to Ellie Austin at eleanor.austin@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 31, 2021 10:14 ET (15:14 GMT)
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