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.
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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 [email protected]
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