How A Global Pandemic Made Me A Better CEO

During the first few weeks of the pandemic, when my husband I started juggling working from home with remote learning for all 3 of my elementary school aged kids, I would chat with a friend and say “It’s ok. I can do this. I can make it to the end of April.” Here we are a full year later and I am still saying “It’s ok,” but it’s now followed by, ‘We’ve done it. We’ll see what happens over the next 6 months.”

Of course, the last year has been hard - much harder for others than for me - and I can’t wait to get the kids back into school and return to the office (I am beyond excited about the idea of leaving the house, taking the subway, grabbing a coffee and going to sit at a desk that is not in my bedroom).  However, I also wouldn’t trade the last year for all that I have learned.

There are probably a million important lessons from the last year, but I wanted to share my top five.

1. Focus, focus, focus

There is something about a crisis that focuses the mind. The pandemic, and all it brought with it, forced me to prioritize, and put my energy only into what truly matters. In the very early days of the pandemic, it had to be the health and well-being of our people, particularly our store teams. Then our number one problem to solve was inventory management. Next up was how to re-open stores safely. Then on to innovating on our product and service. Each month, if not week, it was startlingly obvious where the team and business needed me to focus my energy.

 2. Follow the consumer, not the competition

In the first few months of the pandemic, as the stores were closed and the last thing on consumer’s minds was shopping, many retailers, ourselves included, started promoting heavily.  It became a race to the bottom.  And obviously we did sell more pants - show me a customer that doesn’t like a deal. However, the real problem wasn’t our price, the real problem was that our customers didn’t want what we were selling. As soon as we launched our first super casual set of pants, The Off Duty pant in October, the business started turning around. Our WFHQ pant and Homestretch joggers came next, and then our signature sweaters and patterned shirts - all sold at full price as they fulfilled the customer need for comfort and quality.  

3. Necessity is the mother of invention

I’ve written an entire post about this before, but the launch of video styling, what we have dubbed “Guides on Chat,” and even the record time launch of our Off Duty Chino, would not have happened unless we had been forced to shift gears by the pandemic.  We have innovated like never before and along the way built a new muscle.  Now, I never want to live through another pandemic, but I am left thinking about how we create this same sense of urgency go-forwards as a driver of creativity and innovation.

4. “Your whisper is a shout”. 

Since I became CEO, I have learned that the little things that I say or do have a disproportionate impact - positive or negative. This year, my learning has been that crisis, plus remote working, amplifies that whether it’s because of missing context, or misinterpreted tone or gesture. There have been multiple instances this year where I have said something, and the team has, unbeknownst to me headed off in a direction that I never intended. Clarity of communication is key.

5. The little things matter

I’ve always been a leader that wanders through the office and stops by people’s desks just to check in and catch up. Losing that connection has been really hard for me and I have realized that it’s also hard for others. There is no direct way to replicate that in a remote working world, but here’s some of the things that I have tried:

• Drop a slack to ask a question to the most junior member of a team, instead of the most senior
• Scroll through the zoom at the beginning of our team meeting and ask a random person how they’re doing
• Host Parent Coffee breaks to just spend 45mins chatting with team members facing the same challenge of juggling working at home and childcare

I have definitely not got everything right this year. Far from it. But I have learned a ton and I want to thank the whole Bonobos team for what they’ve taught me. This has undoubtedly been a challenging year in which to lead a team, but it’s also in some ways been the most rewarding.