Hard Leadership Lessons

While I led high tech marketing teams in banks for many years, some of my toughest leadership experiences came at the preschool my wife and I owned. We had created a Christian preschool that benefitted to our community, but we did not anticipate the tremendous leadership challenges coming our way.

One extraordinary challenge came in June 2010. At the time our clientele of families who paid from their own funds, and some who had their payments made by the state government. This was purposeful on our part since we wanted to serve people of all economic backgrounds.

An Extreme Challenge
Things seemed to be humming along fairly well after the turmoil of our startup years, but without warning the state government cut all funding for our government pay families. Without the state’s funding these families could no longer afford our school.

Overnight about 40% of our revenue was gone. We were bleeding cash and dipping into our personal income, savings, and lines of credit to make payroll and pay our bills. Our plight was desperate and we had to cut expenses fast in order to not go bankrupt.

Our landlord refused to consider lowering our rent, and other variable expenses like food and utilities would not decrease to the level we needed.

We could close the school, but would have subjected ourselves to a lawsuit from our landlord for breaking the lease early. Closing would have also displaced our private pay customers who had chosen us after much research, and all our employees would be jobless.

Left with no good alternatives, we did the only thing we could do to lower costs: cut employee salaries.

Connecting In a Difficult Time
The employee meeting where I announced the salary cuts was one of the hardest things I ever did as a leader. These were hard working, loyal employees who deserved a pay raise, not a pay cut. Many were single mothers without much education or good job prospects. Most were already struggling financially, and now I was making their situation worse while asking them to still believe in the mission of our school and trust things would improve.

It was a heartbreaking decision for me, and one I don’t ever want to have to make again. These teammates trusted me to pay them a fair wage for their hard work, and I felt like I was rewarding their trust by creating real economic stress and misery for them.

Fortunately for the school and our students we didn’t lose any employees. John Maxwell talks about connecting with those you lead, and I believe our employees stayed because my honest communication and history of concern for them let me truly connect with them. They saw my agony and knew I would never do this to them unless completely necessary. I had always been authentic with them prior to this, and that allowed them to trust me in a difficult time.

In “Leadership Gold” John Maxwell says tough calls like this are at the heart of true leadership. While painful, the salary cuts allowed us to stay open until our lease ended, providing our customers with a valuable service and our employees with a living.

Hard Leadership Lessons

1. Be authentic and honest. Do your best to connect with your employees. Really care about them.

2. Difficult decisions will come with leadership, regardless of organizational size.

3. You can’t shrink back from tough decisions. There are people depending on you.

4. Prayer and introspection are vital in order to call on God’s strength and ensure our motives are pure.

5. Good leaders try to be as kind and fair as possible while balancing the needs of customers, employees, and the organization as a whole.

Sometimes there are only difficult answers, and the leader has to decide how to spread the pain around in a way that minimizes its impact on everyone.

About the Author

After 24 years leading marketing analytics and automation in the banking industry, Scott decided to pursue his true calling of helping build God’s kingdom through the marketplace.