Skims cofounder Emma Grede thinks many business leaders are too chummy with their workers.
“It is not my job to be your friend,” Grede said this week on the Boardroom podcast. “It is not my job to treat everybody as though this were a family.”
“But that doesn’t mean that you miss empathy or that you treat people badly,” she added.
Grede, who cofounded the $5 billion shapewear and clothing brand with her husband, Swedish entrepreneur Jens Grede, and Kim Kardashian, said an executive’s primary responsibility is to serve their business’s needs.
“You can be an extremely empathetic leader and have the needs of your team and your people at the absolute forefront of what you’re doing, [but you still need to maintain] an enterprise mentality to do what is right for the business,” she said.
“If you’re not doing right by the business, you can’t do right by your people.”
That may include making difficult personnel decisions, including letting workers go who can’t keep up.
“Not everybody grows at the same speed as the business,” she said.
Eventually, even core personnel who originally built the company may need to go.
“The only thing that stays the same is your purpose and the reason that you started,” she said. “Everything else [must] constantly evolve as your business grows.”
However, to avoid blindsiding workers when they are asked to leave, leaders should also give candid, direct feedback so employees know exactly where they stand—something Grede calls “radical honesty.”
For female executives, this can involve overcoming unfair expectations that they be more nurturing or accommodating than men.
“It is not the job of me or any other woman in a position of leadership to have to cotton ball everybody along the way,” Grede said.
Grede is best known for cofounding the denim and apparel brand Good American with Khloé Kardashian in 2016. She has also built a reputation for a demanding leadership philosophy, saying she gets concerned when job candidates talk about “work-life balance” and calling remote work “career suicide.”
However, she said this week that executives can be direct without being cruel or abusive.
“You can still be honest without being brutal.”