The Ellevate Network chair and former top Wall Street exec has led businesses in turmoil.
Just after she was named Director of Research at Bernstein, Krawcheck's mentor — a top analyst at the firm — quit.
"Bernstein wasn't a big firm to start with, so any loss was felt," she writes. "But this one really stung. And, insult to injury, this was during the pre-Spitzer-research-scandal bubble of the late 1990s, so analysts were receiving eye-popping offers from other firms. A new Director of Research, more money elsewhere, and a public vote of no-confidence. Our attrition rate soared."
How did she get through it?
She lists five ways: by realizing that pretending things were 100% A-OK was a losing strategy ("Candor went a long way with the team," she writes); by "identifying a path out of our issues" (which, in her case, was to hire "as many outstanding new analysts as we could find to replenish the pipeline"); by communicating the new strategy and communicating confidence in it — repeatedly; by regularly updating her team on progress; and by always being available to her analysts — by "walking the floor a lot; by working my tail off."
Krawcheck writes: "You don't gain a team's confidence in a day, and perhaps particularly during periods of turbulence. But, slowly, slowly, as we kept a focus on what really mattered and shut out almost everything else, we rebuilt the business into one that was stronger than when we started."
Read her full post here.