Welcome to How Leaders Lead, where every week you get to listen in while I interview some of the very best leaders in the world. I break down the key learning so that by the end of the episode, you'll have something simple you can apply as you develop into a better leader. That's what this podcast is all about. Today's guest is Lauren Hobart, president and CEO of Dick's Sporting Goods. I bet you good money, if you look at any job description for a leadership role, the one thing that's always going to be listed there is excellent communication skills. And it's funny, we talk about communication skills and leadership so often that it's easy to forget what it actually means to communicate well. Today's conversation with Lauren is just the best reminder of what great commun icators do. It's not just about being well-spoken, although Lauren certainly is. It's more than that. Lauren sees communication as a way to connect with people. It's a huge reason she has been tapped to take the reins of Dick's Sporting Goods, making her one of only 41 women CEOs leading a Fortune 500 company. This conversation is a masterclass in great communication, how you can relate better to your direct reports, how you can address conflict, how you can get your vision across, and so much more. I can't wait for you to learn how to communicate by making a connection. So here's my conversation with my good friend and soon to be yours, Lauren Hob art. Lauren, you've just been announced as the upcoming CEO of Dick's Sporting Goods . You're going to take over the role officially February 1. You've been present, but now I know everybody's looking at you. They're saying, "You're the CEO. Is it feeling any different thinking about becoming that CEO versus the president that you've been?" Yeah, it does. In terms of it feels like a weightier responsibility. It feels like I have to deliver, which I always have felt that way, but now even on a more public stage. I think when you're the CEO, the buck stops here. I feel things, I've always felt responsibility, but I feel even more responsibility going forward, but I am excited for the challenge. As a leader, how do you expect to transition into this new role, and what are the new things that you hope to accomplish? Yeah. I've been working for the last several years on some of the things that are very important to me around our culture, around our service organization, around our brick and mortar stores and driving experiences there. I do, in partnership with Ed, so Ed, our CEO is going to transition. He's our founder and CEO, is going to transition into the executive chair role and be chief merchant. A lot of the vision that we will be working on has been set for the last couple of years. The strategy will continue, and we're just going to keep driving it in a post-p andemic world. Most successful companies have continuity and people in process. Obviously with you and Ed being a team in the past, do you view that as a big plus as you move ahead? For sure. I have, not just do I get the counsel of the person who knows the business better than anybody ever would code know a business, but I get somebody who's so very interested in the company's success. He wants me to succeed more than I want me to succeed, and we're very aligned in that goal. I think it's a very seamless transition. I was asked on an earnings call recently what was going to be so different. I feel like the good news is we've been working on this together for some years . We're going to switch roles a little bit, but the vision's been set and it's not going to feel like a radical change to the team or the world. How do you take on somebody like that when you disagree with them, which inevitably happens when you have so much respect for them? Ed and I definitely don't agree on everything and we joke about that because we know we don't. We do have spirited conversations and debates and sometimes we don't leave a conversation agreeing. We always end up leaving unfriendly terms, but we'll come back and say sleep on it or we'll get back together in a day or two and we'll think about it again. When a topic is something I feel very strongly about, whatever it is, an initiative or something that I want to move forward with, if I haven't successfully convinced him, I'll come back at it after a day or two. He's open to that and that's just how we move forward. COVID really just shook up everybody. Every leader really had to look at themselves and say, "Okay, I've got to do some things different." How did it impact your own personal leadership, Lauren? What did you do differently to deal in this environment? Yeah, COVID was an unbelievable challenge, as everybody knows, personal challenge, company challenge, leadership challenge. I think for me it was the responsibility in being in the president role at the time, the responsibility of having 40 to 45,000 different teammates who are depending on us for their livelihoods. We talk about helping people achieve their dreams. That's one of the mantras that we have in the store is we want to make people achieve their dreams. Well, when you have 40,000 employees and a store base that's closing and we can barely get product out of there, it was very, very challenging. The one thing I'm most proud of about our company's leadership and working hand in hand with the entire executive team is that we led every step of the way with values , with safety. We took care of our teammates from start to finish in terms of providing health insurance, in terms of making executive salaries the first to go down. We did have to furlough people, but the people who remained worked tirelessly to get everybody back. It was an incredible, incredible challenge. People are going through still, obviously, lots of challenges. In a weird way, the team has come together incredibly strongly and in a way that I think is going to help us into the future. Did you have to change anything you specifically do to adapt your own leadership style? Yeah, actually, it's interesting. I think inadvertently and because of technology, we actually were able to communicate even more. My communication style, my leadership style does include a lot of open communication, a lot of honest dialogue, a lot of transparency, but during the first stages of the pandemic, when there was so much unknown and so much concern, we really lit that up. We were having all company town halls frequently in addition to daily stand up meetings every day with the leadership team. I think it took communication, which has always been something that I'm passionate about, but dialed it up to a level that, frankly, I think has long-term benefits because we will be communicating in this way with all of our teammates for years to come. I've seen you on your feet. I've seen you deal with people in these town halls and you're really good at it . How did you develop that skill? Oh, boy. I don't know. I think that actually, well, I'm going to give credit back to my Pepsi days because, and you know, from your Pepsi past, Pepsi does. There's a lot of excitement around sharing ideas and making sure you can sell things in. So that's been something that has just been a part of my career development from way back when. I'm grateful to Pepsi for giving those opportunities way back when in my career . You're also entering the CEO role at a time when racial justice and diversity and inclusion, that the importance of this has never been higher. How do you see your role as CEO in terms of really making sure that Dix is doing the right thing? In our company, we've done a lot of soul searching and realized that we had opportunities and that we needed to really lean into the conversation around inclusion and diversity. And so we created almost immediately right when George Floyd was murdered, we ended up having what we call dialogue circles because we had tremendous upset across the country with different teammates and we had teams going through different issues in their neighborhoods. And we ended up just across the country having these, what we call dialogue circles, which have now become a big part of our culture. And we are meeting and just sharing thoughts. How are you feeling? There's no wrong answers. On top of that, we put together the 19 different, what we call impact teams and we've sourced thousands of people from our company who want to help with the initiatives and are really activating across everything you can think of to make us a really a better place to work and a better contributor to the community. We have a zero, we always had a zero tolerance policy, but it wasn't something that we had and we now have a zero tolerance policy against any form of racism whatsoever. And that's for our internal employees as well as our customers who come into our stores, we're not going to tolerate it. So lots of change in a very small amount of time. And I'll just say that the dialogue circles in particular have brought the company together through the pandemic with people being virtual, still being able to have these sessions, even virtually with tears and with a lot of great emotion, it's actually brought us all much closer. You know, that's fantastic. And I've mentioned to a couple of people today, I'm going to do a podcast with the CEO of Dix. And they said, well, who is that? And I said, well, it's Lauren Hobart, she just got the job. And you know, people are really impressed that you're a woman moving into this field. I mean, are people surprised by that, Lauren, that a woman would be running a sporting skid company? It definitely seems that people are a little surprised. But you know, there's, I think we just hit an all time high of 41 women in the Fortune 500 who will be CEOs. So that's a great mark to make. But yeah, I mean, getting to the C-suite as a woman obviously is not a well- worn path. And in the sporting goods industry, perhaps that part surprises people more than I realized it would have. I know it's, but it just has never been something that has been a challenge from my perspective. I mean, I grew up at companies with women leaders. I had that kind of a role model and at Dix, it's never been an issue that I'm a woman. I'm just doing my job and trying to do a good job. So it didn't, it didn't, sporting goods surprise some people, but it doesn't, it's maybe not as unusual as it seems. It doesn't surprise you when Iota basically. You know, do you feel like it puts more pressure on you being a female, CEO and moving into one of those 41 CEOs in the Fortune 500? I don't know if pressure is the right word. I actually think responsibility is the right word. I don't feel any more pressure. I'm sure all new CEOs feel pressure to succeed and deliver. I really want to deliver for the company. I want to deliver for all of our teammates. But I do feel a responsibility to young girls and to women everywhere, to just to open doors and to show the path and to talk and to show people that you can, you know, have in the case of female leaders, you can have kids and know you can't have it all, but you can really do a lot of different things. And so I do feel a responsibility to champion young girls and women. Well, I have a daughter and she has two young daughters and they're pretty impressed that you're running that company. And so, you know, you're going to be a great role model for them, I'm sure. You know, Lauren, you got your MBA from Stanford as I understand it. And that's a real hotbed for entrepreneurs. You know, there's no question about that. Did you ever think about going that route? You know, I didn't think of going entrepreneurial in the sense of high tech the way because tech bubble, the tech bubble was booming at the time and it still is booming. But I had come out of a background in finance. I had spent five years in banking and I was excited to continue kind of leveraging those skills. So technology was never, was never my calling. But I do think it's important that innovation, entrepreneurship, all of those different capabilities have been something that has drawn me to the companies that I've worked for, including it Dix, which really is the, an entrepreneurial company that got big, very, very quick, $9 billion coming from two little stores, you know, not that long ago. How do you take a big company like that and keep it small and entrepreneurial and nimble? I think it has to be the leadership and it has to be the culture. The one thing that's really important, the best of intentions can build a lot of bureaucracy. And I think clarity of decision making and clarity of vision and purpose is just really important. So you have to set the vision, empower the team to so that they know what the goals are. We talk a lot about commanders intent and sharing those kinds of, you know, those kinds of principles so that people can make good decisions, but not becoming bureaucratic with decision making. We are very nimble from a decision making standpoint. Explain that principle to us, the commanders intent. Well, I think you can, you can lay out a bunch of different mandates or tasks that people have to do or you can say, I want you to do ABC, but the reason I'm telling you to do ABC is because the goal we're trying to achieve is this. And if you paint the vision, A, B and C may not work out exactly the way we planned and they never do. But if you know what the vision is, the smart people on the ground can adapt. And there's a million different examples of that, you know, throughout our, throughout our company every single day where people have to make calls and if they know where they're trying to go and what the intent is, then they can get there. So you're driving an entrepreneurial spirit and taking that forward at Dix. But you went the big company route. You know, you've mentioned you're working at Pepsi and you also worked at Wells Fargo and JP Borgen Chase as I understand it. When did you get that first ambition to say, Hey, I'm, I'm going to be a CEO and I think I've got what it takes to make that happen. Oh boy, that's a tough question because I'm not sure I should answer it the way I'm going to answer it. I'm not sure it's a very CEO like answer to give you what I'm about to give you , which is, you know, I never set out and said I'm going to be the CEO of any company. Even when I joined Dix, I joined, it's been about 10 years now, but I joined as the Chief Marketing Officer and was very excited to continue down that path. So I actually think that the, it goes back to the entrepreneurial environment and the fact that there were all these new opportunities that just kept coming my way to run a P&L, to run our e-commerce business when all of a sudden that started to seem possible, that something I had never been planning to do. So, you know, the last three or four years as we've been working on this have been incredibly educational and diversifying from my skill set standpoint, but it's not as if this was a well laid plan from the beginning. Well, you certainly got a broad background, you know, you worked at Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase in banking and then you decided to go to Pepsi Cola and get into the marketing world, you know, after your time at Stanford. You know, what made you decide to go from sort of a left brain field into the right brain area? Well, it's a funny thing, two things. First of all, it wasn't an immediate step. So after I left Stanford, I did join Pepsi, but I joined in our strategic planning group, which was part of the finance organization. And I spent four years in strategic planning. So really kind of leveraging the banking background I had had, but really getting immersed in the products and into CPG generally before deciding pretty, I mean, at that point, pretty late in my career, it was over 30, at least certainly well over that now, but that I wanted to try marketing. So I went into marketing already as a director or senior director. And at Pepsi, marketing is both a combination of right brain and left brain. And I think all good marketing companies are, I mean, it's highly analytic, but it did tap into the more creative side and trying to tell stories. So it was, it was a perfect for me, it was a perfect blend, again, not something I planned in advance on the journey to get where I am today. Do you think, Kevin, both the right brain and the left brain, is that a big advantage to you? And what advice can you give to people on how to get that? Oh, I do think it's probably an advantage that both, although I sure envy people who are so super creative that they can ideate better or so super analytic that they can, you know, look at a spreadsheet and figure out there's one number that isn't quite adding up properly. You know, for me, the, I appreciate left brain and right brain, I appreciate sort of looking at things analytically and also seizing a big idea and going for that. But that's how it may not work for everybody. I think you have to go with where your passions are and where your strengths are. You can't force it if you're not creative, you're not going to make it up. I don't think. You know, speaking of passion, did you have a unique passion for sports? And if so, how much do you think that's really driving your success at Dix? Yeah, it's funny. I do get that question quite a bit and I have a little bit of an unusual journey in that I was not a fantastic athlete growing up. I played some high school sports, but I certainly wasn't winning any awards. And I took to running in my late teens and became somewhat obsessed with running and the fitness side of sports. So I have been an avid runner all that time, like literally, you know, four times a week except for when I had babies or surgery, like right around that time. And that's really been how I've experienced athleticism, sports, fitness and the joy that all of that can give you. My kids all played sports in high school and I was an active parent in that regard and I have incredible passion for what we do as a company and the vision that we have that we do want people. We do think sports make people better and provide opportunities for people and teach them how to win and how to lose. And so it's super important. It feels very consistent with my values and it does keep me excited every day to come to work. You know, Lauren, you're renowned and you mentioned technology a little bit earlier and you're renowned for the great job you did leading Dix Digital and e- commerce efforts. Tell us a story of how you did it. Well, first of all, it wasn't just me. There's a whole army of people who have been building Dix technology and e- commerce over many, many years and it has been a long journey because we were one of the first companies to actually have an e-commerce business back in like 1999, well before I got to Dix. But it took us a while to realize that we needed to bring the capability in- house so that we could control our own destiny so that we could make the business more profitable, so that we could innovate more quickly and not be beholden to other people. So we've been on this journey for I mean, I think it's six or seven years where we brought it in-house and then in the past three or four years really starting to innovate and build the capability so that we can make things that the consumer sees because you're working on the back end it's not so consumer facing but in the last three or four years we've been able to. So it's just honestly it's putting the focus, putting the investment, not worrying that some short-term investment might create some short-term issues with profit but it was important for the long-term and so we did muscle through that and thankfully when the pand emic did hit it was quite clear that we had made good investments and good decisions. Absolutely and I also know you were the architect teaming up with Carrie Under wood, it's one of my favorites and starting the successful Kalea brand of women's workout clothes. Yeah I kind of want to get I want to get inside of your head about how this came about. First when did you get the idea that this was a line that was needed at Dix? So Kalea was born about five and a half years ago so we got the idea probably six and a half years ago maybe even a little more where we realized that there was a white space in our stores there was a lot of products for athletes, for boy athletes, for girl athletes, a lot of products for men and not so much for what we call the athletic females . So we had the female athlete but we didn't have what we call the athletic female which is really again the fitness athlete or the woman who wants to be ready for a workout at any moment and so we thought we had a white space and we went into our private brand group, we now call our vertical brand group and we developed this product but it was a funny journey because we had never worked with a celebrity like that before. I mean it was very much not something we were familiar with doing and thankfully we got put in touch with Carrie Underwood who has been an incredible partner all these years. I mean she's helped us with both the product and the inspiration. She became a mom literally as we signed the deal she was pregnant soon thereafter and so all of her journey about how to, you know, the latest thing we talk about is how do you choose you as a working mom? How does she do all that and the product is meant to support that lifestyle. So we've been really really pleased with Kalia. It is now our number two female athletic brand which is pretty amazing and we think it has tremendous upside. That's interesting about Carrie Underwood because she isn't necessarily associated with sports or I didn't think so. She is a fitness enthusiast of unbelievable proportions and I can only say that when I was in marketing and I was on those shoots I mean you would see her working out you'd be very impressed. She is strong and she is disciplined and yeah she's absolutely terrific. She's super passionate. Her husband is a professional athlete. I mean they're very athletic. How'd you arrive at the Kalia brand name? That's a cool name. Yeah it is a cool name and it was a name we ideated around a ton of different names. We ended up with Kalia because of the origins of a beautiful design we saw that had Cali Lilies in it and we just thought that it would be a really nice takedown and a nod to that and we thought we could infuse it with the meaning of the brand. So Kalia is what it became and that's what it is. Yeah to this day. How big a challenge was it to get the organization behind Kalia and how do you go about doing it? I don't think Ed or CEO won't I don't think mind me saying because he admits very publicly that he and a lot in the organization were a little skeptical about the idea and particularly the idea of us partnering with the celebrity and getting into what was a little bit more of a fashion forward brand and doing it in house all of that. We had a team a dedicated team of people working on the brand. We had product that we knew was exceptional. We met with Carrie and knew we had a real connection with her and her lifestyle and this is an example where Ed just really did let the team go and there was a few of us advocating really hard to let us go and he said fine do it and he'll joke now that it was one of the times that maybe he wasn't right but he's very grateful for that. When you get that kind of push back and you have an idea and you've got people at senior levels really pushing back at you how do you overcome that as a leader? I think you have to a couple of things. First of all you have to pick your battles. I think you don't want to fight every fight. You have to pick what's important to you and then it's just about sharing the reasons why. I don't think you win an argument by putting your head in the sand and saying I 'm right I want to move on and that's it. You have to convince and I've always felt that way and as a team we do have at our executive team level a lot of dialogue where we start off with different opinions and gently challenge each other and eventually a lot of different opinions are raised and then in the end we agree. I think you pick your battles and you come back at it if you don't win the first time. I've also seen you Lord on television as the spokesperson for Dix. Was this something that you were excited to do? Oh my gosh, no. Not even a little bit and I am going to say you're going to have to go interview Ed because he'll admit that he forced me and I know you did interview him before but we were trying to ideate around a back to school campaign and this is going back many years and he had division that you know what you've got kids there going to school, you're a mom , you should be in the commercial and I was no no no no no that is not what I wanted to do and I didn't want to do it but I have to say it was funny my kids still remember that there was a line in the commercial that says as a mother of three and they all felt very famous at that moment. Well you did a good job and you lead like nearly 2,000 retail stores maybe more now. How do you go about getting ideas from store managers? We get a ton of inspiration and ideas from store managers and Ed and I and the entire leadership team I think we're out in the stores more than almost any company I know of. We are out all of the time and we go out we check the environments, the how the store is doing generally but most of all our goal is to hear from the stores what they think the opportunities are some of our absolute best ideas have come out of the stores so it enables me to connect with the team it enables great ideas to come and it's just a hallmark of how we lead a DEX. What do you personally do Lauren to stay on top of customer needs? Do you have a process that you use personally to make sure you really have a good feel for what the customer's thinking? That's a good question. We have a ton of different ways where we can get insight and analytics around how the athletes doing customer athlete is doing everything from the call center where we do get calls and we pay strict attention to that we have emails obviously that if anybody comes in to complain that we that we codify and see what kind of the themes are we also do customer satisfaction surveys real time and we're just testing now something called happy or not which you probably have seen if you've been out and you know I've seen them in public rest areas but it's just really trying to get that real time feedback because I think our team if they can get that real time feedback not having to wait for a delay and not having to wait a week for a survey to come in whether or not customers are delighted in the stores at that time it really does drive that behavior so all of those different metrics sort of way into how we look at you're just this morning even we looked at how our OSAT or satisfaction scores work for the last month and we spend a lot of time diving into that. You know you're very articulate you're very confident that was there ever time when you personally felt underestimated and how did you handle it? Oh that's a good question underestimated. I don't know if I would say I've felt underestimated I'm gonna I would go back to there were there were a couple of times in my career where I made very large career leaps into a lateral position where I really didn't know anything so I was starting with when I moved from strategic planning into marketing at Pepsi I had no marketing background whatsoever and then and secondly you know when I moved into retail and had at Dix and had never had that side of you know the equation either but so I would say when I moved into marketing it was a little frustrating because I really I was at a level where I should know more than I knew about the subject matter at hand. I don't think I was underestimated I think it just took me a while to get my sea legs and learn the skills and take training classes and I went and did a bunch of courses and then also just a ton of on-the-job training so that so that I felt like I slowed down a little bit but to go faster in the long run. You know you've also you know you've had so much success but can you tell us about what you would consider maybe your epic fail or or have you had one? Oh I've had. Yeah I think the biggest most noteworthy failure the one that people might remember is a product that we launched at Pepsi called Pepsi Blue which went into the archives along with you know the crystal pepities of the world as a very large not so good experiment but you know that was right when I moved into marketing it was maybe a year or two as my first innovation job entrepreneurial and and you know we really got all the signals wrong we thought we had a product that consumers would like and that turned out not to be true we thought we'd have repeat purchases that turned out not to be true and trial wasn't even there and so that was an epic fail and that it would you know we just had such high expectations and we have a lot of data and analytics saying that we were going to achieve those expectations so it was a real lesson and and maybe going slow to go fast in the long run and testing and learning rather than just modeling. Well I'm glad to know that you develop Pepsi Blue because I was the inventor of Crystal Pepsi so both of those goes into the archives of Pepsi failures. Give you a good story for the long run. Right I want to ask you a couple of hypotheticals because this is all about how leaders lead. Let's say you have a person who's getting great results but they're demot ivating their team members how would you handle it? That's a real example that happens decent amount of time and I would say the first opportunity is strong coaching and specific coaching with examples about how they are having that impact on people that could be done through 360 feedback that could be done through observation but it's really important that the person has awareness if the person can't get on board and is somewhat of a toxic force I don't care how good of a result performer they are to me they can't stay I think the team has to be rowing in the same direction supporting each other and there's just no tolerance for people who are bringing other people down. Alright here's another one let's say you really want to make a huge change in the organization. How would you go about doing that? What would be your process? I think you have to start with setting a long term vision. I mean by a huge change I'm assuming you mean something that's going to take a year to you know could be a cultural change or it could be a change in how we deliver goods. I think you have to set the vision set the rationale and bring people with you bring key stakeholders with you including the board of directors and the money has to come as well but I would argue set the vision test and learn into it don't get over your skis in terms of building the Taj Mahal when you have to know first how to build and I think that will ultimately in the end be successful you have to set the vision long term. You know you mentioned coaching a little bit earlier what's a one-on-one coaching session like with you? I am yeah I think that people would say that my touch bases my coaching sessions are highly informal I am I joke around a lot in a way but I am able to deliver good feedback and real feedback so if I'm having a performance review it's not all laughs I mean we're talking about the business and we're talking about strengths and where the person has done always starting with where people do well and then talking about opportunities but I don't have a lot of formality and you know seriousness it's always it's always person to person. You mentioned touch bases is that a phrase that you use that or is that company jargon? I probably I probably this point think it's a word in the English dictionary maybe it isn't but it's yeah it's a one-on-one it's a touch base we call them touch bases to me in all seriousness that the the weekly touch bases that I schedule with each individual direct report of mine are the one thing on my calendar that I will protect no matter what so you know if I can't do anything in a week other than have one touch base meeting with everybody because I'm traveling or I'm unavailable or meetings that is what I protect because that's where I really connect with people and also hear what here what's going on get the real deal. I like that phrase touch bases that's a great great way to think about coaching how do you give yourself coaching how do you self coach yourself? Oh I think I am probably my harshest critic or at least I am a harsh critic of myself so I do I don't know if I would say I give myself formal coaching but I do rethink things how could I have done better in that situation how did I have an unintended outcome of a behavior I or an action I took it didn't go the way I wanted I've had some best of intentions that have you know even with people with people things I think in one in particular where I really thought it was the best of intentions to bring two people together who were not collaborating well and it ended up back firing and I think you have to sit back and learn what did what what did I do what could I have done better here what did where did it go wrong I do have an executive coach who I use for things like that who is super helpful to me and does keep me grounded in terms of you know what are the important things and what do I want my impact to be. You know Lauren as terrific and I saw where you recently joined the Young Brand Sport which is my old company tell us the thought process you used in making that decision. Yes I'm thrilled to have just joined the Young Board I was on well I'm on the D ix Board but I was also on an external board sonic burger company for five years until we sold the company about a year and a half ago and so I was looking for another board opportunity but I only wanted it to be with a team that I thought was really excellent with a company that might have interesting capabilities and also bring things that for me would be very interesting like I haven't had a ton of global experience so it was really exciting for me that that young has such a global presence but it also felt like areas where I could add value just given my you know the beverage experience franchise experience traffic driving experience that we have in retail has very similar to what you have in QSR so a lot of it feels so comfortable in a really good way that I feel like I can add value while also learning the team also and maybe it is because Yum is a spin off of Pepsi I mean it just feels culturally like exactly what I'm looking for in a company and in a board so that was another major deciding factor. Lauren this has been so much fun I want to have some more with the lightning round of Q&A okay let's start with this one you know what are the three words that best describe you. I would say one of them one would be insightful and that meaning in terms of just kind of having good instincts how to read a room and situations I think I'm also empathetic you know caring and then while many of my team and my family might disagree with me I do I do think I'm pretty funny so I would say at least I crack myself up so insightful empathetic and funny. What do you see in business that makes you the happiest. I think business has such a unique opportunity to make the world a better place and I've seen it this past year both with how we handled the pandemic and how we're handling the issues of civil unrest and racial injustice but I go back to what we did at Dix a few years ago when we took a big stand with firearms and ended up taking the assault style rifles out of the stores and limiting the age of anyone to buy a firearm to over 21 and high capacity magazines and I think that's an example where business can actually make a real difference in the world where we had an expertise in an area we believed that there were certain loopholes the government wasn't getting there and we felt it was our responsibility to act so I get pretty excited about the impact that business can have. That's great what's your biggest pet peeve chewing gum. If you could be one person for a day besides yourself who would it be and why. I think one of my favorite people in the world is maybe who I would say in that example would be Tina Fey and I love her because she's so real and she's she's also very funny I would give her more funny than me but but I also I love if I could go back in time if I could time travel also that you know the work that she did on on SNL as writers and how they had to work under such incredibly rushed circumstances you only had like three days to put on an entire show it had to be culturally relevant in real time so I would be pretty psyched to go back and be in her body and see what some of those were like those days. That'd be cool. What's something about you that few people would know? Well you may know by the end of this if I go back and listen but I do have I mix metaphors quite a bit. I probably did it here if you go back you'll hear but I actually I find it it's either a brilliance or it's stupidity I don't know but I can perfectly put two metaphors together like yeah I'll give you some of them when we next to each other. Okay great and what do you think is the the most interesting factoid about Dix? I think that it started as a little bait and tackle store back in 1948 and that it's grown it's an American dream story I mean it's grown as a founder led company it truly just continues to to metamorphosize and change and adapt to times and and I'm just super proud of the part of American culture and the family culture that it that it brings. Who would be your favorite leader and why? I have a lot of people I look up to across my career and even in my personal life but I have to say that I'll give that one to Ed Edstack our CEO. Former CEO. Yes former CEO founder executive chair he is an unbelievable leader in terms of many different things but in this case why he'd be my favorite is leading with values and I think it's rare to see a CEO stand up so much for what he or she believes in and in this case you know you look somebody like Ed who put 250 million dollars of sales at risk when we made some of those announcements about firearms and I have to say it never he never blinked I mean we were doing what was right for the company and for the country and it was the right thing to do so I have incredible respect for that. You know Lauren you're in a really competitive industry retails 24/7 I mean it 's just doggy dog you know every it's you know you worry about the sales every day you know I know I've been there I've done that it's not easy and you've got a family and you know how do you balance it all and what advice can you give to people? Well I think the probably the biggest piece of advice and how I would balance it all has been with friends and family and in particular my family I have I do think that the partner you pick in life is super important and I've been very lucky to have a husband who's a supportive as he is and who could help me raise raise the three kids I had parents when my kids were young I had parents who live nearby and were willing to help out if I couldn't be somewhere for work my kids were thrilled to have my mom come and she would do that and it just gave me incredible an incredible support system and even even friends I mean we had we had four other families that we raised our kids with who I used to joke I could sort of drop my kids off if I got transferred to Asia I could just drop the kids off and they'd be finding any one of those houses and that just gives it's you know it takes a village and it did take a village so you know Lauren you work to JB Morgan Chase Wells Fargo you know you get your Stanford MBA go to Pepsi end up being president of Dix you know and the thing that really impresses me the most is you have all these credentials and yet you're really down to earth the real person you know how do you how do you stay humble oh my gosh I stay humble because I certainly have a reasons to be critical of myself I appreciate you you listing out all those accomplishments but but it's it actually you know joy every day is connecting with people and trying to have a positive impact in the world I don't look at it the way you just laid it out I look at it as I 'm really grateful for the opportunities I've had and and I hope to make a difference going forward well I know you will and I want to thank you so much for taking the time to be with us you know we're trying to make a difference make the world a better place by developing better leaders and you know having the opportunity to learn from you I think is is a great a great gift you're giving others so thank you very much Lauren I really appreciate it thank you David I appreciate it well there's no doubt in my mind that Dick's Sporting Goods is in really good shape with Lauren at the helm she shared so many practical tools for how she connects and communicates with her team I love the weekly touch bases where she sits down with her direct reports and I really love that they really are the only non-negotiable thing on her calendar that's just fantastic I also love the phrase she uses called commanders intent to describe how important it is for leaders to communicate the vision of where they're going and not just give people the ABC list of things to do because you know what people really want to know why they need to do a B and C so this week as part of your weekly personal development plan I want you to think about that commanders intent anytime you give direction to your team this week make sure you're telling them the why behind those tasks communication isn't just a transfer of information from one person to another it's the connection when you share the vision behind your objectives you're bringing your people along with you and connecting them to the big idea so do you want to know how leaders lead what we learned today is that great leaders see communication as a connection thanks again for tuning in to another episode of how leaders lead where every Thursday you get to listen in while I interview some of the very best leaders in the world I make it a point to give you something simple on each episode that you can apply to your business so that you will become the best leader you can be. . . . . . . . . . . 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