Career Pivots and Purpose: CEO Stacey Tank’s Approach to Building Inclusive Brands

Lottie Bazley: Hello and welcome to a brand new episode of the Aspire to Inspire Podcast. I am your host, Lottie Bazley, Internal Communications Manager here at Staffbase, and I have been really looking forward to today’s conversation with our incredible guest, Stacey Tank. 

So, Stacey, welcome. I am absolutely thrilled to have you here today. But before we dive into our chat, would you mind giving our listeners a little introduction to yourself, please?

Stacey Tank: Sure, thank you so much for having me. I have what people have described as an eclectic career and I think that’s the right word, actually. I started at General Electric for 10 years in marketing and communications, but then went into financial auditing and finance and then back out again. I joined Heineken after that, and then Home Depot, which is a home improvement retailer based in Atlanta, and was most recently running their services businesses. If you didn’t want to do it yourself, we could renovate your kitchen for you, windows, doors, floors, and all of that. Then I went back to Heineken in the chief transformation officer role, co-creating the new global strategy and then operationalizing it.  Then I’ve gone from working in nuclear power and banks and MRI machines and healthcare and beer, and now to beauty. 

I run a high-growth phase beauty company with a focus on color cosmetics, with two brands, Jason Wu Beauty and KimChi Chic. It’s a privately owned company at the moment and growing and pushing the boundaries of both building brand in this new social era but also how retail is transforming with social selling, becoming a third leg of the stool with brick and mortar and e-comm. It’s a lot of fun. Frankly, beauty is a really heartwarming category because hopefully you’re helping people to feel good about themselves.

Lottie Bazley: Absolutely love that. So thank you so much for that brief introduction. And as you say, very eclectic, lots of different industries there as well. So can walk us through that career and how — any kind of pivotal moments, whether you changed industry or roles, what stands out to you in that journey?

Stacey Tank: Sure. I definitely still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. I operate with boundaries and labels. I always like the ability to be what is needed in that moment and also challenge myself and push myself to the boundary of what feels like my own existing capability or knowledge and conquering that challenge.

It really gives me a tremendous thrill. I started in this leadership program with General Electric out of undergrad. I had done a million different internships because, again, I didn’t have this sense of what I wanted to do. I had interned in ad agency and at a music festival, and I was working as a broadcast journalist and then worked in big business for General Electric.

And that taste of a giant company, hundreds of thousands of employees all over the world, seemed like an amazing way to learn from folks who knew a lot about their craft and also to live all over the world and work in different businesses and just keep exploring. GE, they allowed me or invited me into this marketing communications development program and then no one from my background had ever gone into their corporate audit staff before. They were a group of “financial green berets” doing all the acquisitions, the dispositions, the investigations, and balance sheet financial audits. My father was a former financial auditor, and he always said that’s the way to really understand a business. Where’s the risk, where’s the opportunity, is to get into the financials. That is the language of business, frankly.

I also liked the challenge because I was a bit uncomfortable and I knew that people that came from the more artsy functions like marketing or communications, although marketing is much more technical now because of digital and AI, et cetera, that they were often really uncomfortable with finance and accounting. And then finance and accounting people, in my experience, almost weaponized that against those functions so that they couldn’t follow along and they would just control the situation and I didn’t love that. I wanted to try to break that paradigm and push myself into that discomfort.

So they let me join the corporate audit staff, and they moved me all over the world, Brazil, Mexico. I was living in Germany, the UK, Paris. It was a spectacular experience, very stressful but also very fulfilling.

Lottie Bazley: Yeah, I imagine.

Stacey Tank: Yes, it was the best training I could have ever dreamed of, not always pleasant. Then I rolled off as a finance leader in the industrial water business, and it was coming up on 10 years, came back to the headquarters during the financial crisis in 2008 when Lehman went under and all of that. 

Then, out of the blue, I got a call from Heineken, and someone I sat on a board with was sitting next to the CEO of Heineken in the US. And at dinner, he said, “By the way, I have this open role on my management team, and this is what I’m looking for. Do you know anyone?” The woman said, “Do you know Stacey Tank?” And he Googled me. That person is Dolf van den Brink, who’s now the global CEO at Heineken and he invited me to join the company the first time.

Then again, out of the blue, I got a call from the new CEO at Home Depot, Craig Menear, when he was taking over from Frank Blake when Frank retired. Kind of against the plan, I could really see how I could hopefully help with Craig getting into his new leadership tenure based on my skill set being very different than his. Home Depot is an amazing company with a very strong culture, a very big company, $150 billion or something in revenue, 500,000 employees, third largest employer in the US. So it was a chance to make a real systemic impact and to also learn and to go into the belly of the beast when it comes to retail. I’d done consumer goods, food and beverage, beer on the Heineken side, now deep into the belly of the beast in retail to complete that view.

Then, when Dolf was promoted to the global CEO role in early 2020 and we had this thing called the novel Coronavirus happening in Asia, I texted Dolf when he was announced as the global CEO and just said, “Congratulations, lucky Heineken. This is great.” He said, “Thanks, dah dah dah, can you talk?” I thought, “Oh, no.” We have this beautiful life in Atlanta, and everything seems right in the world, but always up for an adventure. Dolf invited us to move to the Netherlands. So we moved over, and I was working in Amsterdam in 2020. The task was what got us here, won’t get us there.

There was a CEO in role for 15 years, did an amazing job. And anytime you have that kind of leadership change, it’s this next chapter that’s coming in time to write the new growth playbook. Also, the external environment and the consumer was changing in ways that we all know: Your route to market’s changing, consumer preferences are changing when it comes to alcohol. Regulators’ views on alcohol were changing.

So we co-created with our 90,000 employees the new growth strategy we called Evergreen. Then it was about operationalizing that with a big focus on balanced growth. It was, of course, growth, but not growth at all costs. It was being smarter with the bottom line. We had a €2 billion cost-out commitment as part of that, then digitizing our route to market, investing in people and culture, and doing all of that sustainably and responsibly. We also architected the company’s net zero carbon strategy 10 years ahead of the Paris climate agreement and launched that. It was really a fulsome view of a growth strategy, not just the commercial piece, although that is very, very important.

Then I have two boys. They are 15 now and 10, and my older one wanted to get back to the States. So as a family, we started talking about what that would look like. And I was doing the thing I’ve always done, which is talk to big companies, being in that Fortune 500 world.

One night in the early part of 2023, I was emailing with a friend of mine who had a big birthday. I sent her a card, and we were bouncing back and forth. And she said, “How’s your son? What are you thinking about doing?” I said, “Actually, I have these three live conversations about roles. I would love your opinion. You know me, what do you think would be a good fit?” She said, “Nah, those are the things you’ve always done. Come be the CEO of my company.” I thought, “Oh my gosh,” talk about unexpected, beauty industry, growth phase. But the more I thought about it, the more my brain, the hooks of my brain just kept biting into all the opportunity and the joy that you could bring people and all the creativity, so I flew to Toni’s house. We spent the weekend together in LA. The more I learned, the more I thought, “I can’t get it off my mind. I feel I need to do this.” In a big company, you always hear the adage, “If we were a startup, we would.” “If we were focused on growth, we would.” Also in a small company, you hear, “We’re not a big company. We don’t do that.” And I thought, “What if you try to bring those things together? And in my lived experience now, what is the reality of holding those two things at once?”

That’s been a great adventure and I love the category. I love it because when I was a little girl, I would sit with Seventeen Magazine and Vogue and Marie Claire and Cosmopolitan, and I would cut out the pictures of the fashion and the models, and it was Cindy Crawford and it was Kate Moss and it was Christy Turlington, it was these supermodels. Linda Evangelista, I guess, was just a bit before. I would cut all of these out, and I would put them all over my wall, and I would aspire to that expression of beauty and fashion. But I would never be that definition of beauty and fashion because I’m 5’3″. I’m just never going to be like Kate Moss.

And I think in the 20 plus years, or I suppose now more than that, 30 plus years since that time, the definition of what it is to be and feel beautiful is completely different. It’s about your personality. It’s about being who you are. And whatever that is is good and beautiful and celebrated. Being a part of that beauty industry to me is a real treat.

Lottie Bazley: That’s beautiful. And I mean, I’m 5’1″ on a good day over here, so I can totally relate to that. But thank you so much for sharing that. I mean, like you say, it’s been a really fascinating journey and also the fact that you’ve just lived in so many countries as well, you must have just learned so much and soaked up so much as you were moving around.

One thing that I really took from that was the fact that these roles somehow have landed in your lap, right? You have these incredible people that are reaching out to you to say, “Stacey, we want you to come in and help us.” And I think that’s so impressive and the dream, right? When you’re trying to look for a new role, someone just goes, “Hey, have this one!” But I wonder if there’s any, I don’t know — like, how do you end up in that place? Have you got any networking top tips? How do you end up being the person that is at the front of these people’s minds?

Stacey Tank: The universe works in mysterious ways. Life has proven that to me over and over again. I was reading something about Adidas turnaround yesterday. And actually, now that you asked the question, this article was coming to mind because the new CEO, or the CEO who’s executed this turnaround at Adidas and brought them so much success in a moment when Nike is particularly re-imagining themselves. 

He said there were three things that led to this success. And I think they really resonated with me. I think he’s right. The first one is luck. The second one is timing. The third one is outstanding execution. And I think it’s the same thing. What can you control out of those things? It’s the execution part. Just really putting yourself out there and trying to contribute to your best and highest with a big open heart and generous spirit and delivering, being someone who’s known for delivering the goods. Then it is about timing, and it is also about a bit of luck because if I hadn’t sent that birthday card to Toni, she wouldn’t have emailed me and I wouldn’t have flown to LA. So yeah, there are so many threads in life that if you take a moment to pull on them, these things can happen and dominoes can fall, or it could go a completely different way.

I’ve also had people say, my father has said this to me, and others that I’m not afraid to take “big risks” in my life. But I don’t look at it that way at all. I don’t feel like I take big risks at all. I feel my way across the chasm of what might be perceived as a risk like moving to Europe with my family. I didn’t perceive that as a risk. I perceived it as this incredible adventure. What a privilege! Joining an early-stage company, I suppose it’s a bit of a risk, but also it’s something in my heart I’ve always wanted to try, and I felt so lucky to get to do it. So I think that’s somehow, though, letting go of the edge of the pool. It’s a necessary part of all of this. There’s got to be some openness. When the door opens, you have to be willing to go through it.

Lottie Bazley: Yeah I really like that, actually just that shift in mindset of okay, this is not a risk. This is an opportunity. It’s a challenge, sure, but here’s all of these things that I might get out of that. And actually, hey if it doesn’t work out, no stress. We move on to the next “big risk.”

Stacey Tank: Right, exactly.

Lottie Bazley: So, you have worked with various brands and organizations where storytelling has played a really key role in their communication strategy. So is there a secret sauce there? How do you craft those really compelling narratives that engage both employees but also customers too? 

Stacey Tank: A hundred percent. There’s a quote that I live by, which is, “People are emotional beings who are sometimes rational.” We all connect through story. That’s why so much history is passed down from the early days of humans around the fire, telling the stories of the ancestors and all the insights and lessons learned.

I think story is everything. Your strategy is a story. You’re interviewing a new candidate. I was interviewing someone last night to join our company, and we were telling the story of our company and the story of what’s coming next, which touches people’s hearts. I think for the most part, you have to make some sense rationally, but it is all about touching people’s hearts and then energizing them and onboarding them, and mobilizing them towards something that you can all achieve together. I am a massive fan of story. 

We also, in another example, I think Friday it was announced that this organization called BeautyMatter awarded one of our brands, Jason Wu Beauty, the award for, I think it was best use of technology or something, but essentially in February at New York Fashion Week, we were invited with our other brand, KimChi Chic Beauty, to be the TikTok shop beauty launch partner last year. And that has transformed the brand. Social selling is fascinating. I am — I think obsessed is not an overstatement of how interested I am in seeing how it’s all going to play out. And we said, “Okay, we’ve learned from KimChi Chic Beauty. How can we use this for Jason Wu in a way that would make sense for Jason?” We said, “What if we were behind the scenes at the runway and we gave anyone, anywhere in the world, a view into what it is to see the models getting their finishing touches?” See Diane Kendal, this amazing makeup artist, giving the looks and then saying, “You can get the look,” even before it goes on the runway in one click, super affordable. And we bundled these looks, so we were the first brand to ever go live on TikTok shop at New York Fashion Week, where you could actually buy the looks even before they hit the runway.

And to me, it was neat to do it. I’m so glad that we could live in the real expression of what is unique about that brand. But telling the story that I had just shared, that’s, I think, the reason why the brand was then awarded and received an accolade for it, because you can then put yourself there.

Yes, what do those models look like? Are they all just running around getting their clothes? How does this even work? You’re behind the scenes, and then Jason is there, finishing all the touches, and the makeup goes on. There’s so much story embedded within that whole moment, and getting to be there personally was also like a little kid going, “Oh my gosh, I feel like I’m inside of Vogue magazine right now,” and sitting on the runway.

They were very generous. I was sitting in the front row on the runway, and you see Olivia Culpo and all these big influencers and famous people and paparazzi, and you’re just sitting there in the dark waiting for the models. I felt like I was inside a storybook, which was incredible. Without story, just delivering on point 3 in my PowerPoint, “We must save a billion dollars of cost.” It doesn’t really touch people or motivate people, but talking about how you’re going to use that cost savings to invest in your brands because the consumer is changing. We’re going to make interesting additions to the portfolio, and all of that brings you along and hopefully lights people up.

Lottie Bazley: Very cool. And I absolutely would have been with you there on that front row. Like, “Oh my gosh, I’m in The Devil Wears Prada or something like that.”

Stacey Tank: My heart was like beating out of my chest. There was a woman sitting next to me named Vivian who came from the Nordics and she is a cashmere designer, and they had done a collab. And I think it was her first time she ever saw her designs, and she stayed up the entire night finishing these sweaters, and it was the first time she ever saw her creations on the runway like this at Fashion Week. She was crying as the models came down the runway, and I was like, I couldn’t have been more grateful to be this tiny, tiny, tiny part of it. And the raw humanity of the whole thing was incredible.

Lottie Bazley: Yeah, amazing. It sounds like it. Well, I mean, you’ve just told me an incredible story there, so I’m fully on board with those storytelling skills. But I know that I think both of us, with the communications background, maybe storytelling comes a little more naturally to some people than others. I once read an article, I think it was Brilliant Inc actually, where they talked about for people that struggle to get into that storytelling mindset, that you just start your sentence with once upon a time and it hopefully gets you into that mindset.

But have you got any kind of top tips or tangible things that leaders who may not be so strong in the storytelling area, anything that they can do to kind of help inspire that story about those financial figures or whatever it is.

Stacey Tank: There’s a leader who was the CFO at Home Depot when I was there, and now she’s the CEO of UPS, the parcel company. Her name’s Carol Tomé, and she talked about a time earlier in her career. She was a young CFO and over, I think, 25 years with Home Depot before she became the CEO of UPS. And she told a story about how at one of her first investor conferences, she was, “Bullet 3, we will deliver this gross margin, na na na,” and an investor actually fell asleep in front of her. She said, “Never again. I’m going to commit myself to connect all of these messages through compelling stories that people will connect with and be interested in.” And she put in the really hard work of getting a coach, practicing, repetition, repetition, pushing herself into the discomfort. And now she’s known as probably the most compelling storyteller. If you hear someone like Jim Cramer talk about her from CNBC or others, she is absolutely astonishingly talented, and you would look at her on stage and say, “Oh, she was just born with it.” But it’s not true. She worked on it really hard. 

So I think to me, you have to set an intention and it has to be genuine that you’re going to commit yourself. It’s like getting into shape at the gym or eating vegan or whatever your aspiration is or how to knit, whatever your thing is, and then committing yourself to trying and practicing over and over and over until you’re good at it.

The way that I came into it was a little bit different in the sense that I was a theatrical little kid. I grew up in the theater and loving the arts and loving music and performing. So I was just on the stage since I was five years old because I liked delivering story. And I loved the moment when you could look into the audience and you were telling the story. I was in Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods.” I was Little Red Riding Hood at one point. And I remember playing my role and seeing the faces and seeing the animations and seeing the nervousness when the wolf comes out and taking people through story was so joyful to me. That’s how I practiced it. But I definitely had stage fright. Yes, I definitely forgot my lines. Yes, I definitely had wardrobe malfunction. You go through all of those things to get to the place where you lived more natively in that space.

Lottie Bazley:  Yeah for sure and I really agree with you there that practice makes perfect. Like you can’t just say, “Okay well I need to tell this story coming up. I’ll figure it out the day before.” And then a year later when you’ve got another story that you need to tell, another presentation. It’s about making sure that you’re kind of training that muscle and getting into that place. Absolutely. So we talked a little bit about beauty standards and inclusivity. But I want to dive a bit deeper into that. So at Bespoke Beauty Brands, you really are reshaping these beauty standards to become more inclusive, which of course, I love. And actually it’s interesting that we’re having this conversation today because I’ve been reading some stuff over the last week or so about the comeback of the Victoria Secret’s show and how people are reacting to that, which I find super interesting. But people seem to have now a lot higher expectations around inclusivity and beauty.

The fact that it’s even a talking point. The Victoria’s Secret show went away and then it came back and people are talking about it a lot, right? So could you tell me a bit more about your mission for Bespoke Beauty Brands and how you communicate this to your audience? How do you really bring that to life?

Stacey Tank: Absolutely. There are a couple of things that help in the sense that we are female and minority-founded. Toni Ko is an immigrant to the United States. She originates from Korea. As a little girl, her parents came for the American dream, for a better life. And then Jason Wu and Kim Chi are both members of the LGBT community. And both — Jason immigrated from Taiwan for reasons you can read about, but for human rights-related reasons really. Then Kim Chi grew up in the States, but also has a really compelling personal story, ripe with terrible bullying and all kinds of feeling othered. And all three of them have found their voice through the beauty industry and creativity and the feeling also of being welcomed by their community that then has influence, in concentric circles on others that start to shift the standard for what is a founder? What is beautiful?

We are, I think, in a unique place where the founding fabric of the company is coming from folks who represent communities that weren’t always in the mainstream and weren’t always represented. Then within our team as well, it’s probably one of the most diverse teams, if not the most — and, of course, it depends on how you define diversity. We welcome folks that are coming in from all different kinds of walks of life, also from industry, out of the industry. And we often, when we’re developing a new product, we’ll ask the employees, what do you think about this? Does this stand up? Not only from a formulation perspective, but there’s a very important topic in the color cosmetics industry around being representative of all skin types and a level of melanin pigmentation.

We’re always asking, is this good enough? How can this be better? How would this work on you? This is a very industry thing, but maybe a month ago, there was a lilac blush that came out that did not work on pigmented skin. And we were coming out with a lilac blush and we said, hold on, let’s pause.

Let’s really make sure that we’ve done it well and we’ve done it in the spirit of honoring all of the potential consumers. So we did a pause. We had our community give us feedback and we were okay, but I think the other part of this is: No one’s perfect. No one’s going to get it right all the time and I don’t think we should expect that. No leader is perfect. I’m a parent. No parent is perfect. But when you make a mistake, you have to own it. You have to do what you can do to make it right. We will never always succeed at everything we try, but I hope that we’ll always be really transparent and frank about when we stub our toe and then be fully committed to doing a better job.

At key brands now, I think Euphoria — others that I’ve seen recently that have things that happened that weren’t the way they wanted and they’ll get on social and say, “Here’s where we were coming from. Let me tell you the story of how we got here. Let me tell you how we’re going to fix it, and we’re accountable for that.”

Lottie Bazley: Really appreciate that. So you’ve mentioned social selling, and your fascination/obsession with it. So I want to touch a little bit on that one then. It’s very clear to me to see from you how passionately you feel about the parts that make up your brand. But a lot of the stuff that you’re doing is this social selling. So what role do influencers and content creators play in communicating those values to your customers?

Stacey Tank: Absolutely. I think the Edelman Trust Barometer that launched in Davos every year, that’s 20 plus years old, is always an interesting thing to read every year. I enjoy it in, I suppose, February when Davos is happening. I always get the PDF and I flip through it. And one of the tried and true themes forever in the Trust Barometer is that we tend to trust people like me, friends and family, normal people.

If I’m thinking about changing something in my children’s diet, or I have a son who’s my older one, very sporty, plays ice hockey, and he wanted to take creatine. This is a true story. This was a couple months ago. And my sister’s a doctor and so I reached out to her. At first I was like, “No, it’s dangerous.” I promised him, “I’ll do the research. I promise, I’ll talk to your doctor. I’ll talk to Aunt Jackie.” I reached out to my sister, the doctor, and said, “Is this safe for my son? What should I do?” Because I trust her.

What’s interesting, in another silly example last year: I have a dog who is a Bernese mountain dog, loves the snow, and goes out with his friends on these hikes and needed shoes. This is so ridiculous, dog shoes.

Lottie Bazley: Love this example.

Stacey Tank: A dog jacket. Because the snow was getting in his fur, and it was getting stuck and clumped in there, and he could get sick from that. So he needed this snow jacket, which I thought was ridiculous. It was very expensive. But I reached out on social media, and I said, “Does anyone else have a long-haired dog? I’m looking at this Canada pooch jacket.” It was over $100. I’m like, “This is crazy.” Then my friends who have long-haired dogs all chimed in, and they said, “It’s actually a really good one. It’s worth it. You should get it.” So friends and family. I trust people like me, friends and family, for referrals. That’s the most trusted group.

So what happens when you take technology and you democratize that on this, on TikTok, Instagram, Snap, whatever it is, and then you add a buy button? You click to buy. 10, 15 years ago when Amazon invented one-click shopping. Everyone said, “Oh, it’s too easy. You just load your credit card and click to buy.” Now, at least here, we use that every day. It’s very pedestrian and boring. We’re like, “Of course, there’s a one-click button.” But what if I can go on? This is launching soon. This is one of my favorite products that I just happen to have on the desk. This is called the Pearl Darling. What if I go on and I talk about this, I use it, I put it on TikTok, and now I link to TikTok shop, and in one click for the right value, you can have it shipped to your home?

This is fascinating to me. All of a sudden I have become a retailer. You no longer need to go into “insert retailer name here.” You can from your phone at any point in the day transact, and I can become a retailer. And the economics of that are also very interesting. So on TikTok Shop, you’ll see affiliate commission rates between probably 15 and maybe up to 30%.

Let’s do easy math: If you sold $100 of these and say the commission is 20%, you’re going to get $20 out of every $100. And that adds up. That’s paying a lot of rents and mortgages in this country right now at a time when, by the way, TikTok has been banned and that ban goes into effect in January. So what’s going to happen there? I don’t know. But this is redefining retail. We had brick-and-mortar retail. I go on my horse or in my car or on foot or on the bus or subway. I go to the brick-and-mortar retailer; I buy something. Then 15 years ago we had e-commerce. It was clunky at first.

Now it’s easy. So you have interconnected or omni-channel retail. Now we have the third leg of the stool, which is social selling. How am I going to feel about that as a retailer? Because I’m now being disintermediated. You don’t need a Walmart, a Target, even an Amazon to be involved in that purchase anymore. How are these things going to work together?

And none of us know, but it’s meaningful, and it’s growing. And you see very well-run companies like Amazon, Walmart, Target, others, probably social platforms like Snap, YouTube, Instagram, Meta, trying to figure out what TikTok shop has now cracked in the US, and they’re having huge success. To me, that’s also all about the UX and making it really easy and getting the affiliates onboarded to start that behavior-building, like Amazon has done with individual Amazon shops.

So I think this will fundamentally change how different brands go to market. It’s democratizing the ability for very small planners and very small indie brands to have success and scale. Where will it lead? I don’t know, but I look to Asia a lot because they seem to be ahead of where we are in this market.

Lottie Bazley: Yeah that’s really cool. And I really like what you say there about democratizing things, right? It’s not just the big retailers that are the ones that can sell products now. It’s like I could do it if I was on TikTok, which I am not. But it’s putting that opportunity into other people’s hands.

So we talked a little bit there about the kind of future and where this is going, but I just wanted to go back to the past ever so slightly now. So being a CEO now, and you talked a bit about how many roles you’ve jumped around to, but I want to understand a bit about your experience as a CCO and how that experience in the communications area how does that integrate into how you make decisions now as a CEO? Like the old you CCO to future CEO you. What influence do you think that experience has on your current role.

Stacey Tank: Yes. There’s definitely a habitual reflection on reputational impact that now starts at the beginning for me, that’s built in. And I think it helps in the examples of when something goes wrong as a brand, maybe on the topic of inclusivity or diversity; that’s not a new topic for people that have worked in reputation, communications, corporate affairs.

It’s definitely helpful to have so many miles on my tire of really crazy reputational things that I’ve managed through. The Fukushima nuclear meltdown where people were literally dying, where GE designed all six boiling water reactors and built three of them.

I ran that crisis operation center for GE many years ago to the Russia-Ukraine war, where Heineken was exiting their business in Russia and there were many complications, including my personal communications were getting leaked outside the company and my photo was getting leaked into the media with all these really tricky accusations at a time when we were genuinely trying to get out of the country, but the government wouldn’t approve for 18 months, which was really tricky. To more day-to-day things that can go wrong.

For us, what does it mean in real life? I think one of the very practical examples is that we, for KimChi Chic, we use humor a lot, and we have funny names to our products.

And sometimes we go to the line, and I think sometimes we might go over the line in terms of what we’re naming some of these products. And so we can have discussions much earlier in the process, when we’re in product development review, about where that line is. If there are young people in the brand and we make a sort of sexual innuendo, is it appropriate? Et cetera.

Hopefully that line of thinking, because it’s like breathing to me to ask the question, how do we think about this? That will help us as we get down the pike either to stand by our decisions and explain ourselves and say, “This is why we thought it was okay.” Maybe we still could make a mistake and say, “We thought it was okay and we realize now it’s not okay. We’re going to fix it.” But at least to have it embedded into the thought process earlier.

And just like with storytelling or public speaking, where the more times you do it, the more refined your skill is, I think the more you embed thoughts of reputation, also engaging your employees, bringing your employees along, co-creation, the more you embed that just as part of your way of working, then hopefully fewer bumps in the road on those demands as you launch things or get to the marketplace. For sure.

Lottie Bazley: And something that really resonates with me, something that I feel very strongly about in my role as an internal communicator is that being the voice of the employees. And actually, if there’s a message that’s coming from leadership, thinking about how people might interpret that or how people are feeling when that message is being delivered to them, that we really advocate for employees. And customers, I guess, in the CEO arena. So it’s that you’ve got that almost level of empathy and understanding and bringing that into these really big decisions, which I think is incredible.

Stacey Tank: Absolutely and really just getting up on your feet and going and talking with folks and listening very deeply to what they’re saying, what they’re not saying. That’s always interesting. I remember when we were working on the Russia exit at Heineken, things were moving so quickly, and the media was chaotic. As much as you try to plan things, you’re also reacting to things that you didn’t expect.

Hopefully, because we built a culture where people felt safe they — I remember one morning I was in central Amsterdam and I was working on something, responding to the press and someone popped into my office, actually a woman named Lotta, similar to your name. And she said, “Hey, I just wanted to mention that we really need to give all employees talking points that they can use with their families because I’m getting asked and I don’t know what to say.” And I thought, “Such a good one. Thank you so much.” And then we were able to pivot.

So, as much as you can create that psychological safety, as Google said all those years ago, then all of a sudden, it’s also not on your back as a leader. It’s all of us thinking in service of our customers, our community, whatever it is, to try to do the best job that we can.

Lottie Bazley: Agreed. And to your point earlier about coming at things with a big open heart, I think that’s a very key personality trait that leaders need to have, so that wraps that one up nicely there. But before I let you go, I’d love to give you the opportunity to share a little bit more about your nonprofit, Our Happy Place, and how that aligns with your broader vision.

Stacey Tank: Absolutely. Our Happy Place was born now four or five years ago as just a passion of mine and my family’s. We’ve had many folks in our direct family and then friends and other relatives who were touched by mental health challenges, both for adults but also for young people, for children. And unfortunately, right now in the United States, the number one cause of death in children is suicide.

And it’s a first time in our history that that’s the case. It used to be accidents, which is what you would expect. That’s not okay for our community. And there’s a lot we can do about it. There are more and more research showing that social and phones, all this technology is playing a role, and that’s within our power to do something about.

Even here in our small school district in Skaneateles, New York, the board of education this year finally passed a rule that there’s no technology in the classroom. It is amazing and I know it’s scary, and some parents worry, “How will I get in touch with my child?” And I hear that, and that matters, and it’s important to say how they’re feeling. We always just have to weigh these things because when you hear number one cause of death is suicide, what actions can we take? And we can’t just sit here and debate to death. We have to do something and try something and if it doesn’t work, we need to adjust it.

So my hat’s off to the board here. My mother was a superintendent of schools for a mid- to large-size poor school district in Connecticut, also in the Northeast in the United States. The first thing we did was partner with her school district to try to fund some programs there, Triple P, Positive Parenting Program, to help parents support the mental wellness of children in the classroom and beyond. We’re still finding our footing and ways that we can help, but that has been and will always be a big passion for me is supporting young people in their journey of going through their adolescence. Hopefully the safest way that they can and expressing themselves, and learning how to navigate and cope with all the things that you and I both navigated.

There is no amount of money you could pay me genuinely, a billion dollars, there’s no amount of money you could pay me to go back to those years. Those are hard yards in middle school and high school. So how do we support young people to thrive?

Lottie Bazley: That’s super admirable. And what I really find really heartwarming about that is that we’ve talked about that you’re doing a lot of this content creation. We’ve talked about TikTok a lot. We’ve talked about Snapchat, all of these platforms that fall into that category of potentially detrimental to young people. The fact that you have these two things side by side shows me that you’ll be thinking about this sort of stuff in the content that you’re producing, which is amazing.

Stacey Tank: A hundred percent. I’m not a big regulation person, but on this, when it comes to protecting children, we need rules. We really need rules to keep kids safe. Anyone who doubted that, I also doubted that. I’m a very free laissez-faire — With my first son, we were very easygoing about technology, and we made mistakes. There’s no question. We need rules to keep kids safe.

So indeed, a lot of these platforms and these apps need to be only accessible at a certain age and it’s hard. You read all the time that one parent will say, “I don’t want to give the cell phone to the child, but everyone else has one.” That’s an impossible situation for that one parent that we all need our kids to be in cohorts of being treated the same way. Which is why I love that the schools have now said, “Look, for everyone, during instructional time, there’s no technology.” That really helps.

Lottie Bazley: Fab. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today, Stacey.

Stacey Tank: Thank you for having me. 

Lottie Bazley: Of course, no, it’s been an honor. And you’ve shared so much knowledge and if I may say so, have told some incredible stories. So thank you very much for being with us today. And to all of our listeners, thank you so much for joining and you can find all of the things that we’ve spoken about today in the show notes. Thanks again, Stacey.

Stacey Tank: Thank you so much.

Lottie Bazley: Take care. Bye bye.