A Call for Calmness, Compassion, and Creativity in Leadership
From Guest Contributor: Michelle DeFeo
As March of this year approached, I was experiencing the most positive momentum that I’d ever felt in my nine years at the helm of Laurent-Perrier US. We were closing our fiscal year that month and would be hitting our goals thanks to the hard work and dedication of our team and our distributors.
Things were going so well that a few months prior, I had signed a lease for a larger office space, and I was putting the finishing touches on several job descriptions we were getting ready to post to fill the seats of those new empty desks.
In early March we hosted colleagues from France in New York for meetings. At the time there were under 100 cases of Covid-19 in France and even fewer in the US. While we were concerned about the situation, the enormity of what was coming was not yet evident to anyone.
The following week I flew to San Juan for business. Puerto Rico hadn’t yet seen its first case. It was business as usual, albeit with more elbow bumps and fewer hugs and kisses. As each day went by, news from the mainland and beyond became more alarming. By the end of my brief stay, the entire world had changed.
Crises are times during which leaders are made, proven, or broken.
Anyone who is willing to lead can find new opportunities to do so during a crisis, whether in business, philanthropy, government relations or beyond. Those who are already leaders before a crisis hits will have their worthiness put to the test.
I knew that my leadership was about to be challenged in a way I couldn’t yet fathom, and I needed to be in the right headspace to face these challenges. I decided to spend an extra day on that beautiful island to quietly recharge and reflect. I didn’t know exactly what was coming, but over the course of that day I resolved to confront whatever it was with calmness, compassion, and creativity.
Staying calm under pressure has always been a hallmark of good leadership. Calmness allows leaders to have the presence of mind needed to form the right questions, seek out the right information, and take well-considered actions. As I’m not a naturally calm person, I needed to prepare to confront this crisis by spending a quiet day alone to consciously shift my mental space towards calmness.
When I went back into work mode the next day, the first question I asked myself wasn’t “what will we do?”, but rather “what matters most right now?” The safety of our people was the obvious answer, so we immediately told everyone to cancel all appointments and stay home, even if that meant our business would suffer.
We’re fortunate to be a family-owned company, and I’m grateful to have had the complete support of our House in Champagne. We continue to support our team’s health – both physical and mental – by being empathetic and flexible, knowing that each person is coping with this pandemic in their own personal way.
Our first sales team call of the crisis also focused on people–this time on our on-premise accounts, many of whom are not only our customers, but our friends. We were watching in horror as thriving restaurants suddenly found themselves with little to no revenue, and as our colleagues found themselves without jobs.
We quickly hashed out an informal program we dubbed “Small Acts of Kindness”, which gave our sales managers resources to support people in hospitality in a wide range of creative ways. Our sales managers were the true leaders here, recognizing the need for quick compassionate action.
Compassion should come naturally to leaders in this industry, which at its core is about hospitality, shared experiences, and conviviality. And while there has been a myriad of wonderful stories of companies putting compassion into practice, sadly there were still many examples of companies in our industry showing little to none.
Those companies may regret it; studies show that compassionate businesses deliver better long-term results. And how could anyone not have compassion at a time like this?
As the initial onslaught of horrible news about the pandemic began to sink in, the need for creativity became obvious. I’ve been in the wine business for almost 25 years, and even though there have been tough economic crises during those times, nothing compares to what we are now facing.
The vast majority of our business had been done in person, from tasting a buyer on our Champagnes for a new placement, to training a distributor sales team, to holding an in-store tasting. Suddenly we couldn’t see buyers, distributors, or consumers.
As of the end of June, we still can’t. Many hours of videoconferences with my team have been dedicated to developing creative approaches that would allow our business to survive in this very new world.
Now, we must go way beyond that. Every leader in this business needs to task themselves and their people with not just solving immediate problems, but with completely rethinking our industry’s ways of working. We need to reevaluate how everything was done pre-crisis and ask ourselves how it can be done better. We need to eliminate whatever didn’t create value before, and find new ways to create value now.
For this, leaders should actively solicit input from our greatest asset: the vast number of creative and passionate people who comprise the wine and spirits community, within and beyond our own companies.
Leaders who are open to new ideas and who are willing to take risks will find themselves leading stronger companies, which will in turn help bring jobs back.
Our industry has been dramatically disrupted, and we are all now de facto disruptive leaders.
Approaching our current circumstances with calmness, compassion, and creativity can help us rebuild our industry into something even better than it was before.
Michelle DeFeo is the President of Laurent-Perrier US, the New York-based importer of Champagne Laurent-Perrier. Her experience spans every tier of the US wine market, from working the floor at a retailer to being a distributor sales rep to working for wineries and importers. She holds the WSET Level 3 credential and is a Certified Sommelier. You can find Michelle on Instagram @MDlovesLP.
What We're Reading:
There is no shortage of wine news, and here's what has piqued our interest this week.
Black Wine Professionals Demand to Be Seen – Eric Asimov for the New York Times
A powerful read from Eric Asimov on the long-overdue need to end invisibility for black wine professionals.
One Way To Be An Ally Right Now? Support Black Mental Health. – HuffPost.com
Black people are dealing with extreme stress, racial trauma and exhaustion. Here's what an ally can do to help.
How to dismantle white supremacy in wine – Miguel de Leon for Medium.com
A how-to guide on how you and everyone else around you in the wine industry can change it for the better, one action at a time.
Putting a C.O.R.K in Dry July – Hello Sunday Morning.com
With a bit of preparation, you can change your dry month from being a slightly tedious test of endurance to a rich learning experience, following the CORK model: Commit, Observe, Reflect and Keep.
Teach Your Child this Meditation for Positive Energy and Keeping an Open Mind – Yoga Journal.com
This quick and fun practice is a great introduction to the physical and mental benefits of meditation. Plus, tips for how to help your kids build a meditation routine.
Meet the Community!
Our community is only as strong as the company we keep, and here we meet some of the folks who make our profession so dynamic.
Kathleen Willcox, Freelance Writer for Wine Enthusiast, Wine Searcher, and author of Hudson Valley Wine: A History of Taste and Terroir (New York, USA)
Years In The Industry:
Arguably, my entire life. My family moved to Germany when I was seven, and while we were there, we traveled extensively. It became clear when I was a child that wine and food, especially together, are an easy, but beautiful and sometimes profound way to bridge a gap between people and cultures.
When I graduated from college back in the States, I knew I wanted to write. First, I worked for a tiny newspaper (the Lewisboro Ledger), then I dipped my toe into New York City via Thomson Financial (now Thomson Reuters). When I wasn’t writing about investment management strategies for large pension fund companies, I was pitching food, lifestyle and wine publications, and often working on spec and occasionally for free.
My first “big break” was writing for the Hudson Valley Wine Magazine; I still love writing for them, along with Wine Searcher, Wine Enthusiast and SevenFifty Daily. I teamed up on Hudson Valley Wine: A Taste of History and Terroir, with Tessa Edick, who runs the FarmOn! Foundation in Copake.
It sounds easy, when you put it in black and white, but of course it’s not. Like many other freelance writers, I spend almost as much time pitching editors I know and editors I’d like to know as I do actually writing articles. Frankly the pitches are, often as not, completely ignored.
My Biggest Challenge To Wellness:
Balance, especially now, during these strange times. I left New York City for the hinterlands upstate many years ago, in search of balance, and yet it still often eludes me. When the coronavirus hit, and my 7-year-old twins and husband joined me in my home office, it was a lot.
It was a juggle of homeschooling, while writing decidedly downbeat about the state of the world, and trying to maintain civil relations with my husband. Looking back, I can’t believe we managed as well as we did.
Our path to thriving, not just surviving, was by instituting a schedule and sticking to it. For every hour to hour and a half we spent studying or working, we would give ourselves 15 minutes to play. We ran laps around the house, we biked in our neighborhood, we baked. We played Connect Four, we read silly books, we had tickle and hair styling parties. We laughed.
Now, it’s summer and bike tag is the new hotness. I don’t quite understand all the rules, but I can definitely read the glee on their faces. It’s not quite normal, but that’s okay. In some ways, this time has been challenging, but in others, it has been a fantastic gift.
In the end, everyone’s biggest challenge to wellness is themselves. Can you resist getting upset over circumstances you can’t control? How much does that resistance cost you?
How I keep it together to stay well:
I write down the schedule every day, and we discuss it over breakfast. In addition, certain routines are key to my mental and physical health. They connect me to the people I love, and the pursuits that fuel my creativity.
I run or walk every morning, eat enough kale and artisanal cheese to single-handedly support several farms here, and look forward to playtime with my family every day. Monday-Friday, I’m heads-down, focused. Unless I’m traveling, it’s a national holiday or I have a tasting scheduled, I don’t drink alcohol during the week. If I’m feeling stressed at the end of the day, I take a bath and read a book to relax (I’m currently reading A Woman in Berlin and The Secret Chord), or take a walk with my children to catch the sunset.
But on the weekends, I aim to really connect with my parents, husband and good friends over meals or on hikes in the beautiful Adirondacks. My goal this year was to tackle several of the High Peaks, but unfortunately, the weather is not cooperating. (Warnings of mudslides have sidelined my plans.) Instead, my husband, my kids (and occasionally my parents and their lab Quincy), tackle the trails in Spa Park in town, and hike some of the less-popular trails within an hour of our home.
The family favorite, by far, is Bear Slide, in the Lake George Wild Forest. It is a 50-foot waterfall meandering down an extraordinarily gentle incline. You can walk it, surf it on a rubber tube, or slide down it in a bathing suit. My husband and I bring picnics, watch the kids slide and try to just live in this moment, this day, right now.
You can connect with Kathleen on Twitter and Instagram.
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