Years ago, Dr. Robert Schuller stood in front of a room full of Iowa corn farmers who had just lived through their worst crop in memory. He wasn’t there to talk about weather patterns or commodity prices. He was there because those farmers needed something to hold onto, and he knew it. In his big voice, he said, “Tough times never last.” Then he paused — a long pause, because by his own admission he had no idea what he was going to say next. What came out was, “Tough people do.” The room gave him a standing ovation, and that line went on to become the title of one of his best-selling books. Decades later, it’s still doing exactly what it did in that room: reminding tired people that the season doesn’t get the last word.
I think about those farmers every time I walk a store now and talk with company executives across the country. 2026 has been a tough year in our industry — tight margins, unpredictable shrink, staffing that never quite settles, and customers watching every dollar closer than they have in years. If you’re a store director or department head reading this now, you don’t need me to tell you it’s been a grind. You’ve lived it. But tough times never last, and how we lead through the next 90 days determines whether we limp into 2027 or walk into it with real momentum. With one of my clients this year – our theme is “Finish Strong” and our theme for going into 2027 is “Start Stronger”.
That’s not wishful thinking. It’s a plan. For years, I’ve built my leadership work around five rules I first wrote down for my own directors and eventually turned into a book, The Five Rules. If there’s ever a season to lean into all five at once, it’s the run from October through the holidays this year, when every mistake gets magnified and every act of good leadership gets multiplied.
Not someone else’s job, not the job we wish we had, not a watered-down version of our job because we’re tired or short-staffed. Our actual job, done well, every shift.
I’ve watched more culture problems get created by someone quietly deciding not to do their job than by any single dramatic blowup. The manager who stops walking the floor. The director who lets the schedule build itself instead of building it with intention. None of those moments look like a crisis in the room — they look like a shrug. But shrugs compound, and by December they’ve turned into out-of-stocks, safety issues, and a team that’s stopped believing anyone’s paying attention.
Doing our jobs, especially in a tough year, means holding the line on the basics when it would be easier to let them slide. It means the store director still walks the store first thing every day – no exceptions – even when nothing has gone wrong in weeks. Tough years don’t excuse us from fundamentals — they’re the reason fundamentals exist. Momentum into 2027 starts with every person on the team doing their job like the whole operation depends on it, because in a tight year, it truly does.
I wrote a whole leadership lesson last month on civility, so I won’t repeat it here, but Rule 2 earns its place on this list because kindness is the rule sacrificed first when a year gets hard. Margins get thin, sales are tough, patience gets thin right along with them, and the same leader who was easy to work with in March is snapping at people by October.
Being kind isn’t a soft add-on to good leadership. It’s the delivery mechanism for everything else on this list. You can have the right standards and still destroy trust if you enforce them without kindness. I can tell you everything I need to know about a leader by watching how they treat the person who can do nothing for them — the new cashier, the vendor rep nobody important is watching, the customer taking a bad day out on the person at the register. In a tough year, kindness isn’t weakness.
No surprises mean the people who work for you should never learn something important about their store, their schedule, or their future from a rumor or a memo that lands with zero warning.
Tough years create information vacuums, and vacuums always get filled — usually with the worst possible version of the truth. If a director doesn’t communicate clearly about what’s coming, the break room will write its own story, and it’s never flattering. Over-communicate, especially when the news is uncomfortable. Tell your team what you know, what you don’t know yet, and when you’ll know more. That’s the whole formula, and almost nobody does it consistently.
Heading into the holidays, this rule matters more than any other stretch of the year. Schedules shift, seasonal help comes and goes, and resets happen fast. No surprises isn’t about having perfect information — it’s about never letting your team find out something important the hard way when you could have told them first.
This is the rule I want every director in this industry to tape above their desk between now and January. No drama. Not “less” drama. No drama.
The holidays are already the hardest stretch of the year — longer hours, bigger crowds, tighter deadlines, family stress bleeding into work stress and back again. My challenge this October is simple: identify where drama is likely to show up before the season starts, and get ahead of it now, while there’s still room for calm conversations instead of crisis ones.
Drama in a grocery store during the holidays doesn’t stay in the break room — it walks straight onto the sales floor. Customers can feel tension between teammates from twenty feet away, and nothing kills a holiday shopping experience faster than watching two employees snipe at each other near the deli case. Deal with the friction in October and November, while you still have the bandwidth to do it thoughtfully. Waiting until December to fix a personality conflict is like trying to change a tire at seventy miles an hour.
The last rule ties all the others together, because everything a leader does — or fails to do — eventually shows up on the brand. Every interaction a customer has with your store is a deposit or a withdrawal from an account you can’t see, and that account has a name on it that isn’t yours. It’s the companies. It’s the community’s trust. It took years to build and can take one bad moment to damage.
Protecting the brand means every associate, in every interaction, is either building that trust or spending it down. A leader who models the first four rules is, by definition, protecting the fifth, because a store full of people doing their jobs, treating each other with kindness, communicating honestly, and refusing to let drama take root is a store customers want to keep coming back to. That’s every leader’s job, every day — especially during the weeks when the most customers are walking through your doors.
Here’s what I believe about 2026, and it’s the same thing Robert Schuller believed standing in front of those Iowa farmers: this year doesn’t get to define what comes next. It only gets to test us. The stores and leaders who come out of this fall with real momentum won’t be the ones who had the easiest year. They’ll be the ones who did their jobs without excuses, led with kindness even when tired, communicated honestly instead of leaving people guessing, refused to let drama take root during the hardest six weeks of the calendar, and protected the brand as if it were their own name on the building — because in every way that matters to the people walking through your doors, it is.
*-Sidenote – I’ve been a Robert Schuller fan since early in my leadership journey as I watched him every week on his Sunday broadcast – The Hour of Power. He was my biggest influence learning the power of positive thinking. I got to meet him once in Chicago at an FMI conference in 1992 – he and his wife were stepping out of an elevator when me and my wife were stepping into the same elevator. I was so star-struck – I couldn’t think of anything to say besides just shake his hand. Later I wrote him a note and told him what an influence he’d been in my life and took it to the front desk. They delivered it to his room and low-and-behold, I had a personal handwritten note from him under my door when I got up. I framed it and hung it in my office for years! You never know the influence you can have when you have the right mentors! His note reads;
“To Steve, Good morning! Set high and honorable goals! Now – lift them up a tad! No problems today – just decisions waiting to be made!”
