Skims cofounder Emma Grede: A good boss shouldn’t be your friend

Skims cofounder Emma Grede thinks many business leaders are too chummy with their workers. “It is not my job to be your friend,” Grede said this week on the Boardroom podcast. “It is not my job to treat everybody as though this were a family.” “But that doesn’t mean that you miss empathy or that you treat people badly,” she added. Grede, who cofounded the $5 billion shapewear and clothing brand with her husband, Swedish entrepreneur Jens Grede, and Kim Kardashian, said an executive’s primary responsibility is to serve their business’s needs. “You can be an extremely empathetic leader and have the needs of your team and your people at the absolute forefront of what you’re doing, [but you still need to maintain] an enterprise mentality to do what is right for the business,” she said. “If you’re not doing right by the business, you can’t do right by your people.” That may include making difficult personnel decisions, including letting workers go who can’t keep up. “Not everybody grows at the same speed as the business,” she said. Eventually, even core personnel who originally built the company may need to go. “The only thing that stays the same is your purpose and the reason that you…