Years ago, 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 reminding tired people that the season doesn’t get the last word.
I think about those farmers every time I walk a store 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.
Store directors or department heads reading this don’t need me to tell them it’s been a grind. They’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 the 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 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 when every mistake gets magnified and every act of good leadership gets multiplied.
Rule 1: Do our jobs
Not someone else’s job or the job we wish we had. And not a watered-down version of our job because we’re tired or short-staffed. This is 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. These include the manager who stops walking the floor and the director who lets the schedule build itself. 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. Tough years don’t excuse us from fundamentals; they’re the reason they exist. Momentum into 2027 starts with every person on the team doing their jobs like the whole operation depends on it – because in a tight year, it truly does.
Rule 2: Be kind
I wrote a whole leadership lesson last month on civility, so I won’t repeat it here, but the second rule is on this list because kindness is the rule sacrificed first when a year gets hard.
Margins get thin, sales are tough, patience thins 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. We can have the right standards and still destroy trust if we 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, a vendor rep nobody important is watching and the customer taking a bad day out on the person at the register.
Rule 3: No surprises – Communicate better
No surprises employees should never learn something important about their store, schedule or future from a rumor or a memo that lands with zero warning.
Tough years create information vacuums that 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. We should tell the team what we do and do not know and when we’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.
Rule 4: No drama
This is the rule I want every director in this industry to tape above their desk between now and January. Not “less” drama – no drama.
The holidays are the hardest stretch of the year – longer hours, bigger crowds, tighter deadlines, family stress bleeding into work 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 while there’s still room for calm conversations.
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 20 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 there’s the bandwidth to do it thoughtfully. Waiting until December to fix a personality conflict is like trying to change a tire at 70 mph.
Rule 5: Protect the brand
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 a store is a deposit or a withdrawal from an account we can’t see, and which has a name on it that isn’t ours. It’s the company’s. 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.
Coming out the other side
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, refused to let drama take root during the hardest six weeks of the calendar and protected the brand.
Steve Black is CEO and founder of abrighterday.life, a business and leadership coaching organization devoted to helping people and companies with personal growth and implementing simple leadership principles. A 47-year-veteran of the retail grocery arena, Black is the author of “The 5 Rules” and offers an online Masterclass.