As Seen in Forbes, ARCpoint President Kelly Crompvoets Shares Leadership Insights
Thirty years in franchising teaches you a lot. I’ve sat through more leadership frameworks than I can count. Manage up. Manage down. Servant leadership. Radical candor. There’s always a new model that promises to make you better. But what none of them taught me is that most management problems aren’t management problems at all. They’re assumption problems.
I had to learn the hard way. My career path was winding. I went from a temp to developing intranets, working on operations manuals and managing franchise owners through turnarounds. When I finally reached a position where I was leading a brand—a role I once told a corporate psychologist I wasn’t sure I’d earned—I realized my trajectory hadn’t prepared me for avoiding a common mistake. Leaders often assume that caring about the people we lead means we’re leading them well. But it’s far too easy to miss what they actually need.
The Manager-Employee Relationship Is Delicate
For a long time, I managed the way I wanted to be managed. I pointed everyone toward the goal, then gave them the space to find their own way. In my head, I was signaling trust and respect. And I was—for about half my team. But what felt like freedom to me felt like abandonment to the others. They wanted more check-ins, more feedback and more clarity about whether they were on the right track. I wasn’t giving them the support they needed because it never occurred to me that they might. So, they were constantly wondering whether they interpreted and reached their goals correctly.
This pattern has far-reaching consequences. Gallup’s “State of the Global Workplace 2026” report found that global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, its lowest point since 2020. A primary driver of this decline was manager disengagement. A more striking statistic is how differently managers and employees see the same workplace. A 2024 Harris Poll survey, conducted on behalf of The Grossman Group, found that most managers believe their employees are thriving, but only 24% of employees actually are. That’s a significant gap.
3 Questions That Made Me A Better Leader
What eventually corrected my approach to leadership were some long-overdue, honest conversations with my team. I had to let go of the assumption that I knew what people needed. Now, when I start working with someone new, and even periodically with people I’ve managed for a while, I ask three questions:
1. How do you like to receive feedback?
2. What does good support look like to you?
3. How do you prefer to communicate when something isn’t working?
They sound so simple, and that’s exactly why most managers never ask them. We project our own preferences onto the people we lead, then manage to that projection instead of to the actual person. But these questions are how I learned that the people whom I assumed wanted autonomy actually wanted more structure. Those whom I thought needed frequent check-ins actually found it distracting. I had to ask, and ultimately my team became stronger because I did.
Leadership Is About Building Fences
The philosophy I’ve landed on after three decades in the franchising industry is “Build fences, not paths.”
My job as a manager is to define a project’s parameters, including its nonnegotiables and what success looks like. But what happens inside that fence belongs to the team member. Everyone works differently, and I trust team members to determine the structure that’s best for them. I won’t track every step they take or tell them to do it the way I would, but I’ll be honest about where the boundaries are and check in on them as a person, not just on the project.
For example, I was working with a franchise owner years ago who told me something that I carry into every managerial context. While discussing a situation that hadn’t gone the way we’d planned, she said, “Just tell us what happened, tell us what you’re doing to fix it and let’s move on.” She wasn’t asking for perfection. She was asking to be treated like a person who could handle the truth, and she trusted us more when we stopped managing the message and just talked to her. We were able to have a far more productive conversation from that point, and it’s an experience I’ve carried with me any time I’ve needed to deliver hard news.
Great Managers Ask Questions
Gallup’s data makes clear that the engagement problems showing up in organizations right now are, at their core, manager problems. The answer doesn’t lie with a new framework or a management training program, though those have their place. It starts with asking each person on your team how you can be a better manager to them. Every franchisee I support is different, and the ones who feel genuinely understood are the ones who build thriving businesses. If we want our employees to succeed in the long term, we have to know who they are and what they need. Instead of leading a projection, lead the individual. Asking those three questions is how you start.
Kelly Crompvoets serves as President of ARCpoint Labs, Chief Marketing Officer of CRESSO Brands LLC and a Forbes Council member.