After nearly thirty years in franchising, ARCpoint Labs President Kelly Crompvoets reached a blunt conclusion: most management problems are not management problems at all. They are assumption problems. In a new piece for Forbes, she shares what finally changed how she leads, and why caring about your people is not the same as leading them well.
Key Takeways
- Caring about your team is not the same as leading them well. The gap is usually a wrong assumption about what they need.
- Three simple, direct questions reveal more than any leadership framework.
- The best managers build fences, not paths: define the boundaries, then trust people to find their own way inside them.
For years, Kelly managed the way she liked to be managed. She set the goal, then stepped back. It worked for about half her team and left the other half feeling abandoned. The fix was not a new model. It was asking each person how they actually wanted to be led. The data shows how common the blind spot is. Gallup put global employee engagement at just 20 percent in 2025, and a 2024 Harris Poll found that while most managers believe their people are thriving, only 24 percent of employees say they are.
Her approach now starts with three questions for everyone she works with: how do you like to receive feedback, what does good support look like to you, and how do you prefer to communicate when something is not working. They sound almost too simple, which is exactly why most managers never ask.
“Instead of leading a projection, lead the individual.”
— Kelly Crompvoets, President, ARCpoint Labs
In the full article, Kelly explains the philosophy behind “build fences, not paths,” the franchise-owner moment that reshaped how she delivers hard news, and why the engagement problems showing up across so many organizations start, and end, with how managers lead each individual.