Kathy Roedel, Select Comfort’s executive vice president and chief services and fulfillment officer for Sleep Number, sees the brand poised for growth.
Gratitiude Work hard, accomplish much, and be grateful for what you have are principles that Roedel lives by.
Although she is well aware that life offers few guarantees, Kathy Roedel believes that there are tools that can be used to help build a successful and satisfying life. She has learned to rely upon three.
“Work hard, accomplish much, and be grateful for what you have,” she suggests, are solid principles to live by.
If hard work and accomplishment pave the way for professional success, it’s gratitude, she believes, that brings contentment.
“I read a study once that said that gratitude was one of the biggest contributors to happiness in life,” she says. “It makes sense.”
Roedel is quick to point out that these principles did not originate with her, nor have they always been easy to practice. They have, however, been part of the landscape of her life since childhood.
| BRIEFLY | |
| Name | Kathryn Roedel |
| Company | Select Comfort Corp. |
| Location | Minneapolis |
| Title | Executive Vice President and Chief Services & Fulfillment Officer for Sleep Number |
| Sleep Number | 35 |
| Age | 53 |
| Education | In 1983, Roedel earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Michigan State University in Lansing, Mich. |
| Family | Roedel is the mother of an 11-year-old daughter, Julia. |
“I had a hardworking mother who taught school for 30 years and a workaholic father who was a mechanical engineer,” she says. “When I was in the fifth grade, my father told me to make sure that I worked hard and studied hard because I was going to be putting myself through college. He said: ‘I did. You will. And you’ll appreciate it more because you did.’ ”
Roedel did pay her own way, and it turned out her father was right.
“I gravitated towards engineering because I had an acumen for math and science,” Roedel says. “I wanted engineering to be a foundation for a life in business.”
Roedel started her career at General Electric Co., where she spent 22 years in various leadership positions in supply chain, services, and quality for GE Healthcare and GE Information Services. While at GE, she participated for more than 20 years in advanced leadership training programs through GE’s Management Development Institute in Crotonville, NY.
“GE was such an amazing training ground for leadership,” she says. “I was able to work with very high-caliber people and had the opportunity to develop depth in my field.”
In 2005, Roedel left GE to become Sleep Number’s senior vice president of global operations.
“I was looking for a place where I could take that big company experience and put it to work in a smaller company with a mission-driven culture,” she explains.
She was appointed executive vice president of product and service for Sleep Number in 2008, and in 2011 she became the company’s executive vice president and chief services and fulfillment officer.
Roedel believes that she landed in the right company at exactly the right time. The growth of the specialty sleep products segment of the bedding industry, together with increased consumer awareness of the relationship between sleep and health, she says, position Select Comfort’s Sleep Number brand for solid growth.
Sleep Number beds use DualAir technology to allow sleepers to adjust the firmness on each side of the mattress to create personal levels of comfort and support.
Roedel says in her daily role, her key focus is on delivering Sleep Number’s “connected customer experience,” which helps customers build a lifelong relationship with the brand. This includes making sure product is delivered through a Sleep Number-branded service, ensuring that customers have an excellent in-home experience, and fulfilling their needs and answering any questions they may have for the lifetime of their Sleep Number products.
And Roedel is managing this in new and varied ways to match the way customers want to communicate today; Sleep Number’s Relationship Center, an integrated customer service center, reaches out to customers and handles their outreach via email, online chat, phone services and social media.
“We are focused on the individualized sleep experience and we have a very different product from the bulk of the industry,” Roedel says. “We have a 5 percent market share so there is great growth potential.”
“I’m very proud of what our teams at Sleep Number have accomplished over the last eight years,” she adds. “We are very focused on our customers. My personal goal is to be part of Sleep Number’s vision to become a beloved brand. Not many brands reach that level.”
Thoughts on success
Roedel recently discovered a book that has given her a new way of thinking about both time and the meaning of success. Written by Stewart Friedman, “Total Leadership: Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life” divides life into four domains — work, home, community and self — and then offers a strategy for integrating them all.
Family time Roedel takes her 11-year-old daughter Julia to horseback riding lessons every weekend, and recently learned to ride herself.
“Friedman says that the old notion of work/life balance is bunk, a zero-sum game,” explains Roedel. “His book posits thinking about being the CEO of your whole life and suggests that if you can integrate those four domains in creative ways, you can get more out of life.”
To test Friedman’s theory she challenged herself to pick an experiment in which at least two domains of life could be leveraged. Since she was already taking her daughter Julia to horseback riding lessons every weekend, she decided to learn to ride herself, which integrated two of Friedman’s domains: home and self. To her surprise, she was also able to integrate a third domain, community, when she made a new host of friends in the horse-riding community.
“This book and experiment made me step back and think about a new definition of success,” says Roedel. “Success usually means success in a career, but now I’ve become focused on success in all four domains of life.”
Leadership philosophy
In both her 20+ years at GE and her more recent eight years at Sleep Number, Roedel has had time to think about leadership—both her own skills and those she admires in others.
“When you think about natural leaders… they have a spark. But I also think you cultivate skills over time,” she says. “For me, the ability to inspire is one of those important characteristics my team and I want to be known for. It’s a critical driver of leadership.”
Other important characteristics of leaders for Roedel include vision, courage, humility, intuition, decisiveness, the ability to inspire and communicate, integrity, patience and drive.
“Inspiring is the key to leading—finding a spark of interest in a person or team, and making them stretch further to let them do things they never thought possible,” she says.
During her time at Sleep Number, Roedel says she has found many mentors who provide leadership inspiration on the company’s senior team, including Sleep Number CEO and President Shelly Ibach, as well as many colleagues.
“They are so profoundly competent in their own disciplines, but can work together so well in our vertically integrated company, with high levels of accountability to each other…” she explained. “This gives me many different templates for leadership.”
The community domain
Roedel looks forward to finding ways to integrate community service into her life. She doesn’t need to look farther than her own family to understand the positive impact community involvement can have.
“My maternal grandparents were wonderful people…who were active until late in life,” says Roedel. “They opened a neighborhood house for underprivileged kids to give them after-school tutoring and a safe place to be.”
She currently serves as vice chair on the board of trustees of the International Sleep Products Association and in 2015 will become board chair. She sees her role in ISPA as an opportunity to be of service to the bedding industry, especially during a period in which the industry is working to address important national issues like recycling.
“Mattress recycling is important to many stakeholders and we have an important road ahead of us,” Roedel explains. “ISPA is partnering with state governments to launch a new system that works for all stakeholders, and ultimately encourages more recyclers and recycling—which is good for everyone.”
In her free time
Roedel says that not many people know she’s a musician. “I played and studied the flute for many years and still play for my own enjoyment…and to support Julia’s violin playing,” she says.
Roedel is also an avid reader, and particularly enjoys reading works by John Irving.
“I’m always reading something, and sometimes multiple books simultaneously,” she says.
Books she’s enjoyed in the last few months include “The Glass Castle,” a memoir by Jeannette Walls; “Child 44,” a murder mystery by Tom Rob Smith; and “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” by John Berendt.
“I also read books about things that I’m interested in professionally, like how to deliver great customer experiences and create long-term loyalty,” she adds. She says “Net Promoter System—The Ultimate Question,” by Fred Reichheld, has been an invaluable resource.
The ultimate in job satisfaction
Roedel says Sleep Number receives thousands of customer stories and testimonials each month, and she spends time daily reading them.
Recently, she read a letter from a customer whose bedridden son slept on his Sleep Number for 24 hours a day for more than five years—all day, every day, except for the time he spent in the ICU unit of the hospital.
Having the ability to change the Sleep Number settings was particularly important for someone who spent all his time in bed, and the customer said the Sleep Number bed brought both her and her son “so much comfort.”
The letter had a profound effect on Roedel and her team.
“This is the type of impact that gets me up in the morning and inspires me, my team and our company to do what we do,” she says.
