FEATURE: Corporate Leaders Q&A
The View from the Top
Leadership in a Pandemic The coronavirus pandemic has tested the mettle of leaders around the world. To better understand the experience of executives in the transportation industry, Redefining the Road invited two of the finalists for the 2020 Influential Women in Trucking Award to share their perspective. The daughter of a truck driver, wife of a truck driver, mother of a truck driver, and a driver herself, Crystal Anderson has more than 40 years’ experience in the transportation industry. Today, she co-owns Donald D. Anderson Jr. Trucking with her husband and is Owner and President of loss-consulting firm, CL Anderson Consulting, LLC. She also serves as the Executive Chairman of the Nebraska Trucking Association and Secretary of the Great Plains Chapter of the American Society of Safety Crystal Anderson Engineers (ASSE).
24 REDEFINING THE ROAD Edition 3 | 2020
Kristy Knichel began her career in the transportation industry straight out of high school, working in a variety of roles for a local third-party logistics company in order to understand the inner Kristy Knichel workings of a successful operation. In 2003, she founded Knichel Logistics with her father and siblings, and she took over as President in 2007. She currently serves as Intermodal Logistics Conference Chair on the Transportation Intermediaries Association (TIA) Board of Directors. RTR: What steps have you taken to help your clients weather the challenges of the pandemic? KK: We are doing our best to be flexible with customers as far as procuring equipment and navigating the challenges of capacity and peak season surcharges.
Communication is also vital. We need to ensure that our customers are not blindsided by changes that are occurring within the freight market, so we are communicating with them on a regular basis if their shipments may be impacted in any way. CA: This is a whole new world for transportation. We’re working to build even stronger relationships with customers by acting as a real team member. We’re talking to them about the problems they’re facing, asking how we can help and working to provide services they need. RTR: What are you doing to help navigate the current environment internally? KK: Keeping lines of communication open is even more valuable now than it was prior to these new challenges. We’re holding company Zoom meetings to help ensure that everyone knows what we are planning, provide a snapshot of how the company is performing and give employees an opportunity to ask questions.
