Building Leadership Foundations: The Missing Piece in Logistics

This article came from a recent TIA Livestream, Leadership Essentials – Building Foundations & Communicating with Impact

You crushed it in sales. Congratulations, you’re now managing a team. You could book freight like nobody’s business. Great news! You’re suddenly responsible for developing other people.

Sound familiar?

In a recent livestream conversation, two industry veterans pulled back the curtain on one of logistics’ most persistent challenges: leaders are constantly thrown into the deep end without a life jacket. Eileen Dabrowski of Apex Tide Consulting and Georgette Hunter-Franklin of MODE Global discussed why foundational leadership skills matter more than ever. And what happens when we skip them.

The Reality Check: We’re Winging It

“Most people in logistics become leaders by getting thrown into the fire,” Dabrowski explained. “Hey, you were good at sales. Congrats. You’re now in charge of humans.”

The problem isn’t that people lack talent or drive. It’s that leadership in logistics operates differently than in other industries. You can’t simply apply corporate America’s playbook to an environment where you’re managing on-call rotations, dealing with carrier breakdowns at 2 AM, and navigating the organized chaos that defines freight.

“There’s almost no development for it,” Dabrowski noted. “We figure it out the good old-fashioned way.” Translation: trial by fire, with your team as collateral damage.

The Five Building Blocks That Change Everything

After working with logistics leaders across the industry, Dabrowski identified five foundational building blocks that separate effective leaders from those just surviving:

1. Self-Awareness (Yes, It’s Uncomfortable)

Before you can lead anyone else, you need to understand yourself. Not the version of yourself you’d like to be—the actual human who shows up when freight goes sideways and customers are screaming.

“If you can’t level set with yourself about where you are as a leader and what you are great at and maybe what you’re a little less great at, then you’re doing your people a disservice,” Dabrowski said.

Her recommendation? Do a 360-degree review, get an understanding of what is going on around you. Be brutally honest, even if it might sting. It won’t be fun, but it’s the fastest way to identify blind spots that are undermining your leadership.

Case in point: Dabrowski discovered through feedback that her late-night emails were creating an unintended expectation that her team should be available 24/7. The fix? She started using the “schedule send” to make her emails show up during business hours. It’s a simple thing, and had a massive impact. Every bit helps, whether large or small.

“We’re never done getting better at leadership,” she emphasized.

2. Vision and Direction

Here’s a quick test you can try: Ask your team members to articulate your company’s mission, vision, and core values right now. Can they do it?

If you’re like most organizations then the answer is likely no, and that’s a problem.

“Very few people can actually articulate your mission and your vision and your core values,” Dabrowski observed. “That’s a huge miss.”

Hunter-Franklin’s organization recently simplified their core values specifically to make them easier to internalize. “We really simplified them in order for people to be able to understand, articulate and internalize what those core values are and how they should inform the way we treat one another, the way we treat our customers, the way we make decisions.”

Your team can’t march toward a vision they don’t understand. They definitely can’t represent your company effectively if they don’t know what makes it different from the hundreds of other brokers. Simply knowing the “why” behind the action empowers people to want to be better, and find avenues of growth.

3. Trust and Credibility

Here’s an uncomfortable truth: your title doesn’t automatically earn you respect. Leadership is a privilege that must be earned continuously, not a badge you flash.

“Being a leader is about getting the street cred and the buy-in from your team,” Dabrowski said. “You don’t do that leading from the top and sitting in your high tower and not being in the trenches with your team.”

Hunter-Franklin emphasized that trust is “such a cornerstone of leadership. We cannot do anything without it.” When trust breaks down, so does everything else; communication, accountability, retention.

The logistics industry’s brutal on-call rotations provide a perfect example. Nobody wants to be glued to their computer at 2 in the morning, troubleshooting a shipment issue. But when leaders serve in that rotation alongside their teams, it demonstrates commitment and shared sacrifice.

“It’s about does your team know that you’re going to show up for them,” Dabrowski noted.

4. Empowerment (Not Just Delegation)

“It’s easier if I just do it myself.”

If you’ve ever thought this, you’re not alone. Most leaders have, but it’s also one of the most destructive habits you can develop. It erodes trust in a silent, but sinister way.

“The only way to truly learn our industry is to do it, to go down in flames, to be uncomfortable,” Dabrowski said. “Profound change doesn’t happen when it’s safe. Profound change happens when you get shoved into the deep end.”

The alternative is to handle everything yourself, which leads directly to burnout. And burnout in middle management is one of the industry’s most concerning trends right now.

“They tire themselves out,” Hunter-Franklin observed, “and hence why burnout is such a very real thing.”

True empowerment means teaching your team members to think critically, make decisions, and yes, occasionally fail. It means having uncomfortable conversations about succession planning instead of keeping people in roles where they’re “too good to lose.”

5. Accountability (Without Micromanagement)

Accountability gets a bad rap because it’s often confused with micromanagement or punishment. But real accountability starts with clarity.

Dabrowski uses what she calls “mutual learning contracts” with everyone she works with. The questions are simple but powerful:

• What do you need from me as a human?
• What’s your preferred communication style?
• What’s a deal-breaker for you?
• What would it take for you to get fired?

That last question might sound harsh, but it creates crystal-clear boundaries. “If they do that, it’s the easiest termination conversation you’ve ever had,” she explained. “You said that if you… So.”

Hunter-Franklin added that accountability conversations become possible only after clear communication: “Now that I’ve communicated, I can come back to you and have an accountability conversation.”

The Communication Engine

All five building blocks require one critical ingredient to work: communication. And not just any communication—clear, intentional, empathetic communication.

“Communication isn’t just what you say,” Hunter-Franklin emphasized. “Communication is that body language. Communication is the email. Your responses… it’s non-responses. You not responding is also communication.”

She offered a powerful reminder for leaders: “You’re the person that your team goes home and they talk to their family about. If you have a meltdown today, if you have an emotional outburst and it doesn’t have anything to do with the team, it does not matter. You’re the person that they go and talk to their family about at the dinner table.”

The stakes are high. Poor communication doesn’t just affect workplace dynamics, it ripples out into employees’ personal lives and communities.

The Language Problem

One often-overlooked communication challenge in logistics: we don’t all speak the same language. And that’s not just about English proficiency (though that matters too in an increasingly global industry).

“Are we using the same language?” Dabrowski asked. “We all have the same thing, but we have nine different ways of calling it.”

Before you can hold someone accountable for results, you need to ensure they understand what those results look like. How many outbound calls? How many prospects in the pipeline? What defines a successful day?

“We’re so quick to pivot to results that we forget to literally look at the nitty-gritty,” Dabrowski said. “Are we using the same language and do we understand what that language means?”

The Golden Question

Hunter-Franklin shared one question that can transform your conversations: “What else do I need to know?”

It’s simple. It’s powerful. And it acknowledges a fundamental truth: you can’t possibly know everything about a situation, person, or challenge.

“After you are done, say, ‘What else is it that I need to know that I didn’t ask you? What don’t I know?’ And give them an opportunity to share with you because you can’t possibly know all of the things.”

The Woman Leader Question

When asked about communication behaviors that earn credibility in environments where women are often underestimated, both speakers got real.

Dabrowski shared a story about learning to embrace emotion rather than hide it. After being visibly upset about a difficult leadership decision, a male company owner stopped her. “He said, ‘Eileen, you are my barometer. I know how hard it’s going to hit the team based on your reaction, and I thank you for being vulnerable enough to have emotion.'”

The lesson? Don’t hide from who you are. “Emotion that is not vetted and that can hurt people, aggression, putting people down publicly, chewing somebody a new one, not great behavior,” she clarified. “But us coming together, leader and teammate, and acknowledging that we’re both human, we both have emotions… creating a safe space to kind of process that is one of the benefits of a diverse team.”

Hunter-Franklin’s advice was equally direct: “Be confident. You know what you’re talking about and stand firm in that confidence… Don’t dim your light.”

She added a practical tip that applies to all leaders, but especially those who need to advocate for themselves: track your accomplishments. “I started tracking my accomplishments, my wins, my opportunities, my fails, kudos that I received, and it got to the point where I loved my end of the year review because I was so ready.”

The Burnout Warning

Throughout the conversation, both speakers returned repeatedly to one concern: burnout, particularly at the middle management level.

“We can’t take care of our team if we run ourselves into the ground,” Dabrowski warned. “That is something of all the things that scare me in our industry right now; it is burnout, specifically at the middle management level, because that’s who is in the trenches.”

The solution starts with self-care, though both speakers acknowledged how difficult that can be in logistics’ demanding environment. Dabrowski shared that working out at 5:15 every morning isn’t optional for her. It’s essential. “If I don’t work out every day, I’m not the same version of myself.”

The other piece? Creating support networks with other leaders who understand the unique pressures of the industry. Sometimes you just need to vent to someone who gets it.

The Bottom Line

Leadership in logistics isn’t getting any easier. The pace is unrelenting. The pressure is constant. And the stakes,both for your business and for the people you lead, are high.

But here’s the thing: you don’t have to figure it all out alone. And you definitely don’t have to keep repeating the cycle of throwing talented individual contributors into leadership roles without proper preparation.

“This course is for everyone,” Dabrowski said. “It is folks who maybe are not leading and want to learn how to become a leader and do it in the order that we probably should do it. It could be people who are at the apex or top of their career, best leader on the planet. There’s still something to be learned.”

Because ultimately, developing better leadership skills isn’t just about becoming a better leader. “They’re about making you a better human,” Dabrowski concluded. “And better humans who are good and ethical and compassionate and kind tend to have more success in all aspects of their life, because people actually want to be around them.”

In an industry where people are the differentiator, that might be the most important foundation of all.

Learn more about the Freight Leadership Lab, and be prepared for your future