Interview: How Kendra Tucker Leads With Strengths
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About the Leader
Kendra Tucker
CEO of Truckstop
- Communication®
- Competition®
- Achiever®
- Significance®
- Command®
Kendra Tucker joined Truckstop in 2020 as chief revenue officer, leading the sales and customer teams. In 2021, her role expanded to take on operations and strategy as chief operating officer, and in 2022, she was appointed CEO. For more than 15 years, Tucker has led teams across a variety of business models and industries, successfully executing strategic growth and consistent profitability.
In Tucker's eyes, progressive growth is an essential element of winning -- for the individual and the organization. In her industry, victory often requires developing numerous employees' performance to secure intangible outcomes, such as winning truck drivers' trust. While she prizes winning and the people she works with know her competitive nature well, Tucker ensures her employees know that she's competing with them, not against them.
Recognizing that much of her communications must persuade an audience composed of varying perspectives, interests and talents, Tucker crafts statements containing multiple tailored and disparate messages unified by a single purpose. In creating a meaningful connection with many audiences simultaneously, she promotes alignment and cohesion across the organization.
Having known her CliftonStrengths since the age of 16, Tucker has seen her Command mature from once manifesting domineering tendencies to now providing her with the purpose-driven courage to initiate and shepherd change in a complex and shifting environment. Where she may have once overtly insisted on control, she now builds processes that comfort and guide uncertain employees.
Tucker has long had a sense that she is capable of being a positive presence in the world. The urge to create large-scale impact is in part satisfied by her work at Truckstop, where she can meaningfully affect thousands of truck drivers every day -- who go on to affect the health and prosperity of the rest of the nation.
By keeping a running to-do list in her calendar, Tucker can quickly allocate time to complete her priorities among meetings and blocked time. When no existing meetings serve to move her priorities forward, she sets aside early-morning blocks of time for research, thinking, planning and other activities essential to her role as CEO.