“We can’t do it without everybody.”

– Kris Manos

Kris Manos doesn’t remember a time when she wasn’t making things; she made gifts for every occasion from kindergarten through college. A first foray into entrepreneurship was making candles to sell at the beach. Coming from a family of teachers, though, she had no idea you could have a career making things.

An early job was answering a nonprofit’s hotline for working women who called with workplace problems. When Kris noted that the answer was generally, “Yes, that’s not right, and no, there’s nothing you can do about it,” she didn’t give up. Instead, she went to business school so that she could become “a boss” who treated people fairly and could also help resolve systemic problems—and influence workers’ lives—from the inside. Combining her bent toward leadership and interest in organizational development with a history of “making things” led Kris to pursue manufacturing management.

“What I learned at Yale,” she says, “is the value of understanding things from all perspectives. The reason you have sales and engineering and manufacturing and all the rest of the functions is that you’ll fail without them. And better yet, if all the pieces work together and respect the importance of the others, the results are better and more sustainable.” Since learning by doing is powerful, Kris worked in almost every corporate function before moving into general management.

Along with holding this inclusive and systemic view, Kris is adept at moving from the strategic to the tactical and back again. Lois Maassen, a colleague at Herman Miller, recalls, “I’ve worked with very few people as comfortable as Kris in moving from the big picture to the extreme details with equal attention and understanding.”

Having grown up on the East Coast, Kris was attracted to the relative informality of the Midwest. The furniture industry provided opportunities to move from manufacturing into product development and marketing, which fed her curiosity. Texas is currently her home base, from where she travels both domestically and internationally, because her interest in people and cultures—and wildlife—has remained constant.

“They should write books about Kris’s leadership style,” Eudokia partner Jane Sadowsky says. “For a long time, it drove me, as a New York investment banker, entirely nuts. On Wall Street, you start with the agenda and get through it in a 30-minute call. Kris would start with, ‘I saw my granddaughter….’ What I realized over time is that she was creating a bond that is empathetic, understanding; it helps you weather mistakes together and gives permission to be vulnerable. Our different styles create value and add to the culture of the team.”