On a stormy afternoon in Bentonville, Arkansas, a Walmart regional manager shared a story about a moment when his humanity fell short.
He was a 24-year-old store manager who was desperately trying to get his employees to put up Halloween merchandise displays. Instead, workers gathered around the televisions in the electronics department. It was the morning of September 11, 2001.
“Why don’t we have Halloween here? Why isn’t it ready yet?” he remembered saying. He didn’t fully understand what was happening until a worker tearfully approached him and explained that she had relatives in New York City.
“I didn’t take a minute to survey the room to understand the impact of my words and actions,” former store manager David Seymore, now a regional vice president at Walmart, told his listeners. “I grew up really fast that day.”
His comments were intended as an illustrative example. Mr. Seymore, who now oversees 110 stores in the South and Midwest with annual sales of $11 billion, spoke to a group of Walmart and Sam’s Club store managers who had come to Walmart headquarters for a leadership training program at the dealer almost every week since July 2022.
Walmart and Sam’s Club store managers run multimillion-dollar companies and manage hundreds of workers. Their ability to increase sales directly impacts the company’s revenue, which totaled $648.1 billion worldwide last year.
But their leadership style is also important, the company says. Most weeks, Walmart flies a group of 50 people from around the country — about 1,800 total last year and 2,200 expected this year — to what it calls its Manager Academy.
During sessions, trainers reinforce the message that Walmart’s success is only possible when store managers care about their associates, the customers and the communities where they operate.
“The intent of the academy is to learn what our values are, what expectations we have of leaders, and how we work effectively with the goal of putting our people first,” said Donna Morris, Chief People Officer of Walmart Inc.
Over the years, Walmart — the largest private employer in the United States with 1.6 million workers — has been accused of focusing more on the bottom line than the people in its stores. In lawsuits and unsuccessful union campaigns, Walmart workers have said the company’s business practices have been harmful to their physical, mental and emotional health.
In one 2022 case, a worker with health problems died during her shift when a store was short-staffed, and her store manager allegedly told her to “get it together” when she asked to go home, according to reports it in a report in The Neue Republik.
Ms. Morris declined to comment on the case but said: “We always focus on making sure our employees are the first port of call for what a manager should be thinking about.”
Walmart isn’t the only company focused on getting its managers to think this way. The focus on compassionate leadership became a major topic of conversation for companies about two years ago, said Jessica Kriegel, a corporate training consultant who has researched the topic.
“The big takeaway here is that employees’ feelings of care are directly related to communication,” Ms. Kriegel said. “And the people who communicate the most with the front line are their superiors. That’s why frontline managers are so important because when they communicate effectively, the workforce feels cared for.”
Most of Walmart’s executives attended Manager Academy’s predecessor, the Walton Institute, which was founded in the 1980s. And the training has broader implications: Many Walmart executives end up moving on to other retail companies.
“The Walton Institute was a great way to immerse yourself in Walmart culture when you are away from home,” said Horacio Barbeito, who spent 26 years with the company. “And then you go back to your market, which really has a lot of corporate culture, and you become an ambassador and a catalyst.” He left Walmart in 2022 to run Old Navy, a retailer that he said had similar goals and corporate values tracked.
John Furner, the CEO of Walmart US and an Arkansas native whose father also worked at Walmart, began his career at the retailer in 1993 as an hourly employee. As he rose through the ranks, he trained at the Walton Institute. It was also about the company culture, but at that time the company was still relatively small and it was possible to know the top management.
“You weren’t a number,” Mr. Furner said. “You weren’t just someone who was supposed to deliver results.”
But especially since the start of the pandemic, store managers have faced new challenges, managing the transition between in-store and online purchases, higher employee turnover and sometimes unruly shoppers. And as the company grew, it became more difficult to make them feel connected to the company mission. Mr. Furner suggested to Walmart’s global chief executive, Doug McMillon, that it was time for the company to reinstate an in-person training program for store managers.
Former and current managers, including Mr. Furner, speak during the training. (Participants even meet the company’s founder, Sam Walton – sort of. In the company’s local history museum, there is a hologram of Mr. Walton explaining how he first used watermelons and donkey rides to lure people into stores.) Participants receive a one-hour tour of the business At the headquarters, passing executives stop and chat – and are sometimes peppered with questions about the company.
It also becomes concrete. Managers participate in breakout sessions focused on how they make all of their employees feel, from the mechanics in the auto repair department to the night shift workers mopping the floors to those restocking apples in the grocery department can ensure that they contribute something to the greater corporate mission. They consider how to deal with general (understanding other people’s values) and specific (scheduling) problems.
The program gets store managers thinking not only about what’s next for them, but also about how to retain the employees they report to and find other opportunities for them within the company. And ultimately, Walmart is in the business of selling and it measures the effectiveness of this program on that basis.
With “really strong store managers who are purpose-driven and values-driven,” said Lorraine Stomski, who leads Walmart’s learning and leadership programs, “we can achieve better business results.”
Walmart has also loosened incentives to keep managers motivated and discourage them from moving on to other tasks. This year, the company increased the salaries of its store managers, raising the base salary to $128,000 and announcing stock awards of up to $20,000. High-performing Walmart managers now have the opportunity to earn more than $400,000 per year.
In interviews arranged by Walmart, store managers who participated in the program said they liked the emphasis on company culture during the training. Laurice Miller, a 39-year-old store manager at a Sam’s Club in Keller, Texas, who started as an hourly employee 20 years ago and now oversees 165 employees, said that before her January visit she received some feedback from people who work for her: They wanted to build a relationship with her.
Since participating in the program, she says she has made time for informal conversations. (“How was your weekend? What can I do to help?”) “I think that’s crucial when you’re together for eight hours, 40 hours a week,” she said.
Daniel Harrelson, a 30-year-old store manager in Fayetteville, Arkansas, took the training in October. He started at Walmart as an hourly worker, was promoted to store manager during the pandemic and oversees 450 workers.
He learned about resources the company provides for workers in need, such as free counseling classes and funds for those struggling with housing emergencies that could arise from fires or domestic violence. For some of his workers, “Walmart is usually one of the few steady things they have,” he said.
There were also lighter elements to the training that helped reinforce the culture for him. Attend the meetings that store managers hold with their employees. It all begins with an enthusiastic cheer – a tradition started by Sam Walton in the 1970s.
During the pandemic, large gatherings have been canceled to adhere to social distancing guidelines. The cheering also fell by the wayside. But the training, he said, showed him the importance of restoring the custom.
“It’s nothing spectacular, but it’s kind of fun,” he said. “It lightens the mood, and that’s what Sam Walton did.”
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2024-03-13 00:06:54
www.nytimes.com
