Walmart wants to teach store managers compassion
On a blustery afternoon in Bentonville, Ark., a Walmart regional manager told a story about a time when his humanity fell short.
He was a 24-year-old store manager anxiously trying to get his employees to set up Halloween merchandise displays. Instead, workers huddled around televisions in the electronics department. It was the morning of September 11, 2001.
‘Why don’t we organize Halloween here? Why hasn’t it been done yet?” he remembered saying. He didn’t fully understand what was going on until a worker approached him in tears and explained that she had family in New York City.
“I didn’t take a minute to survey the room to understand the consequences of my words and actions,” former store manager David Seymore, now a regional vice president at Walmart, told his listeners. “I grew up very quickly that day.”
His comments were intended as an objective lesson. Mr. Seymore, who now manages 110 stores in the South and the Midwest and has annual sales of $11 billion, spoke to a group of store managers from Walmart and Sam’s Club who had come to Walmart’s headquarters for a leadership training program that has taken place. since July 2022 at the retailer almost weekly.
Walmart and Sam’s Club store managers run multi-million dollar businesses and supervise hundreds of employees. Their ability to drive sales has a direct effect on the company’s revenue, which reached $648.1 billion worldwide last year.
But the company says their management style matters too. Most weeks, Walmart flies a group of 50 people from around the country — about 1,800 last year, and 2,200 expected this year — to what it calls its Manager Academy.
During the sessions, the trainers reinforce the message that Walmart’s success is only possible if store managers take care of their employees, customers and the communities in which they operate.
“The intent of the academy is to walk away knowing what our values are, what our expectations of leaders are, how can we operate effectively with the intent 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 employees — has been accused of being more focused on profits than the people in its stores. In lawsuits and through failed union campaigns, Walmart workers have said the company’s business practices have been harmful to their physical, mental and emotional health.
In 2022, an employee with a health problem died on duty when a store was short-staffed and her store manager allegedly told her to “pull it together” when she asked to go home, according to report in The New Republic.
Ms Morris declined to comment on that case but said that “we are always focused on ensuring that our people are the first line of thought for a manager.”
Walmart isn’t the only company that wants its managers to think this way. The focus on compassionate leadership became a notable talking point for companies about two years ago, says Jessica Kriegel, a workplace training consultant who has researched the topic.
“The big insight here is that employees’ sense of being cared for is directly related to communication,” Ms. Kriegel said. “And the people who communicate most with the front lines are their supervisors. That’s why frontline supervisors are so critical, because when they communicate effectively, staff feel cared for.”
Most executives at Walmart participated in the Manager Academy’s predecessor, the Walton Institute, which was founded in the 1980s. And the training has a broader impact, with many Walmart leaders eventually branching out to other companies in the retail industry.
“That Walton Institute was such a great way to immerse yourself in Walmart’s away-from-home culture,” said Horacio Barbeito, who spent 26 years with the company. “And then you come back to your market, really filled with a lot of corporate culture, so you become an ambassador and a catalyst.” He left Walmart in 2022 to run Old Navy, a retailer he said has a similar purpose and company values.
John Furner, the CEO of Walmart US and an Arkansas native whose father also worked at Walmart, began his career as an hourly employee at the retailer in 1993. As he rose through the ranks, he trained at the Walton Institute. It also focused on company culture, but at the time the company was still relatively small and it was feasible to have top leadership.
“You weren’t a number,” Mr. Furner said. “You weren’t just someone who had to deliver results.”
But especially since the pandemic began, store managers have taken on new challenges, dealing with shifts between in-store and online purchases, higher employee turnover and sometimes unruly shoppers. And as the company has grown explosively, it has become more difficult to make them feel connected to the company mission. Mr. Furner suggested to Walmart’s global CEO, Doug McMillon, that it was time for the company to bring back an in-person training program for store managers.
During the training, former and current managers will speak, including Mr. Furner. (The participants even meet the company’s founder, Sam Walton, something like that. In the company’s heritage museum there is a hologram of Mr. Walton explaining how he used watermelons and donkey rides to attract people to the stores in the first place.) Attendees will receive a one-hour tour. headquarters where passing executives stop by and chat – and are sometimes peppered with questions about the company.
Things get specific too. Managers participate in breakout sessions on how to make all their employees, from the mechanics in the auto repair department to the night shift mopping the floors and those replenishing apples in the supermarket department, feel like they are contributing to the bigger picture. company mission. They brainstorm how to deal with issues that are both general (understanding others’ values) and specific (planning snafus).
The program makes store managers think not only about what lies ahead, but also about how they can keep the people who report to them engaged and how they can find other opportunities within the company for them. And ultimately, Walmart is in the business of selling, and based on that, it measures the effectiveness of this program.
With “really strong store managers who are purpose-driven and values-driven,” says Lorraine Stomski, who leads Walmart’s learning and leadership programs, “we can drive stronger business results.”
Walmart has also strengthened incentives to keep managers motivated and not leaving for other opportunities. This year it increased pay for its store managers, increasing base pay to $128,000 and announcing stock grants of as much as $20,000. High-performing Walmart managers can now earn more than $400,000 per year.
In interviews conducted 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 manages 165 people, said she had gotten some feedback from people before her before joining in January. work: They wanted to build a relationship with her.
Since joining 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 really important when you’re together for eight hours, 40 hours a week,” she said.
Daniel Harrelson, a 30-year-old store manager in Fayetteville, Ark., participated in the training in October. He started at Walmart as an hourly employee and was promoted to store manager during the pandemic, overseeing 450 employees.
He learned of the resources the company is setting aside for workers in need, such as free counseling classes and funds for people dealing with housing crises that could stem from fire or domestic violence. For some of his employees, “Walmart is usually one of the only constants they have,” he said.
There were also lighter elements to the training that helped solidify the culture for him. Take the meetings that managers hold in the store with their employees. These all start with a rapturous cheer – a tradition Sam Walton started in the 1970s.
During the pandemic, large gatherings were canceled to follow social distancing guidelines. The cheering also fell away. But the training, he said, helped him realize how important it was to fix the habit.
“It’s nothing spectacular, but it’s something fun,” he said. “It lightens the mood, and it’s something that Sam Walton did.”