On a stormy afternoon in Bentonville, Ark., a Walmart regional manager told a story about a moment when his humanity got the best of him.
He was a 24-year-old store manager anxiously trying to convince his workers to set up Halloween merchandise displays. Instead, workers were clustered around televisions in the electronics department. It was the morning of September 11, 2001.
“Why are we here and not having Halloween? Why hasn’t it been done yet?’ he remembered saying. He didn’t fully understand what was happening until a worker broke into him in tears, explaining that she had relatives in New York.
“I didn’t take a minute to survey the room to understand the consequences of my words and actions,” former store manager David Seymour, now a Walmart regional vice president, told his audience. “I grew up really fast that day.”
His remarks were intended as an object lesson. Mr. Seymore, who now manages 110 stores in the South and Midwest with $11 billion a year, was speaking to a group of Walmart and Sam’s Club store managers who had come to Walmart headquarters for a leadership training program that has been held. almost every week at retail from July 2022.
Walmart and Sam’s Club store managers manage multi-million dollar businesses and manage hundreds of employees. Their ability to drive sales has a direct impact on the company’s revenue, which totaled $648.1 billion last year worldwide.
But the company says management style also matters. Most weeks, Walmart flies a group of 50 people from around the country — about 1,800 last year in total, with 2,200 expected this year — to what it calls the Manager Academy.
Throughout the sessions, trainers reinforce the message that Walmart’s success is only possible if store managers care about employees and customers and the community where they operate.
“The goal of the academy is to walk away knowing what our values ​​are, what our expectations of leaders are, how do we operate effectively in terms of putting our people first?” said Donna Morris, the head of Walmart Inc.
Over the years, Walmart — the largest private employer in the United States with 1.6 million workers — has been accused of being more focused on the bottom line than the people in its stores. In lawsuits and through unsuccessful union campaigns, Walmart workers said the company’s business practices were harmful to their physical, mental and emotional health.
In one 2022 case, a worker with a medical condition died during her shift when a store was understaffed and her store manager was said to have told her to “pull yourself together” when he asked her to go home, according to a report in The News Democracy.
Ms Morris declined to comment on the case, but said “our focus is always on making sure our people are at the forefront of what a manager needs to think about”.
Walmart isn’t the only company focused on getting its managers to think this way. A focus on compassionate leadership became a notable topic of conversation for companies about two years ago, said Jessica Kriegel, a workplace training consultant who has researched the topic.
“The big picture here is that employees feeling cared for is directly tied to communication,” Ms. Kriegel said. “And the people who communicate the most with the front line are their supervisors. This is why frontline supervisors are so critical, because if they communicate effectively then the workforce feels they are being looked after.“
Most Walmart executives attended the Manager Academy’s predecessor, the Walton Institute, which began in the 1980s. And the training has a broader impact: Many Walmart leaders eventually attract other companies to the retail industry.
“This Walton Institute has been such an amazing way to immerse yourself in the culture of Walmart when you’re away from home,” said Horacio Barbeito, who spent 26 years with the company. “And then you’d come back to your market really infused with a lot of corporate culture that you then become an ambassador for and a catalyst for.” He left Walmart in 2022 to run Old Navy, a retailer he sees as having similar goals and corporate values.
John Furner, the CEO of Walmart USA and a native of Arkansas whose father also worked at Walmart, began his career as an hourly wage earner at the retailer in 1993. As he rose through the ranks, he trained at the Walton Institute. He also focused on company culture, but back then, the company was still relatively small and it was possible to get to know the top leadership.
“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, navigating shifts between in-store and online shopping, higher employee turnover and sometimes unruly shoppers. And as the company has grown, it’s become harder to make them feel connected to the corporate mission. Mr. Furner suggested to Walmart’s global chief executive, Doug McMillon, that it was time for the company to bring back a training program for store managers.
Former and current executives, including Mr. Furner, speak during the training. (Attendees even meet the company’s founder, Sam Walton — sort of. The company’s heritage museum features a hologram of Mr. Walton explaining how he used watermelons and donkeys to initially draw people into the stores.) Attendees get a one-hour tour surrounding headquarters where passing executives stop and chat — and are sometimes peppered with questions about the business.
Things also get concrete. Managers attend breakout sessions on how to make all their employees, from the mechanics in the auto repair department to the night shift workers who mop the floors and those who stock apples in the grocery department, feel like they’re contributing to larger corporate mission. They think about how to deal with issues both generally (understanding other people’s values) and specifically (scheduling snafus).
The program makes store managers think not only about what’s next, but also about how to keep their referrals engaged and find other opportunities within the company for them. And at the end of the day, Walmart is all about sales and measuring the effectiveness of this program on that basis.
With “really strong store managers who are driven by purpose and values,” said Lorraine Stomski, who manages Walmart’s learning and leadership programs, “we can achieve stronger business results.”
Walmart has also sweetened incentives to keep managers motivated and not leave for other opportunities. This year it increased pay for its store managers, raising base pay to $128,000, and announced stock grants of up to $20,000. High-performing Walmart managers now have the potential to earn more than $400,000 a year.
In interviews conducted by Walmart, store managers participating 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 20 years ago as an hourly worker and now manages 165 people, said that before attending in January, she had received some feedback from people working for her: They were looking to build a relationship with her.
Since joining the program, he said he has found time for informal conversations. (“How was your weekend? What can I do to help?”) “I think those are key when you’re around each other 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 and oversees 450 employees.
She learned about resources the company has for workers in need, such as free counseling classes and funds for those facing housing crises that could result from fires or domestic violence. For some of his workers, “Walmart is usually one of the only stable things they have,” he said.
There were also lighter elements in the training that help strengthen the culture in him. Take the meetings that managers hold in the store with their employees. It all starts with an enthusiastic cheer – a tradition started by Sam Walton in the 1970s.
During the pandemic, large gatherings were halted to follow social distancing guidelines. The cheer fell by the wayside, too. But the education, he said, helped him realize how important it was to restore the custom.
“It’s not spectacular, but it’s fun,” he said. “It lightens the mood and it’s something Sam Walton did.”
