Walmart teaching store managers to show compassion
BENTONVILLE, Ark. — On a stormy afternoon in Bentonville, Arkansas, a Walmart regional manager recounted a story about a moment when his humanity came up short.
He was a 24-year-old store manager anxiously trying to get his workers to set up Halloween merchandise displays. Instead, the workers were gathered around the televisions in the electronics department. It was the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.
“Why are we over here not setting up Halloween? Why is it not done yet?” he recalled saying. He didn’t fully understand what was happening until a worker tearfully laid into him, explaining that she had relatives in New York City.
“I didn’t take a minute to survey the room to understand the ramifications of my words and my actions,” the former store manager, David Seymore, now a regional vice president at Walmart, told his listeners. “I grew up really fast that day.”
His remarks were meant as an object lesson. Seymore, who now manages 110 stores in the South and the Midwest doing $11 billion in annual business, 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 taken place nearly every week at the retailer since July 2022.
Walmart and Sam’s Club store managers run multimillion-dollar enterprises and manage hundreds of workers. Their ability to drive sales has a direct effect on the company’s revenue, which totaled $648.1 billion last year worldwide.
But the company says their management style matters, too. Most weeks, Walmart flies a group of 50 from across the country — about 1,800 last year in all, with 2,200 expected this year — to what it calls its Manager Academy.
Throughout the sessions, trainers reinforce the message that Walmart’s success is possible only if the store managers take care of their workers and the customers and community where they operate.
“The intent of the academy is to walk away knowing what are our values, what are our expectations of leaders, how do we operate effectively with the view of putting our people first?” said Donna Morris, Walmart Inc.’s chief people officer.
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 have said the company’s business practices have been detrimental to their physical, mental and emotional health.
In a 2022 instance, a worker with a health condition died during her shift when a store was shortstaffed and her store manager is said to have told her to “pull herself together” when she asked to go home, according to report in The New Republic.
Morris declined to comment on that case, but she said that “we always have a focus on making sure that our people are the first line of what a manager should think about.”
Most executives at Walmart took part in the predecessor to the Manager Academy, the Walton Institute, which was started in the 1980s. And the training has a wider impact: Many Walmart leaders eventually fan out to other companies in the retail industry.
John Furner, CEO of Walmart U.S. 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 had training at the Walton Institute. It also focused on corporate culture, but back then, the company was still relatively small and it was feasible to know top leadership.
“You weren’t a number,” Furner said. “You weren’t just somebody that was supposed to deliver results.”
During the training, former and current executives speak, including Furner. (Participants even meet the company’s founder, Sam Walton — kind of. At the company’s heritage museum, there is a hologram of Walton explaining how he used watermelons and donkey rides to initially draw people into stores.) The attendees receive an hourlong tour around headquarters where passing executives stop and chat — and are sometimes peppered with questions about the business.
The program gets store managers thinking not only about what comes next for them, but also about how to keep the people reporting to them engaged and finding other opportunities in the company for them. And at the end of the day, 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 runs Walmart’s learning and leadership programs, “we can drive stronger business results.”