When CEO Doug McMillon and other Walmart execs visit stores, they’ll collect stray shopping carts from the parking lot or pick up trash.
The idea is to model servant leadership and being “willing to do what we want anybody else to do,” McMillon told a business school audience at Stanford in May.
McMillon, 59, announced on Friday that he plans to retire in January. He will be succeeded by John Furner, president and current CEO of Walmart US.
During his decade on the job, McMillon has talked regularly about the company’s four core values: respect the individual, act with integrity, serve our customers and members, and strive for excellence.
“You have to actually believe them and live them,” McMillon, who began his career at Walmart four decades ago working on the loading dock, told the Stanford crowd.
Here are three leadership lessons that McMillon has offered:
Embrace change
McMillon wrote to shareholders in 2019 that the only thing that’s a constant for the world’s largest retailer — other than its purpose and values — is change. The pace at which it occurs is increasing, he wrote.
“There is no growth without change, and there is no meaningful change without risk. So, get comfortable with an intelligent level of risk,” McMillon said.
Without looking for new ways of doing things, he wrote, “the law of diminishing returns sets in as always doing the same things the same way takes over.”
McMillon went on to reference Walmart founder Sam Walton: “We don’t know what Sam would have done in these moments, but we know he would have been adapting — and he would have been aggressive.”
Demonstrate service
McMillon has said that grabbing errant shopping carts or replying to emails on the day they arrive are small ways that leaders can demonstrate what it means to serve — and be servant leaders.
The company is looking for “altruistic people” who can “put other people first,” he said during his Stanford talk.
Service is a concept that he said is embedded in the company’s culture.
“If I had, in my experience, to boil Walmart down to one word, it’d be ‘serve,'” he said in 2023 on the Simon Sinek podcast. McMillon added: “If you gave me two words, it’d be ‘servant leadership’ because that’s what I see and that’s who I think we are.”
Build trust
McMillon wrote in 2019 that “it’s a challenge to have the broader world know the Walmart we know.” He said that the company was working to build trust by improving the company’s “compliance talent, processes and systems” as well as reducing waste in its supply chain.
“Of course we aren’t perfect. We make mistakes,” he wrote.
During the pandemic, when company leadership began starting each day by talking to each other on video, the company started making decisions faster, McMillon said when speaking at Stanford.
“I learned that I could trust people to make high-quality decisions even more than I had been,” he said.
Speaking in 2024 to the graduating class at the University of Arkansas, his alma mater, McMillon also said that being present helps build trust with others.
He encouraged graduates to “do today’s job well.” That includes driving change and delivering results, McMillon said.
“Being present in today’s role and earning trust leads to the next job opportunity,” he said.
