Since the murder of George Floyd and a summer of Black Lives Matter protests, CEOs at companies large and small have struggled with meaningful ways to react.
In addition to making charitable donations to promote minority education and hiring, many business leaders have initiated soul searching sessions and sensitivity training within their organizations.
For Walmart CEO Doug McMillon, the head of the world’s largest company with 2.3 million employees, the process of grappling with racial injustice has been both a corporate and personal journey. Beyond his initial early public pronouncements that Floyd’s death was “tragic, painful and unacceptable,” McMillion said the past seven months have offered him an opportunity to re-educate himself on racism.
“There were some things that I was not taught in school that are facts related to these various systems—financial, education, healthcare and criminal justice in particular—that result all too often in inequity,” he said in an interview presented Wednesday as part of the all-digital CES 2021.
At Walmart, “we’ve been looking in the mirror and studying and learning,” he added. Floyd’s murder and the murders of others “really did create an opportunity to make more progress faster” on earlier Walmart justice initiatives, McMillon added. “We’ve been trying to seize that inside the company. Also, the size of the company can be used to do good beyond our walls.”
“This gave us the opportunity to be more bold and aggressive and have difficult conversations with people. Change actually starts within each one of us. Our biases, conscious or unconscious, need to be dealt with individually and collectively. So, we’ve had more difficult conversations--open and transparent conversations—and have engaged in training in a different way. All of our officers are going through a two-day session. We’re learning more about American history.”
With 11,000 stores globally and 2.3 million employees, Walmart’s influence on social equity should be enormous. “Inside the company we’ve done things like continuing to change processes related to promotions and pay and being more transparent about those things,” he said. Now there is a mid-year report as well as one at the end to share data “about progress we’re making or not making.”
Beyond Walmart, McMillon said four teams led by Black officers in the company have worked on policy changes such as delivering nightly cash deposits to Black-owned banks and working with Black-owned advertising firms. There are other opportunities with healthcare and education.
Walmart also has set up a Center for Racial Equity to make smart investments to “unlock even more progress beyond our walls,” he said. Walmart and the Walmart Foundation have committed $100 million over years to research and advocacy related to the financial system, healthcare, education and criminal justice.
“We’re being persistent and this is something I’m spending a lot of time on along with other leaders at Walmart,” he said. “I’m encouraged by what we’ve done so far, but this coming year needs to be a year of even more outcomes.”
A CEO’s personal advice
Consumer Technology Association Senior Vice President Tiffany Moore asked McMillon to offer advice to other CEOs on making changes to improve racial justice.
“My advice is to first start with your own personal learning journey and put yourself in situations where you are learning and developing,” McMillon said. “Beyond the two days of racial equity training which helped with U.S. history…I’ve made multiple trips to Montgomery, Alabama, with small groups and gone to speak with people involved with the civil rights movement in the sixties and visited the museums and had conversations with people like [public interest lawyer] Bryan Stevenson and so many others, asking them, ‘Educate me, tell me not only what happened in the past, but tell me what you’re seeing today.’
“As you personally invest in that you can’t help but be changed. And that leads to the second step of engaging your business and getting your people involved and having those very honest, transparent, open discussions and being vulnerable and taking a little risk that if you say the wrong thing and somebody criticizes it you’ve built up enough goodwill to overcome it. A lot of people are afraid to have these conversations because they are worried about saying the wrong thing, but if you don’t have the conversations, you don’t make any progress.
“Also, put the business to work. We are good as business leaders using data and metrics. So take your data, create transparency, set some appropriate objectives and your legal teams can help you on how to do that. Then, go to work and measure progress. Do it in the right way and learn in the right way. One of the things we’re learning is that this is really about growing the whole pie. This is not a zero-sum game where some people win and some people lose.
“Diverse teams win. Inclusive environments are more successful. If you grow the company and you grow the pie, everybody benefits, even if you are a white male like myself. We just have to continue to press forward, make it a priority. There’s no substitute for having the leaders involved.”
McMillon has worked at Walmart for 29 years, starting as a teenager in the hourly ranks at a distribution center.