I recently spent the better part of a day with Ann-Marie Campbell, the new head of stores for Home Depot. She’s number 20 on Fortune’s Most Powerful Women’s list. She is also one of the few women of color on the list.
Being around Campbell is an energizing exercise, and she is clearly a highly capable executive. But she is also rare among upper echelon leaders in that she spends so much time working with, and subsequently coaching, the company’s rank-and-file employees. It suits her job, for one. As she rose up through the leadership ranks from part-time cashier, she’d become responsible for an increasingly large number of the company’s stores. But it also suits her nature. “I grew up in the stores and people feel connected to me,” she says.
I was able to observe her during an hour-long coaching session that came together during my interview. Of the dozen associates around the table who had asked to meet with her, four were women and nearly half were people of color. And two, like, Campbell, were immigrants. After a warm preamble, she went around the table and asked the participants to share their goals. What was holding them back?
“Honestly, being a store manager was the best job I ever had,” she tells one associate who confessed that his goal was to become one by age 30. She asks him some questions about his life – he worked as a truck driver until his wife threw up her hands at his marital absenteeism – then ticked through a list of must-dos. “Tell your manager you want to spend some time getting to know other departments,” she says, casting an eye at his manager, who is listening. “Ask people who have the job you want how they got it.” She tells him to be persistent, stay curious and keep in touch with the people he meets. “Drop them emails asking what you should do to learn,” if you stick with it, “this is totally doable for you,” she says. “But you have to ask people for help. I wasn’t good at that.”
If I had boil down her coaching style to three key elements, it would be these:
- She asks questions that are specific to the story each person has told and listens carefully to the answers;
- She offers tailored advice – including what skills they’ll need, and where they need to fill in their networks;
- Then she tells a story, either about herself or someone in a similar position, that helps her root the coaching in real world success.
It’s the story that really clicks with people. They’re always candid, personal, relevant, often funny or bittersweet. And they’re rarely the same. They cast Campbell as a person on the same journey, albeit a few chapters ahead of the class. And that her journey included being an immigrant – whose CEO couldn’t decipher her accent for years – or that of an overloaded working mother, was lost on nobody.
Ironically, it’s this candor, and the ability to tell these types of stories, that are one of the things that senior leaders tend to lose when they move closer to the C-Suite. (They also tend to lose their ability to empathize.) Campbell’s practice of meeting with and coaching employees at every level has allowed her to hone an authentic, empathetic and personal leadership style that works for everyone.
Click through to the story for more.
On Point
| Graphic images of shootings can trigger a form of post-traumatic stress |
| Research has shown that frequent exposure to the shootings of black people can have long term, negative mental health effects on people of color. Called “vicarious trauma,” it can be difficult to avoid when images go viral. “There’s a heightened sense of fear and anxiety when you feel like you can’t trust the people who’ve been put in charge to keep you safe,” says one researcher. |
| PBS |
| No racism before Obama declares a Trump campaign chair |
| A prominent Trump campaign chairwoman in Ohio says that there was no racism in the 1960s and that black people are responsible for any problems they're having today. “If you’re black and you haven’t been successful in the last 50 years, it’s your own fault. You’ve had every opportunity, it was given to you,” she says. The accompanying video is worth your time, if only for the look of utter defeat on the face of interviewer. |
| The Guardian |
| The Anti-Defamation League sends a representative to Silicon Valley |
| The move comes after significant upticks in vicious, anti-Semitic trolling of journalists and other public figures, mostly on Twitter, have been reported. “We’ve really doubled down on the work that we’re doing to deal with this new emerging and metastasizing trend of online harassment and cyber hate,” said an ADL director, calling the resurgence of public hate speech “breathtaking and downright scary.” |
| Buzzfeed |
| How zip codes nearly hid the lead problem in Flint |
| Last year, geographer Richard Casey Sadler was asked to analyze and map blood data from Michigan area pediatric clinics, looking for lead levels in neighborhood clusters. He found highly elevated levels in Flint, but the state of Michigan didn’t. Why? The state analyzed samples according to zip code, which included people who appeared to live in Flint but actually didn’t. Zip codes create artificial geographic boundaries that can mask all kinds of important information. |
| The Conversation |
| Standing Rock Sioux Chairman testifies at the U.N |
| Standing Rock Sioux Chairman David Archambault II took his case to the 33rd session of the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva on Tuesday, calling on the body to halt construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline, saying that oil companies are causing a deliberate destruction of “our sacred places and burials.” He also extended a formal invitation for a U.N. envoy who represents the rights of indigenous peoples to visit the reservation for a complete review. |
| Indian Country Today |
The Woke Leader
| Refugees are having a difficult time in Idaho |
| Idaho has been welcoming refugees since the 1975 fall of Saigon. Today, the majority of nearly 700 refugees who move there every year are from war-torn countries or are escaping religious persecution. As a newly stoked hostility toward immigrants has gripped the state, their transitions have become even more difficult. Photographer Angie Smith has been following several families as they navigate their new, snowy world. |
| The New Republic |
| A formerly undocumented immigrant gets a Genius grant to help the poor |
| Jose Quinonez runs the Mission Asset Fund, an organization that helps scale self-organized “lending circles,” the community driven savings and lending schemes that poor people around the world have relied upon for millennia. He just won a MacArthur Genius grant for his work. Quinones was undocumented when he came to the U.S. at nine years old; an amnesty law passed in 1986 allowed him to get an education and thrive. “We don’t give [poor people] enough credit for their ingenuity, for their innovativeness, for what it takes to survive and thrive in poverty.” |
| OZY |
| What should we call people of more than one race? |
| Leah Donella digs into history to assemble the dizzying array of terms used to describe people of more than one race around the world. She identifies a disturbing theme: Most are offensive. (I can testify.) Her examination describes a poignant history of the failure of science, society and governments to describe people who are often seen as tragically split between two worlds, and rejected by both. So, what do we call ourselves? |
| NPR |
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| —Benjamin Spock |
