"Aggressive listening." "Favorite self." "Bionic leadership."
Claire Macintyre, SVP & Chief People Officer at Sam’s Club, uses several memorable metaphors in this fascinating conversation about technology, culture, and leading people through rapid (and sometimes scary) change.
She shares why the best HR leaders are equal parts manager and mentor—and how to build a people strategy that doesn’t just respond to the future, but helps shape it.
Claire also shares:
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[00:00:00] Claire Macintyre: We've lived through a lot of technological changes, and I understand that the pace of change for AI is much, much more rapid. I'm not sure why we're all gonna stuck on this, and I think as people leaders, there's gonna be a moment that comes soon that industry will be looking to the HR organizations globally to see.
So what does it really mean from the people and products?
[00:00:20] Dave Travers: So what does it really take for your business to attract world-class talent today? I'm Dave Travers, president of ZipRecruiter and on Talent All-Stars. We shine a light on the people and the day-to-day processes behind recruitment and retention at some of the world's most influential businesses.
Today's talent All-Star is Claire Macintyre, the Senior Vice President and Chief People Officer of Sam's Club, the membership-based retailer operated by Walmart. Before that, Claire held VP roles at Estée Lauder and Diageo. We had a fantastic conversation about company culture, aggressive listening, her approach to AI, and her belief.
We should start thinking of ourselves as bionic. So let's bring her in. Claire McIntyre, welcome to Talent All-Stars.
[00:01:04] Claire Macintyre: Thank you, David. It's such a pleasure to be here.
[00:01:06] Dave Travers: So great to have you. So there's so many interesting directions to go here, but the one I I wanna start with is you've worked at different companies that all have incredibly strong established cultures.
And I think culture is such an interesting lens or overlay or you know, fabric for people, leaders to think about and utilize and channel. How do you think about that and how should a people leader who's taking on, you know, a new culture or joining a new culture for the first time, how should they think about that?
[00:01:38] Claire Macintyre: Yeah, I love that question and. Although they seem to be three very distinct cultures, I would actually say there's some commonality in that. Very values driven, very purpose driven, very in service of the associate, the role of the, in the community. So I think there's some things that made them feel a bit more similar.
Right? Which helped me as a leader as I navigated because I'm a really purpose-driven leader ,and my first job outta school was where I got a hard lesson. They would, and when your values don't match the values of the organization. And that was a fail fast, fail cheap, take the lesson and move forward. So the kinda culture I work for the organizations I work in, that, that's probably the biggest question I have whenever I go and I interview and I, I spend time and, and I make decisions about the kind of culture that I wanna be part of. And I actually think the types of organization and culture says something about your personal brand as well, actually. And I do believe there has to be that alignment. I believe that there has to be alignment to your values, your purpose to the organization. And I worked with a leader before, and he used to say, no, David, he might have stolen this from someone else, but he used to say to me that culture was the worst behavior that the group would accept.
And what I like about that is it takes culture from this nebulous idea to be in something about how we behave with each other. And the everyday behaviors, I think is when culture comes to life. Culture is the fabric of the organization. It's just another word for it, but it's about how we behave with each other every single day.
I think it really. Sums it up.
[00:03:11] Dave Travers: I think that idea that the worst behavior that a organization would, would tolerate, uh, speaks to the culture, is highly related to another thing I've always liked the idea of, which is a culture is the thing that your company would say no to, that some other reasonable company would say yes to.
Like that's really what defines you. It's not the poster on the wall that says something that could be at any single, could be the inspirational photo behind anybody. Or poster behind anybody. I love that, and I love how you talk about. How you know your own personal alignment to the culture and the values.
Makes sense. Can you give an example of where, you know, for somebody who's like, I've never been in an organization where I felt that connection to the culture or that alignment to the culture. What does it feel like when you found a place where you're aligned and where you're leading others and developing a culture where they can be aligned?
[00:04:03] Claire Macintyre: There's a sense of stillness, but also movement. So let me tell you what I mean by that duality. There's a sense of stillness in being yourself. There's a sense of, of feeling like you belong, that it makes sense. There's, there's so phenomen almost in your gut, right? It's more of a, this feels good, and it feels like I belong.
There's, there's this sense of like-mindedness, and I don't mean everyone's the same. I mean, there's a, like-mindedness. There's this things that are important to others or important to you. And then there's the kinda the sense of, of of movement, which is. You are thriving, you have this sense of being, part of making something bigger and different and better.
So you're, you're part of the movement. You're, you're part of the, so like you have that sense of kinda connectedness to others, and you're causing and creating something together. And for me, it's even when I'm having the bad day, you know, the day when you're like, oh my gosh, what am I doing? Why am I in this?
You still actually feel good about, okay. It was tough today, but we got things done. It was tough today, but we were kind to one another. Tough. You know what? I was making a difference. And I don't think that's a hierarchical thing. I think that's a from every chair thing, and I steal that expression from William Lauder that was something I learned at Estée Lauder Companies was this leadership from every chair.
And I really believe in that. And I think that plays into, when you're in a culture where you feel that sense of connection, you actually feel comfortable. You kind of breathe, you know, that's back to the stillness thing. And then you feel confident. So you make a move. And that's, that's kind of how I think about it.
Does that make sense, David?
[00:05:36] Dave Travers: Totally. Like when you feel confident to make the move that both, you know, 'cause it feels right to you and you have this bedrock. Knowledge and confidence that it's also right for the organization. And there's no conflict about how can I thread the needle between the institution and myself.
That is this freeing, you know, of I'm now freed up to be my best self. And once you get it, it's very addicting.
[00:06:01] Claire Macintyre: I actually, so I love the concept of best self, but I have a different view on it, and I've decided I'm not gonna call it my best self because that feels quite judgy. I'm gonna call it my favorite self.
[00:06:12] Dave Travers: Ah. I'm gonna steal that. I love that.
[00:06:15] Claire Macintyre: And by the way, I totally must have stolen it from someone smarter than me. But what, what I like about that reframe is best seems like this. You've made a mark, like you, you've just like checked you, you've, you hit someone's bar or you've hit a, it, it feels like quite hard.
And your favorite version of yourself is when you actually accept that. You've got flaws, and that you're not perfect, and you're gonna make mistakes. And, and I've just been trying to reframe that with some leaders I, I talk to because I think it's a bit more liberating, right? If I focus on being my favorite version of myself, the one that I'm most comfortable with, the one that I feel is the best representation of me as a human versus the best one.
I just think it might be nuanced. But, uh, I, I do think there's something in that.
[00:06:57] Dave Travers: I think it's super powerful. 'cause if you're giving as a leader, uh, in any chair, you're a leader in if you're giving yourself grace to not be the absolute best, but to be your, your favorite. Then you're also embodying for others to see that they, they have the freedom to be imperfect, but still their favorite selves, which is exactly where you want people to be.
I love that. Okay, so one of the lessons I've taken is I've studied, um, leaders in businesses that I love about Sam Walton in, in the current culture that you're in, is a lesson that I took from him that I'm sure I'll misquote in some way, but it's that the way you treat. Your people, or your associate,s is the way that they will treat the customers.
And so, talk as a people leader, how do you instill those words feel really powerful, but how do you get someone to embrace that? Or how do you create an organization or an institution that embraces that?
[00:07:48] Claire Macintyre: I love that quote as well. And um, Mr. Sam wrote a book, um, made in America, and there's so many amazing leadership lessons in there actually.
There really is. I've read it several times, and I'm now going through highlighting all my favorite quotes and, and that was one of them. I will say to you that I intellectually understood servant leadership until I got to Walmart, Inc. and Sam's Club. Then I felt it in a very different way, and even our corporate head office here is called Club Support.
So the orientation for all of us is the associate. And we role model that. We live it, we breathe it, we expect it. We talk about it all the time, and we actually talk about the inverted pyramid. With the member, then the associate, then everybody else, and at the very, very top or the, the pinnacle, that's a bit the upside down.
Sticking on the ground bit. That's says the leadership team because we only exist in service of enabling our associates to have amazing experiences at work. So they can create amazing experiences for our members. And it's kind of culturally embodied actually, David. It's kind of what we think good looks like it.
It's the bar that we hold for our leaders. It is the orientation that we have. For our people function, for our business leaders. And you know, we were away last week. Uh, we have a year, big year beginning meeting. We bring all of the club leaders and the co-leaders. It was a couple thousand people, all of the people, partners, and we, we kinda get 'em ready for the new year, and we show them the new merchandising.
We showed them the new technology and we actually had a rotation that was all about license to listen. It was back on the tenets of what Mr. Sam taught us, and it was a 45-minute introduction and it was about getting people to slow down. It was getting people to really invest in the time to listen to one another.
We quoted an article that, um, Mr. Sam wrote to the associates. He asked everybody to aggressively listen. And I was very struck by that because of the, the duality of kind of the words, right? But this whole kind of concept is very, very core to, I'm paid to listen. As a chief people officer of Sam's, I'm actually paid to listen.
I'm paid to listen to all of our associates and the members and to make sure that everything we're working towards is enabling, um, them to have great experiences and, and great, um, interactions with our members. That's what I think happens. That's what I think is here is very ingrained, but we continuously reinforce it.
We continuously reinforce through our words, our behaviors. And the things that we highlight that are important to us as a leadership team and as an organization.
[00:10:32] Dave Travers: What's so cool about the concept of aggressively listen is the word aggressive is so different than what you expect that it, it makes you think like, oh, I think of listening as this lean back experience.
But if I'm aggressively listening, there's no way I can lean back and be aggressive in my listening. And I think like that is. So many of the challenges of a business leader are embodied in the challenge of truly seeking to understand, uh, the way you you do when you're aggressively listening. For example, one that I would love to ask you about is we're in this world now where a leader such as yourself is.
Being pulled in, in a duality as you, as you mentioned earlier, you're being pulled in the direction of technology is changing underneath our feet, AI and all the other buzzwords that go with that. And we have this imperative to not just change with it, but be at the, the vanguard of leading that change because it's a necessity and our customers are gonna need it and expect it, et cetera.
And there are people involved, the people that work for us, et cetera, for whom change is really difficult and scary. And what about my job and who moved the way I like to do things, et cetera. How do you manage that and how do you lead an organization like so many of us are leading? Or have leadership seats of different types where we're leading and we're trying to both go skate where the puck is going and go toward the future and embrace technological change and bring people along who are like, Hey, what does this mean for me?
[00:12:07] Claire Macintyre: Yeah. Super fascinating question just now. Um, and we're spending a lot of things thinking and talking about it, and we just had a turn hall a couple weeks ago and, uh, myself and the chief technology officer were asked to come up on stage and talk a little bit about it. Walmart is a people-led, tech-powered company.
So that's very much at kind of the heart of, of what we do. And I was really reflecting on this when I was talking to the room. We've lived through a lot of technological changes. We, we really have. So the iPhone was invented in 2007. I know because I was around and I was one of the first purchases I got when I moved to America, you know, so I'm aging myself out here, David, we maybe wanna cut that.
But anyway, nobody bolt the iPhone coming in. Nobody had a moment of, oh my gosh, what is, what does this mean for my job? Everybody embraced it to the point that we're almost over indexing in the individuality of our iPhone and the world that it creates for us. So that struck me. And then if you kind of go back the internet email, like we have lived through so many technological changes, and I understand that the pace of change for AI is much, much more rapid.
I'm not sure why we're all getting stuck on this and I think we're overthinking it a little bit. I think we think it's harder than it's, and what I told the audience was, AI's not actually gonna take your job, but somebody that's using AI really well probably will. And if we start to reframe it a little bit to think about it as another formal intelligence, like it's like having a PhD intern sitting beside you all day every day doing what you ask it to do.
Or what you ask them to do. If we can reframe this thinking on that, I think that we'll start to embrace it a little bit differently. And if we think about how do we use AI to create capacity, how do we use AI frankly, so that we get a bit smarter? And a phrase I've been playing a little bit about with my own leadership team is we need to see ourselves as bionic.
If we think about ourselves as a bit of a bionic superpower. And just start to try and experiment. I think we'll find a different, um, orientation towards technology and changes. Sam's is a very innovative technology-driven company. I mean, we have amazing technology in our clubs where you can shop on your app, scan and go, and then we have arches where you just walk out.
So that's really changing shopping. Everybody's cool with that because it takes the friction outta the experience. We have AI tech in our clubs where AI is actually going around doing all of the checks and accounts. So it's constantly taking pictures, and we've actually removed something like a hundred million mundane physical tasks from our club associates job using AI.
All of that's really cool so that there's, there's a place for us to start to get a bit more, um, engaged with it and a bit more seen the possibility and the opportunity. And I think as people, leaders, I would like to see more of us leaning in to start to shape some of the thinking on this, because I feel right now it's very business-driven.
So if you think about, and this is not in a Walmart, this is not, this is like, if you think about the macro sense of the world, who's driving the thinking on this? It's, it's the business. It's the entrepreneurs. I don't see a big people, a big HR representation, really leaning in to start to inform and, and to shape some of this, this thinking and, and.
I think it's a miss, and I think more of us need to start to lean into some of these conversations at more of a macro level because being bionic's amazing. I think it could be amazing, and we have amazing technology or associates all have phones and we call it meat sand, and they can. Schedule picked their schedule on the phone, they can check or pay.
Like there's so many things that were we've done to enable their lives to be enriched. But there's certainly more that we can do. And I've even booked with my leadership team 30 minutes every Friday and my people leadership team to say, let's just play, let's just go in and play around and start to kind of come up with different use cases together 'cause we have to have a perspective and a point of view on it. And, and I feel like there's gonna be a moment that comes soon. Industry will be looking to the HR organizations globally to say, so what does it really mean from the people impact? Um, Ariana Huffington's gonna meet an amazing coach, she talks about.
So, systems downtime is a defect. Human downtime is an advantage and a necessity. And we have to bring these two concepts together in such a way that we're finding the balance, this really bionic balance.
[00:16:37] Dave Travers: Ooh, I love that. So what is so wise about how you lay all that out, um, and how you think about it is that before you go into describing how great it can be to use technology to become the, the bionic person that, um, has all these new superpowers that were previously unimaginable, rather than going straight into how great it can be.
You started off by aying the technology's not gonna take your job, but somebody who embraces it more than you do might. And so what that says is, it's okay that you're anxious about this. It's okay that you have some anxiety. It's okay. It makes sense that you have. Questioning me about how we are gonna approach this.
And it gives you so much credibility to acknowledge first, to aggressively listen to what's the question behind the question, and acknowledge it first gives you then the permission to go sell and say your truth, which is, I think this can be great if we do this well together, but implicitly you're saying you're gonna have to trust and we're gonna have to trust each other that we're gonna do this well to make it work out for everybody.
But it's gonna be, there might be some bumps and scrapes along the way,
[00:17:43] Claire Macintyre: A hundred percent. And, and I, I confessed to that audience that there was a couple thousand people. I was like, listen, I called someone up and said, if I'm asking for a friend where to find ChatGPT for, where would one go? My friend wants to know, like, but it's kinda like we just gotta get in and start playing and experiment and then stop being frightened.
But I really believe that I, I believe we'll come to a point where. It's not AI you should be worried about. It's about someone that's using it smarter and more regularly than you are.
[00:18:09] Dave Travers: Okay? So we always end these episodes, uh, by doing a little bit of an elevator rapid-fire. So you're getting in the elevator in the morning, and then the CEO steps into the elevator with you and says, oh, hey Claire.
And you know, the elevator's only gonna take 30 seconds or whatever to get, or 60 seconds to get to your floor. You know, I was thinking about the people team. And how should we be measuring the people team over the coming year? How should we judge the success of the people team the coming year? What would you say to that?
[00:18:42] Claire Macintyre: I think something big on my mind about succession, like real depth of succession. Um, not having the same name in 1,000 times, but actually having unique successors that we're taking a future-proofing lens on. And I think that we need to start to look at succession as who are the talents that can reimagine the future with us.
Um, so I mean that's how I'll be looking at the people function is know your talent. Do you have depth of talent, and how are you thinking about future focus capabilitie,s and how are you measuring them and bringing them to bear? Um, like I love this Netflix concept of talent density. That's kind of what I'm getting at.
But really kind of future-orientated. And the people that are 10x talent are those that can reimagine the future with you. And I think frankly, any people function. Should we really laser focus on what does that look like for them in their industry and how do you find them? How do you get them, and how do you measure it?
That would be my thing.
[00:19:38] Dave Travers: That's great. And what's cool about that is I think it's counterintuitive for a lot of emerging and younger leaders to think about. I. Succession management being a, a source of strength for them as opposed to a scary thing that makes them replaceable. Because as a leader, what you hear is like, this is a person who I can throw in a problem.
They will then find their own replacement, and I can throw them at the next problem. Like, this is the most valuable type of person I could possibly have, as opposed to, oh, now this person's replaceable. Okay. And then so one more, uh, same rapid-fire sort of scenario. Getting in the elevator. And I see you and I say, Hey, Claire.
One of the most important things I do as I think about it, is evaluate talent. And you're a talent and people person. Like what's the one thing I could do to be better at that?
[00:20:28] Claire Macintyre: The human piece is really important for me and. When you're looking at talent, I sometimes think we get caught up in the skills that people have rather than the 360 view.
And I would want to see more great leaders that have got empathy, empathy, learning, agility, uh, ability to reimagine all of those kind of softer skills that I would be really encouraging people to think about more broadly about. I think when we narrow the focus on talent to be success and job only, that we don't really, I.
Get to a place where we're actually building bench and we're starting to think about the future of our organization. I'm obsessed with what the future looks like and what does that look like from capability. Um, so again, back to this duality, when you're assessing talent, you gotta be working on two time horizons.
You gotta be working on the performance period and the potential period. And I sometimes think people only focus on the performance period. That would be kinda my, my pitch.
[00:21:28] Dave Travers: Claire Macintyre it's not only so clear why you're telling All-Star today, but it's clear why you're going to be in the future 'cause that's what you think about all the time.
Thank you so much for taking the time to be with us today. This is awesome.
[00:21:40] Claire Macintyre: No, thank you, David. It's been such a pleasure.
[00:21:46] Dave Travers: That's Claire Macintyre, the SVP and Chief People Officer at Sam's Club. We'll put our LinkedIn profile in the notes below. And just a reminder, we put the video versions of these conversations on YouTube and also on the official ZipRecruiter channel. I'm Dave Traver. Thanks for listening to Talent All-Stars. We'll see you next week.