4 minBusiness
Sam's Club CEO Latriece Watkins Says Leadership Power Comes From Investing in Others
Latriece Watkins, who rose from a Walmart intern to CEO of Sam's Club, told Fortune's Most Powerful Women Summit that her greatest source of power is watching people she has mentored succeed, and she urged executives to make time for clarity.
Latriece Watkins, the chief executive of Sam's Club, said her deepest sense of professional power comes not from titles or milestones but from watching the colleagues she has invested in advance in their own careers. Watkins made the remarks onstage at Fortune's annual Most Powerful Women Summit in Santa Barbara, California, in a conversation with Most Powerful Women editor Emma Hinchliffe.
«When I feel most powerful is when I see the people I've invested in make moves,» Watkins said. «When I see them get promoted, I see all of their faces running across memory from very early in my career, or very early in their careers, to where they've moved now.»
Watkins has built a career that spans roughly three decades at Walmart, the parent company of Sam's Club. She began as an intern and worked her way up through the retail giant, which carries a valuation of about $890 billion. In 2023, she became the first woman and first person of color to serve as Walmart's chief merchant, a role widely regarded as one of the most influential in the retail industry. She has led Sam's Club as CEO for eight months.
Her approach to leadership, she suggested, is built on the idea that individual advancement and collective success reinforce each other. «The contributions we make are more than we could individually do,» Watkins said. «So power for me is the names of all the people that I can say who have benefited from my contributions, and I've benefited from being able to either contribute or get feedback from them.»
That mutual exchange, she indicated, has shaped how she views her own rise. Rather than treating a career as a solitary pursuit, Watkins described a symbiotic strategy in which peers help one another move forward, and the results compound over time.
Watkins also addressed the practical demands of leading a major retailer. In her eight months as CEO, she said, she has found that understanding the power of workers and delivering clarity are essential. Employees look to the top executive for transparency and a clear sense of direction, which places a premium on a leader's ability to think matters through before speaking.
«People look to you for clarity, which means you have to be clear. You don't think out loud,» she said. «When you're the leader, people want to know what you think, and if you haven't cleared it up for yourself and you're thinking out loud, you'll confuse them.»
Her recommendation is to set aside time for reflection, even when the demands of a top job make that difficult. «So take the time—make the time—to create clarity for yourself,» Watkins said. «It's one of the hardest things to find this time for yourself. But it's required, because you can't get clarity without it.»
The comments place Watkins among a group of senior executives who argue that leadership is measured partly by the people a leader develops. For a company operating in the competitive grocery and membership retail sector, where execution depends on large frontline workforces, that emphasis on clarity and investment in people carries direct operational weight.
Watkins, 51, has spent her entire professional life inside the Walmart organization, moving from an entry-level internship to the top of one of its most prominent divisions. Her trajectory reflects a broader pattern in retail leadership, where long internal tenures and cross-functional experience are often prerequisites for the highest roles.
At the summit, she framed her own success in terms of the network of colleagues she has supported and learned from. The measure she returns to is not a title but a list of names—people whose progress she can point to as evidence that the contributions she made along the way mattered beyond her own advancement.
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