Sam's Club CEO Latriece Watkins Says Her Greatest Power Comes From Helping Others Succeed
Latriece Watkins, the first woman and person of color to serve as Walmart's chief merchant, told Fortune's MPW Summit that watching people she has invested in advance in their careers is her greatest source of power, and she urged leaders to make time for clarity.
Latriece Watkins built a three-decade career at Walmart that took her from intern to chief executive of Sam's Club, one of the largest grocery retailers in the United States. But the accomplishment she describes as her greatest source of power is not a title she holds. It is the progress of the people she has helped along the way.
«When I feel most powerful is when I see the people I've invested in make moves,» Watkins said onstage at Fortune's annual Most Powerful Women Summit in Santa Barbara, California. «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 made the remarks in conversation with Emma Hinchliffe, Fortune's Most Powerful Women editor. Her message to an audience of senior executives was that concentrating only on one's own advancement can leave larger opportunities for impact untouched. In her own rise through Walmart, a company valued at roughly $890 billion, she said she relied on a mutually reinforcing approach with colleagues so that everyone could succeed together.
«The contributions we make are more than we could individually do,» she 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.»
Watkins has compiled a record that illustrates the point. In 2023, she became the first woman and first person of color to serve as Walmart's chief merchant, a role widely considered among the most influential in retail. She has now spent eight months as chief executive of Sam's Club, the warehouse club chain owned by Walmart.
At 51, Watkins said the transition into the top job has reinforced two requirements of leadership: recognizing the value of workers and delivering clarity. Employees, she said, look to the person at the top for transparency and a clear sense of direction, and that expectation places a distinct burden on the executive in charge.
«People look to you for clarity, which means you have to be clear. You don't think out loud,» Watkins 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 recommended remedy is deliberate and, by her own account, difficult to schedule. Watkins said leaders must set aside time to work through their own thinking before they address their teams, because clarity cannot be manufactured in the moment. «So take the time—make the time—to create clarity for yourself,» she 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 advice lands at a moment when large employers are under pressure to communicate strategy clearly to workforces navigating rapid change in retail, where competition, technology and consumer expectations shift quickly. For Watkins, the discipline of private reflection is not a retreat from leadership but a precondition for it. A leader who has not resolved an issue internally, she suggested, risks passing confusion down the chain rather than direction.
Her emphasis on investing in other people also carries a practical dimension for companies that depend on developing talent from within. Watkins's own trajectory, from an internship at Walmart to the top of Sam's Club, is an example of the internal pipelines that large retailers rely on to fill senior roles. She framed the payoff of that investment in personal terms: the promotions of people she has mentored are the measure of power she values most.
Watkins's appearance at the summit placed her among a group of senior women executives discussing how authority is exercised at the highest levels of American business. Her answer was that authority is most meaningful when it is shared, and that the leaders who leave the strongest mark are often those whose influence shows up in the careers of others.
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