Sam's Club CEO Latriece Watkins Measures Power by Who She's Helped Rise

Latriece Watkins runs Sam's Club, the membership warehouse arm of the nearly nine hundred billion dollar retailer Walmart, and she has spent three decades building a career inside that company. At Fortune's Most Powerful Women Summit in Santa Barbara, in a conversation with Fortune editor Emma Hinchliffe, Watkins offered a definition of power that had less to do with her own rise than with everyone she has pulled up along with her.

A different scoreboard

Watkins described tracking the people she has mentored over the years, watching for the moments they get promoted or step into bigger roles. She said those moments bring back a flood of memory, the faces of people from early in her own career and early in theirs, set against where they have ended up now. It is a way of keeping score that has nothing to do with her own title.

She put it plainly during the conversation: the contributions a team makes together outstrip anything one person could do alone, and she measures her own power by the names of people who have benefited from her contributions along the way.

A three decade career inside one company

Watkins has spent her entire professional run at Walmart, climbing through merchandising roles before becoming the company's chief merchant in 2023, the first woman and the first person of color to hold that job. That history gives her mentorship talk more weight than it might carry from an executive parachuted in from outside. She is describing a system she rose through herself, and crediting it for the people she helped move through it after her.

Leadership as a shared asset

The philosophy Watkins laid out at the summit treats leadership less like a personal trophy and more like a resource meant to be redistributed. Rather than framing her career in terms of her own title or the scale of the business she now runs, she frames it in terms of a growing list of people whose careers she helped move forward. For a retail executive overseeing a business this large, it is a notably people first way to define success.