Walgreens Leadership Styles

Across the globe, there are CEO’s, managers, and several other individual’s in leadership-type roles that have the expectation of making their company successful in the eyes of the investors, the employees, and the customers that they serve. This may be measured by a company’s gross profitability, employee engagement or overall customer satisfaction. Most companies have leadership models and strategies in place that leaders are expected to use in order to drive the expectations of the company while maintaining consistency across the business. In an effort to examine various types of leadership styles, I have conducted interviews with two individuals that are or have been previously tasked with leading their teams and their company towards success.

What you will find most interesting about the leaders that I interviewed is that they were both tasked with leading the same company, but during different timeframes and while using different leadership models. In this report, I will go into detail on how each leader led there teams to be successful through the companies initiatives that were in place during their time in leadership at this specific company. First, I will explain in detail what type of leadership model each leader used and how the strategies from these models may or may not have created a high performing culture. Next, I will explain how the leaders I spoke with implemented and handled change within their business, especially when it came to implementing new methods of leadership. Lastly, I will examine any similarities and differences between the models used by each leader in order to understand how the company has evolved through each leadership model described and how they may have stayed the same.
The first interview I conducted was with a retired store manager that had managed a retail pharmacy for 10 years, from 2001-2011. During our interview, he explained to me that the company was in the process of expanding from 3000 stores to 7000 in a three-year period. The ultimate goal was to have a brick and mortar store on “the corner of happy and healthy” across
the United States, which is how the initiative was pitched to employees. Along with this initiative, the company launched what was known as the “cultural beliefs”. These beliefs were created by the top leaders in the company in order to gear employees towards better collaboration and teamwork in order to position themselves in a way that would set them up to be successful while growing the business. The expectation was that employees would gain a better understanding of what behaviors were expected from management by memorizing the cultural beliefs so they could live and breathe by them while at work. The cultural beliefs that were created are:
 Be One. I know what Walgreens must deliver, and I align my daily action with others to make it happen.
 Be Real. I am open, honest and respectful in my words and actions every day.
 Be Bold. I demonstrate courage in everything I do to create the future of Walgreens.
 Build Trust. I listen, seek to understand and always assume positive intent.
 Love Customers. I engage with customers and passionately innovate to exceed their needs.
 Own It. I constantly ask, "What else can I do to achieve our results?" and refuse to blame others.
 Live It. I help people get, stay and live well.
Before launching the cultural beliefs, the employees did what they were told from the top down, however they had more flexibility as to how they accomplished their jobs.

The manager I spoke with stated that changing this mentality was very difficult at first, especially since he did not feel the company had done a good job of rolling the program out. The first change that had to take place was how store employees greeted customers arriving at the store and how they

said
goodbye when the customer left.

The expectation was to say “Welcome to Walgreens” when they arrived and “Thank you and be well” when they left. If employees were not compliant with this, they were to be held accountable by the manager, which could include disciplinary action. Then came the memorization of beliefs. Each day, the store manager was expected to discuss the cultural beliefs throughout the day with employees and would ask them to recite them during mini meetings on the sales floor. After they recited the belief, he would ask them to give an example of the belief that they witnessed recently. If employees struggled with these changes, the GROW coaching for performance and engagement model was used. GROW stands for Goals, Reality, Options, and Way Forward and it is a format of questions used to steer the employee in the right direction so they can perform the job the way the company expects. The store manager felt that he had dealt with the change in culture to the best of his ability with the tools provided to him from the top of the company. Nevertheless, the reality was that the change did not really “change” much and the store manager found it hard to keep employees and lost many long-term team members as a result. The manager does not feel that the company did a good job in engaging team members of why they had to change, but instead just told them they had to or

else.
The second interview I conducted was with a current district manager that works at the same establishment as the retired store manager that I interviewed first. The district manager had started with the company around the time that the cultural beliefs were falling to the wayside and employee engagement and customer satisfaction was declining. In 2014, the company rolled out a new model called Frontier. In order to make the change land, the company rolled the program out thoroughly with in depth meetings and training sessions with all members of leadership first and then with all employees. Initially, the changes made the district manager and his employees
very