Leaders Playbook: Inside Lowe’s 1/28/26

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0:35And with Discover, you can. Get this. Discover automatically matches all the cash back you've earned at the end of your first year. Seriously, all of it. And we trust you to make smart decisions. After all, you listen to this show. See terms at discover.com slash credit card. On this episode of Leaders Playbook, Inside Lowe's, one of the nation's biggest brands in home improvement, helping millions of Americans repair, remodel, and decorate their homes. I'm trying to create a company I wish I could have worked for. Meet Marvin Ellison, the CEO who brought new life to an aging brick-and-mortar business.

1:16We had to make some incredibly quick pivots. Delivering a multi-billion dollar upgrade from the sales floor to the supply chain. We were generating a lot of cash. This is his playbook for a massive retail turnaround. It all starts with people. And a revealing look at his journey from humble beginnings to CEO. I unloaded trucks, I drove forklifts, I was a janitor. And meet the leader who helps execute his vision. He will always be very clear on his expectations. Leaders have to be decisive. Leaders Playbook Lowe's starts now. I'm meeting Lowe's CEO Marvin Ellison in a location that looks exactly like most Lowe's stores.

1:56Only this place never sees a single customer. And this is an identical replica. It's a giant retail lab where Lowe's tests product displays, store layouts and new technology. We have training classes here with store managers, district managers. I'm here to learn how his leadership strategy transformed Lowe's since he took over as CEO in 2018. What were some of the challenges that were facing Lowe's when you took over? We needed to transition Lowe's to a modern retail format. Lowe's was designed as a classic brick-and-mortar retail, and that means all the technology, all the e-commerce, everything was centered on brick-and-mortar.

2:37As a result of that, we had a 30-year-old IT operating system for the company. We had a dot-com system that was on a decade-old platform. If you don't have modernized supply chain, IT infrastructure, digital infrastructure, e-commerce, then you are woefully behind. In his first year, Ellison immediately took a big swing at a giant upgrade. Soon after you started, you announced a$1.7 billion investment in infrastructure. Was that a big risk? You know what? It was not a big risk to me. I understand the value, the importance and the power of an efficient supply chain. And if a retailer does not have an efficient supply chain, they cannot operate in a sustainable fashion to serve customers at the right level.

3:27So I knew that we had to do that. It was Ellison's first high stakes decision as CEO. But he says the real risk would have been sticking with the old system. And at the time I took over, we were selling appliances literally out of the stock rooms and out of storage trailers behind the store. And it was a very inefficient model. And so we had to create a supply chain to take pressure off the stores. Right now, we're the largest seller of major appliances in the U.S. What did you learn about leadership from executing that bold decision and coming up with that plan? I just have just some really basic leadership philosophies that I lead by.

4:06One is I'm trying to create a company I wish I could have worked for at every level. And being decisive is another one. Leaders have to be decisive. And in just a few years, Ellison's decisive approach delivered, a modernized supply chain which increased revenue and led to a historic surge in low stock price. You made the decision to spend your first days in stores, not in the office. Yes. Tell me about why you decided instead of going and meeting with your C-suite executives, you wanted to come meet with the associates. I was actually traveling around the entire company kind of covertly just visiting stores, meeting associates, talking to suppliers.

4:49For me, it's the best way for me to learn because I get a lot of really fancy presentations as a CEO, but I just take those fancy presentations and I validate them against what I see and what I hear when I go to the stores and I talk to customers and I talk to associates. And so it wasn't anything other than for me sending a message to every associate in the company and every corporate executive that if your CEO can spend his first week physically in the stores, then maybe you all should do the same. Janice Dupree reports directly to Ellison as head of human resources. When Marvin Ellison first started making changes, was there resistance?

5:27No one wants big change. And this was sweeping change. And it was really change that if we didn't do it, I'm not sure where we'd be today. And we had the opportunity to gain alignment with the senior leadership team first. The field people got it a lot quicker than the corporate folks. And that's because he was in the field. They would see him walking the stores every week. So they knew he understood. The question was, did the rest understand? So that is where the shift came in. The culture shift was we gave voice to the 300 ,000 and not the smaller groups sitting at corporate. And that is where the transformation began.

6:05Ellison's goal was clear. He wanted to flip the company's culture from top-down leadership to a bottom-up approach. What was the inspiration for that approach? The inspiration started with that Marvin Ellison making$4.35 an hour working for Target, clocking in every day, wondering how the company could be different if the CEO and the executives were spending time in the stores. It was born from my experience. It was born from the experience of hearing my mother talk about how when she would be working on the factory floor and nobody would come in and talk to her. They would not talk to the hourly employees because they were not important enough and what they had to say was not of value.

6:47And so it was born from all of those experiences. The blueprint for Ellison's success at Lowe's was forged from experience. He spent 12 years climbing the corporate ladder at Home Depot, then faced a turnaround challenge as the CEO of JCPenney. His takeaway? Always keep it simple. What I learned as I continued to work my way through different jobs in corporate America is that success was really driven by how well your team can execute and how clear you could make division. And so I took a step back and I came to the realization that simple actually works. And so I had to teach that philosophy to a bunch of very smart people because when you're really smart, there's so many things in your head you want to do and there's so many actions you want to take.

7:33And so getting the company grounded on a couple of fundamental things, we actually called it retail fundamentals. Let's And so once we were able to put those principles in place, we started to see really good improving in execution and our results follow. Keeping things simple was the framework to modernizing key infrastructure and resetting culture to focus on employees. But just as Lowe's found its stride, the world changed overnight. A global pandemic puts Ellison and his new supply chain to the test. The immediate reaction was, can we keep our stores open and keep our associates safe? after the break.

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10:01After all, you listen to this show. See terms at discover.com slash credit card. By 2020, Lowe's CEO Marvin Ellison had a turnaround plan in motion, and it was paying off transitioning Lowe's from a legacy hardware chain into a modern-day retail giant. But his leadership was about to be tested. Just a couple years after you started as CEO of Lowe's, the company in the world was rocked by a global pandemic. What was your immediate reaction to the pandemic? The immediate reaction was, can we keep our stores open and keep our associates safe? That was job number one. And once again, he leaned on a principle that defines his leadership.

10:43Employees come first. Our jobs in corporate is to serve the people who serve our customers. Janice Dupree, head of Lowe's Human Resources, helped him create a path to get through the pandemic. It was really about those associates. Like we had people that were frontline associates that we were trying to figure out how to help them be able to show up at work every day because they're an hourly associate. If they don't work, they don't get paid. How do we support them? So we had to put policies and practices in place overnight to say if they're going out on COVID, they're going to keep getting paid.

11:15After prioritizing employee and store safety, Ellison turned to his next big problem, the global supply chain crisis. How much was at stake for Lowe's back then? If we had not taken the steps to shore up our supply chain, to create a more stable digital infrastructure and really investing in our sources, I can't imagine what that time period would have been like for the company. By 2021, pandemic-fueled home improvements boomed across America and renovation spending surged. Demand was so high both in-store and online, and so we had to make some incredibly quick pivots. We didn't even at that time have the ability to do curbside pickup.

11:59And so we had to build that real time. And the key was how do we work with our suppliers here in the U.S. and around the world to make sure that we are keeping the available products on hand. We just had this incredible acceleration on things that we had to do to serve the customer. And what it taught me is that when there's an urgent need to serve the customer, it's amazing how quickly you can move. That lesson inspired Ellison to streamline operations even further. The question was, what do we need to do to get all bureaucracy out of the way to deliver things that we know that are in high need for the community and the customers?

12:41What we learned from the pandemic is that a lot of steps we had in place for capital approval and technology development, they were really impeding speed and progress. And because the need was so urgent during the pandemic, we were able to get things done so much faster. And speeding up paid off. In the years after COVID, Lowe's posted record revenue driven largely by its modernized supply chain and faster decision making. We've been fortunate. There is no way we would have delivered the results that we've had over the last seven years without an incredible team that's really doing the work. And so it all starts with people, you know, and that's something that I'm a fundamental believer in.

13:22What is your system for diagnosing problems and solving them? So the first thing I do is I get all the leaders together and I give them an alignment quiz. And I ask them five questions. The first question is, what is the mission of the company or the department? What are the three things you're executing to achieve the mission? What are the top three measurements that you're focused on to drive success? Who is your customer? Define it. Who is your competition? Then I have a bonus question. What's the purpose of the company? And then we determine how aligned are we as an organization on the answers.

13:59And what you find out is 100 % of the time, if it's a function or a company in trouble, there is no alignment. And it always starts at the mission. Most people cannot define it. And if you can't define the mission, it's like being on a destination with no end in sight. And so it all starts with clarity. A clear vision, focused execution and aligned leadership turned around the company. But something much bigger defines this leader. It's hard to separate me from that because it's who I am. Plus the unexpected strategy that launched Ellison all the way to the C-suite. The way you get people to notice is you take jobs that nobody else wants.

14:41After the break. At Venture Global, we think about what can be done, not what's usually done. Through innovation, Venture Global is not only building some of the largest energy facilities in the world right here in the United States, but delivering American energy at a fraction of the cost in a fraction of the time. So while others are busy talking, we're busy building. That's Venture Global. that's unstoppable energy it's smart to always have a few financial goals and a really smart one you can set earning cash back on what you buy every day and with Discover you can get this Discover automatically matches all the cash back you've earned at the end of your first year seriously all of it and we trust you to make smart decisions after all you listen to this show See terms at discover.com slash credit card.

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16:14The approach Ellison relied on to lead and rebuild Lowe's is called servant leadership, and he learned it at the dinner table. My dad was a hardworking, honorable man. And when we would sit down for dinner at night, my mother was served first, the seven kids were served second, and my dad was served last because he was the servant leader of the house. It was his job to make sure that the family was taken care of. To me, that is the greatest definition of being a servant leader. And so So I always ask the question for every decision we make, how is this going to impact our frontline associates?

16:57Because that should be the first question. Then the next question is, how does this impact our customers? For Ellison, focusing on serving employees in the community isn't just good leadership, it's good business. The serving leadership part is what I believe in to my core. But I think philosophically, it is also a way that large public companies can create sustainable shareholder value. If you're not serving your associate and your customers and your communities, you can't sustain success. From a corporate philosophy standpoint, it makes perfect sense as well. And in 2025, you paid out$80 million in additional bonuses to store managers and assistant managers.

17:34What's behind this strategy? So many times when I was an assistant manager, store manager, hourly associate, trying to make ends meet, and I would read a headline that my company had record earnings, I felt disconnected from that. You know, record earnings for the company, but yet none of that flowed down. And so our philosophy is if we have an earnings outperformance, the first thing we do is figure out how much of that can we give back to our associates. Because when they see that headlines that we had a strong earnings quarter, I want them to feel the benefit of that. A benefit that Ellison says improves the customer experience and the bottom line.

18:15I think that is part of creating shareholder value. Having good retention rates on key leaders in those frontline jobs is so important. And the way you draw retention is making sure those people understand that they matter, that they just don't matter because they're a number on sheet of paper, but they matter because they are an intricate part of the company's success. At the heart of Elson's servant leadership is a strong work ethic and ambition, qualities shaped in his childhood. I grew up in a small town in western Tennessee. And when I say small, I mean about 10 ,000 people. And we live 12 miles in the country outside of the city limits.

18:54And I tell people I won the lottery with two winning tickets. I was born in America and I was born with two great parents. My parents taught us a couple of fundamental things, and that is you couldn't allow your surroundings to limit your vision of your future. My parents encouraged us about the power of education, the power of believing that you could be anything you wanted to be. And so I look back at that, and I'm incredibly fortunate. My dad is my ultimate role model. He's 83 years old now, and it's great that in one generation, he can go from Jim Crow segregation to seeing his son be the chairman, CEO of two Fortune 500 companies, and And that can only happen in America.

19:32You've talked about the importance of education and you worked multiple jobs to get through college. What did you learn from those jobs and that experience? Well, the one thing I learned is that you can't look at an employee at any level and try to make an assumption of who or what that person is because, you know, I unloaded trucks, I drove forklifts, I drove trucks. I was a janitor at a women's department store when I was in college. And so somebody could have easily looked at me pushing that mop around and thought that I was some guy down on his luck, not knowing that it was one of two jobs I had, trying to pay rent, buy books, and cover my tuition.

20:14So you can't look at the job and try to define the person. And so when I walk in a store, when I walk in a distribution center, and I see our employees we call associates working, I have enormous respect because I can easily identify with who they are, what they're doing, and in large cases, the journey that they're on because I was there. You've said that you've learned to let your background define you but not limit you. Yeah. And when you say define you, is that about authenticity and figuring out who you are? It's about not forgetting who you are. It defines me by reminding me that my faith is important because my parents believed so fiercely in that and they made sure that we understood the power of believing in God and believing in something greater than yourself.

21:03How has this faith that your family instilled in you impacted your vision as a leader? Well, it's really hard to separate me from that because it's who I am. So when I talk about it, it's not to boast or it's not to draw attention. It's just to be a reflection of authentically who I am. It's how I make decisions. when I think about being charitable, when I think about making decisions for people that are in less than situations than I am, I can go back to scriptures and define what that all means. Marvin has talked a lot about the core principles of hard work and faith. How do you see those in his leadership and now the way the company operates?

21:44The very first thing I saw was when he first joined and he signs his emails, God bless. And of course, you know, when people aren't prepared for that they're like what is this we shouldn't be able to do that and i'm like he's not telling you you have to convert he's just wishing you goodness and that's how he feels he should represent himself every day he's not expecting you to reply back with your religious backgrounds and i believe i don't that's not it at all it's his way of saying thank you my mother told me when i was younger and throughout my entire life whenever i struggled with any decision making she said just go read proverbs there's always wisdom you know in those words and so those are the things that i live by and when you take on a job like the ceo of a big public company there are a lot of forces coming at you and for me it's one of the ways that i don't get overly burdened with the pressures of the job because i know that there's a foundational thing in my faith that's more important than all of that.

22:41And I just believe that I take all of my natural abilities and all of my learned abilities and I make the best decisions I can. And for the things I don't control, I just pray about them and I move on. I don't worry. Ellison's journey from the small town to the C-suite was achieved with that faith and commitment to serving others. But none of it came easy. Why do you opt in to these tough, challenging roles? To give you an interesting statistic, for the last 25 years, every job that I've taken, I replaced somebody who was fired or forced out. And so to answer your question, when you don't have an impressive pedigree, when you don't have a resume that will stand out, the way you get people to notice is you take jobs that nobody else wants.

23:30Because if I can go into that situation and I can turn it around, then maybe that opens up another an opportunity for me. And so that's the path that I've been on for 25 plus years. And that requires a degree of self-confidence, a high degree of resilience, but it also forces you to understand the power of people because none of these assignments were successfully accomplished by myself. It was always a team working with me. Seeking out difficult jobs set him apart and rising above those challenges proved his value as a leader. What's your advice to young people, whether they're at college or just starting out, about how to rise through the ranks like you have?

24:16It's important to have a vision about what you want to achieve in life. It is important to understand that you cannot allow your surroundings limit your vision of your future or your aspirations. There is nothing special about me. I just believed in my heart of hearts that anything I desired to achieve, I could. And I've never been a victim. When things don't go well, I don't blame anybody. I look in the mirror and I ask the question, what can I do to get better? So have a vision of your future. Don't limit yourself. Be resilient because you're going to get knocked down. Don't be a victim. And make sure you take advantage of every single opportunity you can to get better.

25:00More valuable insights from some of the top business minds in the country on the next episode of Leaders Playbook.

25:30And everyone who dares to ask, what would you like the power to do? Bank of America, proud to be the official bank of U.S. soccer and FIFA World Cup 2026. Bank of America N.A. Member FDSC.