Kroger Exec Traces Her Path to Career Success
For “Leadership Differentiators at Kroger,” a session at Progressive Grocer’s Grocery Impact event last week in Orlando, Fla., Mary Ellen Adcock, SVP of operations at The Kroger Co. and a 2022 Top Women in Grocery Retail Trailblazer Award recipient, took part in a fireside chat with PG’s newly promoted editorial director and associate publisher, Gina Acosta, during which the two discussed Adcock’s leadership style, career trajectory and operational excellence vision for America’s largest supermarket retailer.
Having grown up in a small town in Kentucky with one Kroger store, Adcock joined the company in 1999, which was also the year she got married. She originally started out in HR, but then went back to school, earned her MBA and moved into operations, which led to various opportunities in manufacturing and merchandising, before she took on her present role three years ago. “My career is not unique [in] that I’ve had a lot of different paths,” noted Adcock. “I think that’s the exciting thing, is that there’s no one path to what your ambition is going to be.”
She added: “I always do think that you want to be open to new experiences and be willing to take a risk. It was a risk to go from human resources to operations, from manufacturing to merchandising, but that’s OK. If you don’t take risks, then you don’t expand.”
Asked by Acosta about the current retail landscape, Adcock replied: “The exciting thing is that there’s a tremendous amount of change, which I view as healthy and exciting. I think if you’re in this industry that you enjoy change; it’s always adapting and changing, and there’s been so much change over time.” Noting in particular the evolution of digital at retail, she observed: “You wouldn’t have thought 10, 15 years ago the great opportunity you have for customers to be able to shop [for] delivery [or] pickup online. … [W]e have jobs that didn’t even exist five and 10 years ago, and [there will] continue to be jobs that we don’t even know what those are today, what they’ll evolve to.”
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On the subject of her unique leadership style, Adcock cited what she’s learned from her mentors and applied in her own interactions: a focus on delivering results, the ability to inspire people and listen to their suggestions and concerns, and the necessity of accepting and absorbing honest feedback from those you trust.
The role of a leader at Kroger, she noted, is to “empower our associates and bring out the greatest in our teams and our individuals. That’s what makes the difference, and that’s what makes it special. All of our team members have really great ideas, and they’re all really focused on the customer. … They really want to take care of the customer, and how do you connect to that? Part of that, from Kroger’s standpoint, is having a culture where people can use their voice and bring those [viewpoints] to make us better, because great ideas happen all throughout the organization, all different places. You just have to ask, and people will bring up ideas.”
Regarding work-life balance, Adcock offered the opinion that the term “is a little bit of a misnomer, because it kind of implies that it’s very balanced and very tidy and everything is neat and equal, and from my experience … it’s not equal all the time and it’s always up and down and up and down. My experience has been you just have to embrace that that’s how it’s going to be.” She also noted that when it came to her own experience as a working mom, “I don’t compare myself [to others]. … It has to be what works for you. It has to work for your family.”
As equality continues to evolve at Kroger and in the broader grocery industry, Adcock took the time to consider the top lessons learned during her career. These included having mentors and being a mentor, but to take the initiative in such relationships, and that it’s okay not to have all of the answers and to reach out for help.
On challenging days, she said that she reminds herself: “This is not about me. This is about the bigger picture. This is about our purpose, to Feed the Human Spirit and just staying true to that North Star. Then the best thing for me is to go into the stores and engage with our associates, because it’ll remind you why we do this.”
Attendees of the session came away with the knowledge that Adcock’s tenure at grocery more than lives up to the goals of the company where she learned how to lead: “As we say at Kroger, come for a job, discover a career.”
