Arthur Valdez on belonging when the pressure is on

What this conversation is about

Arthur Valdez has spent more than thirty years in operations, supply chain and logistics, at Starbucks and before that at Target, Amazon and Walmart. He is also the son of Mexican-American and Cuban parents, and he mentors first-generation and minority college students. Glenn Llopis introduces him as someone who has guided his own reinventions.

This is the third episode in the special series for Make Reinvention Your Superpower, and it covers the sixth skill, Lead: using influence to strengthen your purpose. Glenn opened with a statement rather than a question:

"There is an urgent need for people to deconstruct what they've become to achieve in the world as it was, and reconstruct who they are in order to be ready to thrive in a future that's still unclear." — Glenn Llopis · 00:03:00

Valdez’s answer was personal rather than theoretical:

"It's being more of who you are outside of work and bring that inside of work. And what that means is it's okay to be you." — Arthur Valdez · 00:03:58

Chasing the shiny object

His phrase for the discomfort worth chasing is simple:

"I use a statement all the time that is growth is on the other side of discomfort." — Arthur Valdez · 00:04:51

But he draws a sharp line between that and ambition pointed at the wrong target. People chase the company that looks good on a résumé, or the boss whose name moves careers, and then find themselves unhappy:

"a lot of times what I see and what I try to mentor individuals is they're not happy. And the reason they're not happy is because they've started doing things that are not aligned to their personal passion principles." — Arthur Valdez · 00:06:27

The discomfort that counts, he says, is knowing what you want and what your superpower is, and then having the courage to move toward it. His own, by his account, is positive disruption: defining the operational problem precisely and digging until the root cause is visible.

Knowledge was power, until it wasn’t

Early in his career Valdez was told that knowledge is power, and he took it literally: learn the details, solve the problems. What changed as he led larger teams was what the knowledge was for.

"instead of keeping that knowledge as a power for your own ambitions, for your own aspirations, is how do you do that to inspire others, to inspire a team to want to do the same, to where they're learning? Because then it just multiplies" — Arthur Valdez · 00:13:00

Glenn stopped the conversation to point at what had just happened. Valdez did not accept the advice at face value; he worked out what it meant, and only then shared it. That is the difference between holding knowledge and being ready for the responsibility of passing it on.

Pressure, or belonging

The most useful part of the conversation is about the moment a team is behind. Every leader faces the fork: apply more pressure to force the result, or build an environment where people want to solve it together. Valdez came out of retirement from a previous company partly because he missed building the second kind.

"that's become the real measuring stick of my leadership today is no matter how tough the pressure is, am I creating a sense of belonging and teamwork?" — Arthur Valdez · 00:16:59

He is blunt about having tried the alternative:

"I've tried it all and the pressure never worked for me by the way. I actually chased people away versus brought people in." — Arthur Valdez · 00:16:59

His method for getting there is operational, not sentimental. Define the problem correctly, because a team that cannot see the problem argues about everything else. Then get everyone to say out loud what they bring and what they do not, so that one person’s weakness is covered by another’s strength and everyone knows their contribution matters.

When it stops being about you

Glenn asked what ties the skill together, and Valdez named what he considers the punchline of the book. You go through reinvention for yourself, which is as it should be. The sign that it worked is that it stops being about you, and the line at the top of this page is how he puts it.

Glenn drew the wider lesson for anyone listening: we have spent our lives following a playbook, and the work now is reinventing ourselves to contribute, at work and beyond it. Respect, he added, has to be earned by doing that work and then sharing how you did it, so someone else can start.

Valdez’s closing thought was about limits, which is a rare thing for a senior executive to volunteer: knowing what he can provide and what he cannot, and anchoring on the first so the team gets the result.