Deidre Duria started working at WW Grainger Inc. a decade ago as a temp in a distribution center outside Chicago. Today, she manages about 100 workers there. Noah Volling joined the company as a warehouse associate. Four promotions later, he’s a senior analyst scrutinizing customer purchases to reduce hiccups during ordering. And Rob Laughlin, who began his Grainger career 35 years ago as a part-time sales associate, is now a group vice president overseeing more than $8.5 billion in annual sales.
Corporate culture is notoriously hard to connect to metrics like sales and shareholder returns, but Grainger’s investment in leadership development — which helped ...