At the age of 10, Russell Shaffer was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa.
Shaffer – who is now senior director of global culture, diversity, equity & inclusion at Walmart – sat down with WorkingNation at 2022 Disability:IN Conference in Dallas.
Shaffer and his parents were told that he would lose his sight by specialists in Massachusetts. He says, “What they were off on was the timeline. They told me that I would go blind in my forties or my fifties. Instead by my late twenties, I had lost pretty much all usable vision.”
He continues, “For me, the most disabling thing that ever happened was not losing the ability to see. It was what losing the ability to see did to me emotionally and psychologically. I think that gets discounted, particularly for people with acquired disabilities or progressive conditions like my own, is that there is an emotional and psychological piece to the physical or sensory disability that often gets discounted or doesn’t get treated.”
Shaffer says early in his career, he did not disclose his disability. “It was easier for me to be able to conceal the fact that I had a disability as I was losing my vision. I could go in for an interview and I could pass, so to speak, during that interview period.”
He adds, “And I frankly didn’t feel comfortable with disclosing that I had vision loss because I knew that there was stigma. I had internalized bias.”
In high school and college, Shaffer worked at Walmart to help pay expenses. Some years later, Shaffer and his wife were trying to determine next steps and decided to move to Bentonville – where Walmart is headquartered – to try to get new jobs.
“That was Memorial Day weekend of 2005. By January of 2006, I was working in benefits communications at the corporate office. Putting that experience – working in our stores when I was in college together with the degree that I had and the little bit of professional experience that I had up until that point as a communications professional – that was the start of Act 2 my Walmart career,” says Shaffer.
He credits resources provided by the company as an impactful point in his life. “There was really no greater impact on my life and my career than finding an associate resource group. There’s no greater starting point or potentially more directly impactful thing that a company can do on its inclusion journey than having resource groups that give people a chance to plug in, connect, belong, find themselves, and hopefully, find their voice.”
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Dana Beth Ardi, PhD, Executive Committee, is a thought leader and expert in the fields of executive search, talent management, organizational design, assessment, leadership and coaching. As an innovator in the human capital movement, Ardi creates enhanced value in companies by matching the most sought after talent with the best opportunities. Ardi coaches boards and investors on the art and science of building high caliber management teams. She provides them with the necessary skills to seek out and attract top-level management, to design the ideal organizational architectures and to deploy people against strategy. Ardi unearths the way a business works and the most effective way for people to work in them.
Ardi is an experienced business executive and senior consultant who leverages business organizational transformation through talent strategies. She uses her knowledge and experience to develop talent strategies to enhance revenue and profit contributions. She has a deep expertise in change management and organizational effectiveness and has designed and built high performance cultures. Ardi has significant experience in mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, IPO’s and turnarounds.
Ardi is an expert on the multi-generational workforce. She understands the four intersecting generations of workers coming together in contemporary companies, each with their own mindsets, leadership and communications styles, values and motivations. Ardi is sought after to assist companies manage and thrive by bringing the generations together. Her book, Fall of the Alphas: How Beta Leaders Win Through Connection, Collaboration and Influence, will be published by St. Martin’s Press. The book reflects Ardi’s deep expertise in understanding organizations and our changing society. It focuses on building a winning culture, how companies must grow and evolve, and how talent influences and shapes communities of work. This is what she has coined “Corporate Anthropology.” It is a playbook on how modern companies must meet challenges – culturally, globally, digitally, across genders and generations.
Ardi is currently the Managing Director and Founder of Corporate Anthropology Advisors, LLC, a consulting company that provides human capital advisory and innovative solutions to companies building value through people. Corporate Anthropology works with organizations, their cultures, the way they grow and develop, and the people who are responsible for forming their communities of work.
Prior to her position at Corporate Anthropology Advisors, Ardi served as a Partner/Managing Director at the private equity firms CCMP Capital and JPMorgan Partners. She was a partner at Flatiron Partners, a venture capital firm working with early state companies where she pioneered the human capital role within an investment portfolio.
Ardi holds a BS from the State University of New York at Buffalo as well as a Masters degree and PhD from Boston College. She started her career as professor at the Graduate Center at Fordham University in New York.
