Tony Spring career advice drawn from around four decades in retail covers listening before leading, showing your personality at work, mastering first impressions, and practising humility without sacrificing confidence, four principles Spring outlined on the How Leaders Lead with David Novak podcast.
Spring became chief executive of Macy’s in February 2024, having spent around 35 years at Bloomingdale’s before that, climbing from a store trainee in 1987 to CEO between 2014 and 2023. The podcast conversation gives a rare, methodical account of what he says actually shaped him across those years.
Hit the ground listening, not running
The first and perhaps most counterintuitive piece of Tony Spring career advice is a deliberate rejection of the idea that new hires should arrive and immediately prove themselves. ‘I’ll cut your legs off,’ he said on the podcast, when discussing the urge to hit the ground running. His preferred instruction: ‘Hit the ground listening.’
‘Honeymoons come once,’ Spring continued. ‘You want to learn. This is your time. No one’s expecting anything. You actually have the clearest view when you come into the company.’ New employees lack the institutional knowledge to have the right answers, he argued, but they carry something their longer-serving colleagues have lost: the ability to see things that familiarity has made invisible.
Spring said he applies the principle to himself. ‘I read every customer note I receive,’ he said during an earnings call, a commitment he described in the podcast as an extension of the same listening discipline.
Show your heart, not just your output
Early in his career, Spring planned to keep his head down and outwork everyone around him. A boss changed his thinking with a direct observation: people could see his shirt, his jacket, and his glasses, but ‘only you can show them your heart.’
Spring said those words reframed what he thought leadership looked like in practice. ‘Smiling, laughing, sharing some stories, being interested about what their lives are all about, is the smallest and simplest thing I can do, and can make the biggest difference in how people feel at work,’ he said. Competence, in other words, gets you to the room; warmth determines what happens once you are in it.
First impressions start before the customer walks in
Spring’s third lesson traces back to his very first job, at a Burger King at the age of 16. On his first day, he was sent out to clean the car park, with no explanation given. Only after he had finished did his team explain the rationale: the car park was the customer’s first impression, and everyone who worked at the restaurant had to understand how consequential that moment was.
The story has obvious parallels with retail, where a window display, a store entrance, or a website landing page functions as the same kind of threshold, but Spring told it as a universal lesson about taking seriously the parts of a job that appear mundane. He added, with some wry self-awareness, that the experience also taught him a second thing: ‘even though it looked like a lot of fun to work the fryer, it gets very hot.’ His advice, tongue in cheek: ‘Get out of the fry station as quickly as possible, learn how to work the drive-thru.’
Humility and confidence are not opposites
The fourth thread running through Spring’s Tony Spring career advice is a particular definition of humility. ‘Humility is not the absence of confidence or competence,’ he said, a line that pushes back against the idea that stepping back means stepping down.
As Macy’s CEO, he said, he finds value in letting workers call him by his first name, wearing jeans, talking to people about their families, and acknowledging when something meaningful, good or bad, happens in their lives. He described Macy’s as a ‘big family’ whose members ‘care about each other,’ and argued that internal care translates directly into care for the customer: ‘if we do that, then we’re going to care even more about the consumer.’