Leading for the Next Generation: Graybar CEO Kathy Mazzarella

Kathy Mazzarella: Every person in this world wants to matter. You can be a leader in an organization without even having the fancy titles. One of the key traits to a successful person is having resiliency. Our jobs as business leaders is to talk about how to get things done.

David Young: Today, I have the distinct privilege of speaking with one of our 2026 honorees, Kathy Mazzarella, the chairman, president, and CEO of Graybar, one of North America's leading distributors of electrical communications and data networking products, and a provider of supply chain management and logistic services.

As one of the largest employee-owned companies in North America, Graybar takes a distinctly long-term approach to business grounded in integrity, employee ownership, customer focus, and a commitment to leaving the company stronger for future generations. Kathy, welcome. We're so pleased to have you joining us today.

Kathy Mazzarella: Thank you for the opportunity to spend some time with you.

David Young: So Kathy, let's start by talking about you, your leadership journey, and the experiences that have shaped the way that you lead. You joined Graybar at age 19 and you went on to hold leadership roles across sales, marketing, human resources, strategic planning, and operations before becoming CEO in 2012.

Quite a remarkable career journey. Tell us a little bit more about this career journey, some of your reflections, and the experiences along the way that most prepared you to lead Graybar today.

Kathy Mazzarella: Appreciate the opportunity to chat with you, especially about this career. I've been very fortunate to find a company that shares the same values as I do personally.

And I tell young people all the time, that's the key, I think, to longevity at any organization and to a successful career is to find a company aligned with you. I grew up in Southern California and graduated from high school. I was one of those kids that was in honor society and top of my class, and I had a Baccalaureate science and math scholarship, so I went to upstate New York for college.

After about a year, I decided that wasn't the path I wanted for life, and so had to call my parents and tell them I was coming home. That was not a phone call that I really wanted to make, but I really had no choice at that point. So I moved in with my parents up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and about three days after I moved in, my parents and I mutually agreed I needed to move out and find a job.

So I went to a job interview, and at the ripe old age of 19, got lost driving around, asked for directions, went in, and a woman at the front desk said, "Hey, if you're looking for a job, want to take our test? We're hiring." And three days later, I started at the great company that I get to lead today. When I was hired, I was asked what I wanted to be, and the gentleman who hired me, his name's Roger Cutler, didn't laugh when I told him I wanted to be president. And I told him that because that's the way I was raised.

My dad said that "If you're going to do something in life, you always go for the top." And so here I am at 19, college dropout, had no idea what I was doing, didn't know business, didn't know the industry, didn't know anything, stepping into a job. And good old Roger saw something in me that I'm not sure I would've given myself a chance at the same age.

I think one of the first leadership lessons that I learned was from Roger. I tell people all the time, we need to all be Roger Cutlers. He was a leader who didn't have the high title. He was a middle-level manager but he realized that his job really was to develop the future of the organization and talent.

So Roger took an interest at me at a young age and helped me along the way, and continued to inspire me throughout my entire journey. When I became president in 2012, we hold this retiree reunion every year since our shareholders are all active or retired employees. So once a year we bring retirees together to thank them for their support.

And Roger came the first year that I was the president, and so I give a speech, and Roger comes up to me, and his hands are behind his back. And he says, "Kathy, I've been saving this for almost 30 years." And he said, "I've been saving this to give to you the day you became president of the company." And he pulls out my old nameplate from the day I started.

You used to have the nameplates on your desk? Yeah. He took it out of the office after I left and saved it all those years so that he could hand it to me. And he said, "I wanted to tell you that I kept this because I saw something in you, and I believed that you were going to get your dreams, and also to remind you of where you came from." And so it was an outstanding leadership lesson that you can be a leader in an organization without even having the fancy titles, right?

I went through sales, marketing, operations, HR, which was one of the pivotal jobs that I had. HR was a role that I turned down four times when I was offered the job, and the gentleman at the time, the CEO, just wouldn't let me not take the job.

He said, " It's a board position. You need to take the job." And I said, "No, I don't want to take the job because HR is more of a traditionally female job, and I've worked way too hard to just be one of the group, and I don't want it to do it," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he said, "Okay, what does it take? What is it going to take you to take over that job?" And I said, "Okay, two conditions. One is keep me in strategic planning so I keep a foot in the business, because I think HR should have a business role." And I said, "Two, before you leave the company, take me out of HR and put me back in the business so I don't end up there forever."

And he said, "Okay." That detour in my career is one of the reasons I'm probably CEO. I learned corporate governance. I learned about the structure of the organization. I saw some of the toughest things with people, but I also learned more about the power of employees, and not just what they could produce from a revenue side or productivity improvements, all that.

I'm talking about the power of our people in taking care of each other and taking care of customers. They never failed to step up, ever. The things that they would do to take care of each other... we had a situation where one of our employees was in an accident, and it was a terrible situation.

He was not near his house. It was in another part of the United States, and it was over a holiday weekend. So I get a phone call. I'm heading up HR. I get a phone call and said, "This such and such is in the hospital. His wife has been killed in the accident. He's with his children. We need support."

So the local manager, who didn't know this person but knew it was a Graybar fellow employee, spent the whole weekend taking care of the family and staying in the hospital with him because he was one of us. Those are the kind of things that I learned in HR that are irreplaceable from a leadership perspective.

One of the key traits to a successful person is having resiliency, being able to bounce back from setbacks or detours. Or like with me, I thought I was going to be a doctor. I'm not a doctor, as you obviously see. Life is up and down and sideways and stuff, and so learning how to overcome challenges is important.

When I had been a vice president for a number of years and I had worked really hard, and I was passed over for a promotion that I should have had, right? Or I thought I should have had. I was crushed, absolutely crushed, and my father told me to stop feeling sorry for myself. I called him and I was whining to him, and he said, "Look, I raised you better than that, and this is the biggest test you're ever going to have in your development professionally. People are going to watch how you recover from this and decide what you're really made of. If you have the grit, stamina, resiliency, do you put the company first?" And he said, "So I want you to stop feeling sorry for yourself and call the guy that you're going to report to now and tell him you've got his back."

So that's what I did. The lesson I learned was my father was correct. When I became CEO, one of the board members came up to me and told me that was the changing point of his opinion of me was how he saw me respond to that setback. He said, "Prior to that, I thought you were all about yourself, winning the awards, winning the sales contests. And then when I saw that you took a punch and you were knocked down, that you came back strong and you put the company ahead of your own ambition," he said. "That's when I thought you were deeper than what I originally thought, and that's one of the reasons I supported you to be president." And so those were some of the key things I would say from a leadership perspective that I probably learned along the way.

David Young: Yeah, really interesting, Kathy, when you talk about the power of employees and resiliency. Graybar has a particularly distinctive business model. As employees purchased the company, I believe, from Western Electric in 1929, making Graybar one of the first and largest employee-owned corporations in the US.

Nearly a century later, employee ownership remains central to the company's culture and its approach to financial stewardship. Graybar also explicitly identifies a long-term view as one of its core values and you mentioned just alignment on values earlier. The belief that long-term success is more important than short-term gains, and that each generation has a responsibility to keep the company stronger and healthier for the next generation.

How does employee ownership change the way that you lead and make decisions? And what can other business leaders learn from Graybar's focus on long-term stewardship?

Kathy Mazzarella: My favorite subject, of course, is employee ownership. Now, Graybar, as you mentioned, is very unique. We're a Fortune 500 company that's 100% owned by our employees.

We're technically a public company privately traded. It's a very unique structure. And since our employees and retirees own the company, our decisions really aren't just about today, which they are. We have to be adaptable, you have to be agile, you have to be competitive, but it really is about the long-term viability of the organization.

When I became CEO in 2012, we started talking about 2020, 2030, and the things we had to do from an investment perspective-- employee development, capital allocation, new opportunities, industrial spaces that we wanted to enter back then for that period of time. Where did we think the market was going to move?

Now, none of us have a crystal ball and you know how quickly things can change, but we try to balance the short-term needs with the long-term investments to make sure that we remain strong. The core value about the long-term view is extremely important when you look at our longevity, and it comes back to what you just described.

In 1925 when the company first broke off from Western Electric, it was one of the first initial public offerings of the United States. It was actually offered up to the public market saying, "We want to sell this, but there's a condition on the sale." And the condition on the sale was that they had to maintain the same level of benefits for the new company.

Whoever bought it had to maintain it as the employees had with Western Electric. Nobody would commit to that. And so in 1929, you think about the employees stepped up and bought the company for $9 million. They made the first installment of $3 million, and then within a year, not even a year, the Great Depression hit, and the company took a financial hit.

They basically over a couple years lost two-thirds of the revenue. So here's a start-up spinoff company, I call it the baby company, and all of a sudden it got hit with about something as hard as you're going to hit. So they laid off some employees and in Graybar's history, there's only been one year, knock on wood, that it lost money, and it was one of those years during the '30s, just one, which is amazing considering what they were up against.

But the gentleman at the time really demonstrated the long-term view. The president at the time decided, " We can't fold with this. We're not going to pull in with this. What we're going to do is expand." And the CEO decided to open 14 new locations during the Great Depression. So they actually invested when everybody else was pulling back.

You think about what was happening at the time. People were fighting for survival, and here's this new start-up kind of company who was investing in growth and expansion. In addition to that, they paid a cash dividend to every single shareholder. Graybar has never missed a cash dividend in its history, even during the Great Depression.

Because the leadership at the time, if you read the stories, it was so important to give support to the people who took their hard-earned money to invest in their own company to make sure that they were rewarded and received the benefits. So that whole long-term view isn't just something that we came up with because it sounds great and it's something that we thought of today.

It's really been one of the core values the company was anchored in since the '20s. When you look at long-term view too, it changes the perspective of how you define leadership. Leadership to us is really about stewardship. When I describe it to people, I say you've got this long continuum of Graybar, and we hope it continues for generations to come, right?

I've got the privilege to serve in this leadership role for a short period of time in that continuum. And my job is to make sure I leave it better for the future generations, to make sure that our decisions don't preclude the next generation of leaders from doing what they need to do to make the company strong and healthy and thrive.

For us, it really is about taking care of this precious entity we call Graybar to hand off to the next group. It also is about making decisions about what's right when it might not be the easiest decisions, and to make decisions based off of more than the financial impact. I'll give you an example.

When Hurricane Maria hit in 2017, Puerto Rico was pretty much destroyed. It wiped out a lot of the island, and we had an operation in Puerto Rico. We still do, but we had an operation in Puerto Rico that had been struggling for years, was financially not doing really well. We had been talking as a leadership team, "Do we sell it? Do we do something with it?"

When the hurricane hit, a lot of companies left Puerto Rico. A lot of companies decided to leave, and we were faced with that same choice. If we were going to close the operation or sell it, that would've been the time, after the hurricane. So we sat as a leadership team and we're discussing the options and we're going around the leadership table.

And I remember sitting there thinking, and this will sound really naive, but I remember thinking I can make this decision. What am I worried about the money? This is about the people. This is about making sure that our employees who lost all their homes had financial ability to rebuild, which means they had to stay employed, and if we didn't stay open, they wouldn't have any ability to rebuild.

So I said to my CFO, "Okay, let's say we have no business for five years. How much money are we going to lose?" So he gave me a number. And I looked at my leadership team and went around and said, "Okay, how much of this are you going to make up? All right." And I said, "Fine. Keep it open. Let's give the people a raise. Let's go. Game on."

David Young: Wow.

Kathy Mazzarella: Fast-forward a year later, they had a record year. We were one of the only ones left on the island. I went to go visit the families because I like after some kind of a difficult situation to see how everybody's doing, so I went to Puerto Rico. They had a huge party. I got to meet everybody's children, grandchildren.

It was wonderful. But the stories I heard of survival really humbled me as an executive. I sat there listening to stories where people thanked me because they said, "We were afraid you were going to leave us and we wouldn't be able to survive. We were afraid. We knew that we may not be able to produce any revenue, and we thought you were going to leave us stranded, but you didn't do it. Thank you for caring about us."

And if you looked at it strictly from the numbers, you would have closed. The irony is it's been making money ever since. It's been growing. We've expanded. And so the right human decision for the people really became also the right business decision. To me, when you look at employee ownership, that really describes to me the essence of what we should be looking for. You're investing in your people for the right reasons, and if you do that, the business results typically follow.

David Young: Yeah. Thank you. Kathy, let's talk about innovation and AI. It's hard not to talk about these topics today. Graybar has evolved alongside enormous technological change throughout its history over more than 100 years.

Today, that includes digital tools, automation, machine learning, and AI. You've talked about the need to balance the science of technology with the art of humanity. As AI transforms businesses, how do you capture the opportunities it creates without losing sight of people that you've spoken about, customers, and the fundamentals that have made Graybar successful?

Kathy Mazzarella: AI is the topic, right? That's all you're hearing about. I don't care where I am. At a grocery store, somebody'll be talking about AI. There's a lot of fear around AI. And yes, now we're hearing about all these stories about how we're going to cease to exist as humans and all this stuff.

But employees, when you talk to them, their biggest fear is, "Am I going to be out of a job? It's going to displace me. What am I going to do? Is my job safe?" And so the way we've always viewed AI is that it's a powerful tool, but it's not a strategy. AI really requires us trying to figure out what the business needs are and introduce technology to address those business needs while balancing it with the things that only people can provide to your business.

Technology we know can analyze data, automate work, can improve forecasts, improve productivity. But the one thing that we need people for is really judgment, creativity, developing relationships, and the most important thing for business for us is trust, that human beings are the best at creating trust.

And if we're going to have long-term relationships with our customers and our suppliers, it's really about trust, and people can do that and people do it best. The way we look at AI is we start with the business problem, not the technology. And so we'll identify something where it's either routine business that isn't providing higher value to our customers, or it's something that we find is just draining us as an organization.

And then we'll take the technology, and especially around AI, and try to apply it to either eliminate the routine work or to improve the productivity of the employees. And so for us, it's about helping employees work smarter, decide better, and to serve customers better. I tell employees all the time, "The job you have today may not be the job you have tomorrow."

Maybe. And in some cases, jobs will be eliminated with technology. But what it allows us to do is to reskill them and upskill them and train them on new skills and to take them and point them toward the things that actually provide the value to the customer. We're not going to replace humans in the equation.

The deal is really to enhance the abilities that our people have so that they can even raise up for more, so they can develop more skills, and they feel that they're more effective, and also to help our customers become more productive.

David Young: Graybar describes its employees, and I think this is incredibly powerful, as the heart and soul of the company. Its ownership culture emphasizes accountability and shared success, but also dignity, respect, collaboration, and creating opportunities for people from different backgrounds and experiences to grow, learn, and make a difference. As you look at this and you look at Graybar, how do you create this culture where people feel a genuine sense of ownership and responsibility for one another's success?

And how does that translate into business performance? Because I think it's one of these things people can talk about, but they don't actually put it into action. If they do put it into action, does it actually drive business success and performance?

Kathy Mazzarella: Employee ownership culture is built on trust, respect, and accountability, where we all have to show up with our best and to do our best. It really gives people a direct stake in the outcome. It's more than a financial commitment. Really, it is a mindset when you think about it. It's recognizing the fact that we win together and we lose together, and we do. In addition to just the stock part of our program, we also have profit sharing.

Everybody gets the same percentage of profit sharing every year, or we don't get any profit sharing if it's a really rough year. There's been years I've been at Graybar we didn't get profit sharing because the performance just wasn't there. Again, we really do win together or lose together.

Employees that have this employee ownership culture, we want to make sure that they understand that they make a difference in the performance of the company. At the end of the day, every employee, every leader, every person in this world wants to matter. They want to make sure that they're seen. They want to make sure that somebody cares about them.

They want to make sure that they leave an impact, right? That they can actually help something move forward or help a person with success. Creating that on a daily basis becomes really the essence of employee ownership-- that every person, regardless of the role you have in this company, impacts the results of our organization and can make a difference, and in many cases, make a big difference.

So they tend to look beyond their immediate roles and look at things that impact the customer on a broad scale. We have employee feedback. We have all these type of things. And when you look at it, though, for us, employee ownership supports performance. And it's pretty basic. Strong culture drives employee engagement.

Employee engagement has been shown to improve customer experience. Strong customer experience drives business results. Our average customer has been a customer of ours over 30 years. Think about that, 30 years. Customers don't come back for 30-plus years. Some of them are 50, 75 years with us. Multi-generational family businesses keep buying from us.

Why do they do that? Not because of me, not because of the things I do, but because each one of our employees who are on that front line feel a responsibility to take care of them because it helps the overall company. Part of this sense of ownership is thanking the people for what they do, recognizing them, paying attention to them, taking an interest in their career development, and ensuring that we provide an environment where they have an economic opportunity to live the life they choose to live how they choose to live it.

To me, we can do that, we win at this game.

David Young: Yeah. And as you say, you win together and you lose together.

Kathy Mazzarella: Absolutely ...

David Young: Yeah. Kathy, closing reflections here for you. Throughout today's conversation, a common thread has been holding a long-term view, investing in people, preserving a strong company for the next generation, and recognizing that leadership carries responsibilities beyond quarterly results. As you look to the future, what gives you a sense of optimism about the ability of business leaders to help build a stronger, more prosperous society?

Kathy Mazzarella: Business leaders care about their people. Large businesses get a bad rap at times, and it's like anything. There are good people, and there are people that are not so nice. It's just in life in general. And too often we get branded as business leaders that all we care about is the bottom line and all this, but not really.

When you talk to CEOs, and you speak to a lot of them, they truly care about making a positive impact for people. But what gives me the most optimism literally are the people. When you get around and you meet your front line and you hear their stories, you hear their excitement, how they solve problems, you hear about their dreams for the future, what they want to do, what they're going to do.

You hear the stories about their children and how they're going to contribute to having their children be successful, how they're going to help their customers become better and stronger, and you hear about their dreams. To me, there's an optimism and excitement that we should be building upon as leaders and to make sure that we share that same optimism, and make sure we talk about with our people and talk about people in society in general, not about what's always what's wrong.

Our jobs as business leaders is to talk about how to get things done, the possibility of dreaming big and doing what we were built upon, this country was built upon, which is big dreams, bold progress, and helping provide an opportunity to raise everybody up. In my 47 years in this business, I have never been more excited about the opportunities, the world I live in around innovation, around AI, electrification, robotics, automation, the digital infrastructure.

You look at this, and it's not just about what it's going to do for business, but how will it benefit society? By providing people across the world with tools that can connect them, can network them, provide them with energy, provide them with clean water, provide them with housing, provide them with education.

Those are all things as business leaders that we can leave a lasting impact to help society. When you look at the positive momentum, instead of us focusing on all the bad, why don't we as the business leaders focus on the art of that possibility, of what the dreams are, and what we can do to impact and move our people forward to attain their dreams?

That's what gives me optimism.

David Young: It's very inspiring words as well as I've just written down here, the art of the possibility and this country is built on big dreams. And this gets to our closing question. I want to kind of circle back to the opening question that I asked you.

But when you reflect, Kathy, on your own journey, and I've gotta say it is a remarkable journey. Joining Graybar at 19, leading the company today. I'm not sure there's a position in the organization that you haven't held. You're incredibly well-respected and inspiring, and you speak with a tremendous amount of passion.

When you look at the legacy that you want to leave for generations of employee owners who will follow you, how do you begin to articulate that legacy?

Kathy Mazzarella: You get asked that question when you're old and you've been around a long time. I try to encourage college students to start thinking about their legacy, because a legacy actually starts in every interaction you have with people, even early in your life.

You build a legacy over your lifetime. The basic stuff is pretty straightforward. You want to leave people's lives better, leave Graybar stronger and stuff. But there was a note, and bear with me, it'll take a minute, but I do want to read this to you because I would like my legacy to be this.

And this was written when a good friend of mine retired from the company. She was a long-term Graybar employee, and her husband posted this on Facebook. And we have permission to use it, so I use this a lot because it really is what I would like to do. This to me, if I can do this for one family, then I would consider me successful, right?

Myself successful as a CEO. So bear with me. Let me read this real quick, if you're okay with that.

David Young: Yeah, absolutely.

Kathy Mazzarella: Okay. "What 30 years of consistent and steady paychecks have done for an employee and her family: Has helped with a roof over our heads all paid for. Gave us enough strength, gave us enough to share part of our income to serve humanity.

Helped educate our two daughters in the very best schools and universities. One is already a physician, and the other on her way to become one. Gave us many beautiful memories with hundreds of friends around the world. Gave us the courage to see money as our secondary and put the humanity as our primary objective.

Gave us the freedom to smile regardless of the outcome of any situation. It made us safe, happy, loving, caring, giving, and made us better people that love everyone without any expectations. With our sincere love and respect to the great company, Graybar, and the people who make this company great, thank you for helping one first-generation immigrant family be better citizens of this great nation, the United States of America."

If I can provide an opportunity for one of our employees and their families to live the life that they choose just like they did, that's my legacy, and I would consider I did my job.

David Young: Kathy Mazzarella, thank you. I'm going to say incredibly powerful closing reflections, and we really appreciate you sharing them, and we are delighted and really appreciate you joining us today.

And many congratulations from everyone at The Conference Board on being a recipient of the Distinguished Leadership Awards this year. And I can't state this part enough, but we are looking forward to celebrating you and the entire Graybar community and organization in New York City this October.

Many congratulations to you and the entire organization, and thank you again for sharing your insights, your reflections, your life story today. It has been an absolute privilege to speak with you.

Kathy Mazzarella: Thank you for the opportunity to talk about my favorite subject, Graybar.