Home Depot CEO Medical Leave: $47.9B Quarter
If your CEO’s medical leave can stall the business, you have built a $47.9 billion single point of failure. Home Depot’s response shows the alternative.
Home Depot just reported a $47.9 billion quarter while its CEO was on medical leave. If that sounds alarming, you have misunderstood what a properly run company is supposed to look like.
Too many businesses are built around one person’s calendar, instincts and ability to answer Slack messages at 11:47pm. That is not leadership. It is a highly paid single point of failure.
On August 12, Home Depot chair, president and CEO Ted Decker began a temporary medical leave, with the company expecting him to return within the next few months. The board did not slap an “interim CEO” badge on one executive and hope for the best. It split the work.
Ann-Marie Campbell, senior executive vice president, took oversight of day-to-day operations. Richard McPhail, executive vice president and CFO, took financial management and the company’s Pro subsidiaries. Independent lead director Greg Brenneman took the board chair role during Decker’s absence.
Then, on August 18, the business delivered second-quarter sales of $47.9 billion, up 5.7% year on year. Comparable sales rose 1.7%, including a 1.3% gain in the US. Net earnings came in at $4.8 billion, or $4.79 per diluted share. Home Depot reaffirmed its full-year guidance.
That is not a victory lap for a medical leave. Nobody outside Decker’s circle needs to speculate about his health, and sensible people will not. It is a leadership lesson: when the chief executive is unavailable, the company should be able to keep serving customers, allocating capital and making decisions without behaving like a pub team that has lost its captain.
Home Depot did not replace Ted Decker. It unbundled his job.
The board’s move matters because it recognised a fact most companies hide from: “CEO” is not one job.
At a business of Home Depot’s scale, the role contains at least three distinct jobs. There is the operating job: stores, frontline teams, customers, inventory, supply chain and execution. There is the capital-allocation job: margin, investment, debt, acquisitions, real estate and the long-term economics of every big bet. Then there is the governance job: the board, shareholder accountability, executive oversight and decisions that need an independent voice.
Home Depot divided those responsibilities among Campbell, McPhail and Brenneman.
Campbell is not some glossy succession-plan name pulled from a consulting deck. She started at Home Depot as a cashier in South Florida in 1985. More than 40 years later, she oversees US stores and operations, Canada, Mexico, outside sales and service. Her remit touches more than 2,300 stores and more than 400,000 associates.
That is where the actual business lives. Not in the strategy PowerPoint. In stores. In stock availability. In how a tradie, a homeowner or a contractor is treated when something is wrong and they need it fixed today.
McPhail, meanwhile, is the finance bloke with a much broader commercial remit than the stereotypical spreadsheet custodian. He joined Home Depot in 2005 and is responsible for financial operations, capital allocation, strategy, real estate and strategic business development. During Decker’s leave, he also oversees the Pro subsidiaries—an especially important patch of the map as Home Depot builds deeper relationships with professional customers.
The result is not a co-CEO circus. It is a clear division between the person closest to operating execution and the person accountable for financial discipline and strategic resource allocation.
Frankly, plenty of founders would be better off admitting they need exactly this arrangement before the board is forced to make it for them.
The $47.9 billion result is useful evidence, not proof of immortality
Home Depot’s second-quarter numbers were good. Sales rose $2.6 billion from the same period a year earlier. Adjusted diluted earnings per share were $4.92, against $4.68 a year earlier. The company says customers continued to engage in smaller projects, even while the broader housing environment remained sluggish.
That last bit is important.
This was not a business getting dragged forward by some miraculous boom. Home Depot is operating in a market where customers have been more cautious on larger projects. Its own guidance remains measured: total sales growth of roughly 2.5% to 4.5%, comparable sales ranging from flat to up 2%, and diluted earnings-per-share growth of roughly flat to 4% for fiscal 2026.
In other words, this is not easy-mode retail. It is a large, mature operator executing through a choppy environment.
At the end of the quarter, Home Depot had 2,364 retail stores, more than 1,340 SRS locations and more than 470,000 associates. A business that size does not succeed because one person gives a rousing speech at headquarters. It succeeds because thousands of small decisions are made well, repeatedly, by people who know what they own.
That is the standard founders and investors should apply to any company claiming it has a “strong leadership bench.” Not whether the bench looks impressive on LinkedIn. Ask a harder question: if the CEO disappears for 90 days, can the business still hit its numbers, make decisions and keep its best people calm?
Home Depot has offered a reasonable answer.
The overlooked point: temporary leadership is a live-fire succession test
Most succession plans are fiction until the person at the top is unavailable.
Boards love talking about succession because it sounds responsible. They commission profiles, compare candidates, list competencies and reassure shareholders that there is a plan somewhere in a secure folder. Then a surprise happens and everyone discovers the plan was really just a list of names.
A real succession system has operating muscle. It tells people who decides what. It defines which decisions stay local, which go to the executive team and which need board sign-off. It gives the next layer genuine responsibility before the emergency arrives.
Home Depot’s response has that shape. Campbell has the operational mandate. McPhail has financial management and Pro subsidiaries. Brenneman chairs the board. Employees, suppliers and investors are not left guessing whose call it is.
The company also avoided a common mistake: pretending the chief executive’s absence has no consequence. It disclosed the leave, set an expectation that Decker is expected to return within months, named the executives responsible and moved on to running the business.
That is adult corporate behaviour. It is not dramatic, which is exactly why it is valuable.
For investors, the episode is a reminder that key-person risk is not just a startup problem. It can exist at any size. If all major commercial relationships, capital decisions and cultural authority run through one individual, your business may look powerful while being structurally fragile.
For boards, it is a warning against the lazy habit of treating succession as a CEO replacement exercise. The better question is: which parts of the CEO’s role can be separated today, assigned to capable leaders and stress-tested before a crisis?
Don’t get too romantic about the cashier-to-corner-office story
Campbell’s rise from cashier to senior executive is a terrific story. It is also easy to turn it into corporate wallpaper.
The real value is not that it makes a nice keynote slide. The value is that her career appears to have given her operational credibility across the organisation. She has held store, district, regional, merchandising, marketing, vendor-services and divisional roles. That is hard-earned pattern recognition.
But here is the contrarian point: internal promotion is not automatically brilliant, and external hires are not automatically reckless. The right answer depends on what the company needs next.
If your problem is execution, complexity and culture, an internal operator with deep institutional understanding can be a weapon. If your problem is that the whole strategy is obsolete, the business may need an outsider willing to break furniture.
Home Depot’s current arrangement leans into continuity because continuity is what the moment calls for. The company has a clear operating model, a massive frontline workforce, a professional-customer growth agenda and reaffirmed guidance. It does not need someone arriving on a white horse with a 100-day transformation plan and a consulting firm in tow.
It needs the shelves stocked, the Pro customers served, capital allocated intelligently and the team focused.
That is not sexy. It is how money is made.
The bigger lesson is that founders should deliberately become less essential
I have met plenty of founders who say they want scale, then personally approve every meaningful hire, discount, supplier agreement and product change. They do not want scale. They want a larger version of themselves.
That approach works right up until it doesn’t. Usually the bill arrives when the founder is exhausted, the company is too complex, good executives have stopped taking ownership, and every decision backs up behind one desk.
The solution is not to become irrelevant. It is to become selectively essential.
Keep ownership of the few decisions that genuinely need your judgment: mission, capital allocation, senior talent, major strategic pivots and standards. Push the rest to leaders with clear mandates, visible scorecards and authority that is real rather than decorative.
Home Depot’s split model is a useful template. Operations should be led by the person who lives closest to customers and delivery. Finance and strategic investment should sit with someone who understands the numbers and commercial trade-offs. Governance needs an independent board voice, particularly when the CEO is unavailable.
You may not have 470,000 employees or $47.9 billion in quarterly sales. Lucky you—your org chart can be fixed before it needs three lawyers and a board committee.
What this means for you
Do this next week, not at the next off-site where everybody gets excited and nothing changes.
First, list the ten decisions that currently stall when you are unavailable. Be honest. If pricing, hiring, customer concessions, product priorities or supplier negotiations stop because you are on a plane, you have found your bottlenecks.
Second, assign each decision to a named owner. Not a department. A person. Define the financial threshold, the expected outcome and when they must escalate. “Use your judgment” is not delegation; it is a future argument.
Third, run a two-week absence drill. Do not vanish theatrically. Tell your leadership team you will be offline except for genuine emergencies. Watch what comes back to you anyway. That list is your real management problem.
Fourth, separate operating leadership from capital allocation in your own head. The best person to run daily execution is not always the best person to decide acquisitions, debt, hiring pace or strategic investment. One person can do both, but do not assume they can just because their business card says CEO.
Finally, tell your board, investors and senior team what happens if you are unavailable. Certainty beats theatre. A company that can explain continuity calmly is more valuable than one built around a hero.
Ted Decker is expected back. Good. But the sharper takeaway from Home Depot’s $47.9 billion quarter is this: the business did not need to wait for him to keep moving. That is what leadership looks like when it has been built properly.