Rhode Island’s new Governor Helena Foulkes spent 25 years at CVS and lost her first election—she says failure and bad bosses made her a better leader

Amidst the wave of democratic victories in Tuesday’s 2026 midterm elections, Rhode Island voters elected Helena Foulkes, a former Fortune 500 executive, as their next governor.

Foulkes spent 25 years at CVS, eventually rising to president of its pharmacy division, before leaving to become CEO of Hudson’s Bay Company, the now-defunct Canadian department-store operator. She was also repeatedly named one of Fortune’s Most Powerful Women, reaching No. 12 on the list in both 2015 and 2016.

While becoming governor marks her first elected office, Foulkes’s career has been defined by ambitious pivots, taking chances, and learning to see failure as something other than a dead end.

“You can go for something and it doesn’t work, and yet other gifts come,” she said on a Harvard Business School podcast in 2024. “I’ve had a lot of those experiences in my life, in my career. I think it’s redefining what failure looks like and asking yourself, not only what could go wrong, but what could go right?”

Her own political career offered a recent example. In 2022, Foulkes first challenged incumbent Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee in the Democratic primary, losing by roughly 4,000 votes. Rather than walk away, she ran against him again in 2026. This time, she defeated McKee by more than 40,000 votes in the primary before winning the general election by more than a 100,000-vote margin.

It’s a lesson that echoes the advice Foulkes has offered young people navigating their own careers: “Do not hold yourself back. Go for it.”

A Harvard MBA alum, Foulkes says careers are like being a ‘marathoner’

Foulkes grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, as the oldest of five children. Her dad was a businessman while her mom stayed home to raise the family.

When she arrived at Harvard as an undergraduate in 1982, she had “no idea what I wanted to do,” she told Fortune in 2018. She studied economics before spending two years at Goldman Sachs and later taking what she described as a “relatively boring” finance job at Tiffany & Co. She eventually returned to Harvard Business School to earn her MBA.

After graduating, Foulkes joined CVS, where she would spend the next 25 years climbing the corporate ladder—but it wasn’t always easy. Foulkes acknowledged that early-career jobs don’t always live up to expectations, and that it’s easy to become discouraged when they don’t.

“It’s like being a marathoner,” she said. “Sometimes you’re going through some really hard things, and you’ve got a bad boss, and you’re in a crummy situation. I can tell you, I learned more in those moments than I did in the easy moments, and I became a better leader because of those moments.”

One of her secrets for landing promotion after promotion wasn’t sweating the small stuff—but rather always pushing for progress.

“Don’t wait so long for perfection on something, because you’re going to lose the attention, energy, and enthusiasm of the top team,” Foulkes said. “I focused really early on producing something tangible, then refining it and making it bigger. It was a constant journey, and it still is. That’s the fun thing about doing things like that.”

During her tenure at CVS, she helped launch the company’s loyalty program as well as playing a key role in its decision to stop selling tobacco. But she also faced scrutiny over the company’s role in the opioid crisis, which became an issue during her gubernatorial campaign.

Foulkes says career success means knowing when to move on

Even as Foulkes rose through the ranks at CVS, she had ambitions beyond her current role. She wanted to become its CEO but felt the path to the top was taking too long.

So in 2018, she took a leap into the unfamiliar, leaving after 25 years to become CEO of Hudson’s Bay Company, a struggling Canadian retailer that owned Saks Fifth Avenue at the time.

“I felt like I needed to get out of my comfort zone a little bit and do something different,” she told Fortune that same year. “I was liberated in many ways.”

While Foulkes kept the CEO job for just two years, the move reflected a broader lesson Foulkes had learned throughout her career: Sometimes advancing means taking a chance on something new rather than waiting for the perfect opportunity to come along.

That same willingness to take a risk has carried into politics. As she prepares to move into the governor’s office in the nation’s smallest state by area, Foulkes faces a new set of challenges, from affordability to data center development.

“I’m always trying to think about tapping into what makes you spark and what your special strengths are,” she said. “Sometimes I was good at that, and sometimes I wasn’t, but it has been a thread for me throughout my career.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com