Sam Walton's rules of high-performing teams
What we can learn from Sam Walton and team Walmart
“To succeed in this world, you have to change all the time.”
––Sam Walton, “Made in America”
Between 1962 and 1990, Sam Walton and the Walmart team grew annual sales from $1.4 million to $26 billion–a 1,857,042 percentage point increase. During that same period, annual profits grew from $112,000 to $1 billion. This was a high-performing team that accomplished uncommon results.
What can we learn from Sam Walton and Walmart about how to build high-performing teams?
It turns out, a lot.
In the awe inspiring and moving Sam Walton autobiography, “Made in America'', he shares the story of how the Walmart team beat the odds to become the largest retailer in the world.
Throughout, Sam shares his principles for leading Walmart during this era of hyper-growth and his “rules” of building (and scaling) a high-performing team.
Here are five of Sam’s “rules” on building high-performing teams:
Leaders are there to serve the employees, not the other way around. Sam believed in servant leadership. If you want your team to take care of your customers, you have to make sure you’re taking care of your employees. Leaders are there to serve the employees, not the other way around.
Over-communicate. From the beginning, Walmart leadership shared most of their performance numbers with all of their employees. They believed that sharing this information was a vital part of enabling the team to do their jobs to the best of their abilities. The entire team had to know what was going on across the business. Senior leadership would talk about the numbers with store managers and associates, showing them how their decisions impacted those numbers. They taught everyone how to think about “operational control” (e.g., if we put these items on the end caps, sales will move this direction). I believe over-communication is a pre-requisite for pushing responsibility and decision making down in an organization.
Never stop learning. Sam Walton and I share the belief that you can learn from everybody. Sam didn’t just learn about how to build a great retailer by reading every retail publication, he studied his competitors. He wasn’t concerned about what his competition was doing wrong, he looked for what they were doing right. High-performing teams are always looking for information that can propel a company and its team forward.
Listen to everyone in the company. Great ideas happen everywhere in a company. High-performing teams and its leaders create environments where great ideas “bubble up” and people feel heard.
Stay out in front of change. High-performing teams feel uncomfortable with the status quo. They show up each day with a desire to make things run a little bit better than they did the day before.
“You can’t just keep doing what works one time, because everything around you is always changing. To succeed, you have to stay out in front of that change.” ––Sam Walton
Sam Walton’s autobiography moved and inspired me. His life story is filled with moments of courage, perseverance, determination, candor, self-reflection, and a life dedicated to learning and getting a little bit better each and every day.
I’m grateful for Sam sharing his story with all of us shortly before his passing in April 1992. The world of retail has changed a lot since then, but his “laws” of leadership and building high-performing teams have stood the test of time.
Until next time,
Jon