force ideas to bubble up

This goes hand-in-hand with pushing responsibility down. We're always looking for new ways to encourage our associates out in the stores to push their ideas up through the system. We do a lot of this at Saturday morning meetings. We'll invite associates who have thought up something that's really worked well for their store - a particular item or a particular display - to come share those ideas with us.

The VPI (Volume Producing Item) contest is a perfect example of how we put this into practice. Everybody from the department manager level on up can choose an item of merchandise they want to promote - with big displays or whatever - and then we see whose item produces the highest volume. I've always thought of the VPI contest not just as a way to stimulate sales, but as a method of teaching our associates how to become better merchants, to show them what can be done by picking an item that's available and figuring out a creative way to sell it, or buy it, or both. It gives them the opportunity to act the way we need to in the early days. They can do crazy things, like pick an item and hang it all over a tree filled with stuffed monkeys in the middle of the store. Or drive a pickup truck into action alley and fill it with car-washing sponges.

We're not just looking for merchandising ideas from our associates. Our latest effort is a program called Yes We Can, Sam! - which, by the way, I did not name. Again, we invite hourly associates who have come up with money-saving ideas to attend our Saturday morning meeting. So far, we figure we've saved about $8 million a year off these ideas. And most of them are just common-sense kinds of things that nobody picks up on when we're all thinking about how big we are. They're the kinds of things that come from thinking small. One of my favorites came from an hourly associate in our traffic department who got to wondering why we were shipping all the fixtures we bought for our warehouses by common carrier when we own the largest private fleet of trucks in America. She figured out a program to backhaul those things on our own trucks and saved us over a half million dollars right there. So we brought her in, recognized her good thinking, and gave her a cash award. When you consider that there are 400,000 of us, it's obvious that there are more than a few good ideas out there waiting to be plucked.

Sam Walton

Sam Walton, Made in America by Sam Walton & John Huey. Bantam Books. 1992. p. 228, 229

thinking small: store within a store

I first began thinking about some of the very real ways that we could improve our teamwork and put more authority in the hands of our people in the stores.

Our most famous technique for doing this is a textbook example of thinking small. We call it Store Within a Store, and it's the simplest idea in the world. Again, in many big retail companies the department head is just an hourly employee going through the motions, somebody who punches a clock, then rips open boxes and stacks whatever's in them onto shelves. But we give our department heads the opportunity to become real merchants at a very early stage of the game. They can have the pride of proprietorship even if they weren't fortunate enough to go to college or be formally trained in business. They only have to want it bad enough, pay close attention, and work very hard at developing merchandising skills. We've had many cases where the experience has fired people up with ambition, and they've goin on to work their way through college and move on up in the company, and I hope we have many more cases like that.

Again, this only works because we decided a long time ago to share so much information about the company with our associates, rather than keep everything secretive. In Store Within a Store we make our department heads the managers of their own businesses, and in some cases these businesses are actually bigger in annual sales than a lot of our first Wal-Mart stores were. We share everything with them: the costs of their goods, the freight costs, the profit margins. We let them see how their store ranks with every other store in the company on a constant, running basis, and we give them incentives to want to win.

 

Sam Walton

Sam Walton, Made in America by Sam Walton & John Huey. Bantam Books. 1992. p. 227

crucial conversations

The ability to engage in crucial conversations, absent from the pervasive authoritarian leadership style of the past, is now recognized as an essential leadership skill. Because emotionally charged conversations can get messy, some leaders still prefer to avoid them, which creates a gap in leadership and can significantly impact employee morale, retention, and the company’s bottom line.

Jody Michael, Jody Michael Associates 

"13 Leadership Skills You Didn't Need A Decade Ago That Are Now Essential." Forbes. December 13, 2016

no time to stand on trifles

Having no authority whatever to do so, [George Washington] offered a bounty of ten dollars for all who would stay another six months after their enlistments expired that day – a considerable sum for men whose pay was six dollars a month.

“I feel the inconvenience of this advance.” Washington would later tell Congress. “But what was to be done?” To Robert Morris he said more bluntly, “I thought it no time to stand on trifles.”

David G. McCullough

1776. Simon & Schuster, 2005. p.285

a realistic sense of magnitude

One of the cliches of the campaign season is that a candidate has to want the job badly, to burn with ambition, to have “fire in the belly.” Otherwise, why elect someone to the demanding task of being president? Surely the first criteria is to want to be president very, very much.

The biblical model of leadership suggests otherwise. One of the striking features of leadership in the Hebrew bible is how often the people who become leaders don’t wish to be. When God first comes to Moses at the burning bush, Moses contrives a series of excuses—I don’t speak well, the people won’t listen to me—before he flat out asks God to simply choose someone else. God leaves Moses no choice, forcing him to shepherd the people out of Egypt.

The prophet Jeremiah has a similar reaction: He desperately does not wish to be a prophet, but finds that God’s word is like a “fire shut up in my bones,” and despite his desire he can’t seem to hold back from prophesying as God wishes. And perhaps most dramatically, the story of Jonah tells of a prophet who literally tries to flee from God only to be swallowed by a large fish that spits Jonah out on to dry land to prophesy and save the city of Nineveh.

Each is ultimately pressed into service, along with many others who are hesitant to become leaders. Yet once in the position of leadership, they serve effectively and in many cases, with astonishing devotion. The Bible seems to assume that reluctance in the face of a great task is the natural reaction of a healthy spirit, and that pursuing leadership is often a disfigurement of ego and not an essential attribute of authority.

So instead we have a parade of people who are certain they can solve all the problems of the world if we give them a vote. The biblical days when Samuel did not recognize that he was hearing God’s voice, or when Isaiah worried that he was of unclean lips—the age when leadership was tentative, hesitant and humble—has given way to an age when leadership is certain, declarative and boastful.

To doubt whether one can do a demanding job is to have a realistic sense of its magnitude. When candidates are convinced they will be great, I wonder not only if they overestimate themselves, but if they do not recognize the difficulties of the task. In our history we have seen certainty crumble into chaos. Better to elect someone who sees the enormity of the challenge and is humble in the face of being called to serve than someone who is certain of triumph.

Rabbi David Wolpe

"The Best Leaders Are the Ones Who Don’t Ask for the Job" Time. 10/7/2015

you already have permission

Act: “You Already Have Permission”: This is a challenging guideline for many managers, because it means switching from direct control to a trust relationship with the members of the team. This allows entire teams to change and transform the product and the internal processes in a flexible way, to adapt to different goals and changing markets, and to be overall more innovative and competitive. Removing the worry of “I need to get authorization” from every aspect of the work can be challenging, but it rewards business and people’s health greatly.

This is embraced at multiple levels inside Automattic as a rule. While there is still a long term vision from the top, each person and team is left to decide what’s best for the work that has to be done. The goals of the organizations are collected and discussed, teams set their own roadmap, goals and milestones and individuals can start initiatives on their own...

What is important is to recognize that people will want to give feedback or add their own shape to the idea.

Rawn Shah

"5 Leadership Attitudes From Flat Organizations" Forbes. 11/5/2015

socialized to think about success

Ari Weinzweig and Paul Saginaw understand the challenges [of Servant Leadership] better than most. The co-founders of Zingerman's Community of Businesses have built their $30 million food, restaurant, and training company on servant leadership principles. In the process, they've wrestled with three paradoxes. First, the higher you rise, the harder you must work for others; no kicking back in the Barcalounger of success allowed. Second, although you hold formal authority over employees, you must treat them like customers and, when reasonable, do their bidding. Third, when your desires and the needs of your organization conflict, your desires draw the low card. "It's a big change from the way we're socialized to think about success," says Weinzweig. "When you've put so much energy into getting to a leadership position, this is hard." 

Leigh Buchanan

In Praise of Selflessness: Why the best leaders are servants. Inc. magazine. May 1, 2007.