Raise Your Game: Walmart’s Approach To Leadership

Oct 25, 2010 • 26 Min Podcast

One of the unique things about Walmart is the type of people that they hire – old people who are friendly. Customers enjoy having small-talks with them whilst paying for their grocery items.

It seems like Walmart is easy to be built or developed, but no one has ever managed to imitate its concept. This is solely because it’s purpose-driven. It starts off with a thought of wanting every item in the store to be cost-effective or affordable to everyone. To successfully implement this idea, Sam Walton builds the store in rural areas (where rental fee is low). Then, he only works with national brands.

The secret behind Walmart’s success lies within Sam’s style of getting each manager of each Walmart store communicate with each other through a video conference every Saturday.

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Leaderonomics x BFM

Tune in to listen to various Leaderonomers interviewed on pertinent leadership topics on BFM radio.

A senior L&D manager I spoke with recently described her quarterly ritual with weary precision. Every three months, she rewrites the same leadership development deck, the one on giving difficult feedback, polishes the talking points, books a room, and watches a third of the registrants quietly skip the session. The slides are good. The content is sound. And almost nobody finishes the self-paced PDF version she emails afterwards as a "convenient alternative." Her completion data is a graveyard of good intentions. She is not alone, and the problem is not the quality of her material. It is the format.

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