TAKE A TIP FROM WALMART
Source: The Cycle of Leadership
All organizations have routing processes through which they coordinate and control their normal business operations. These operating mechanisms keep the organization functioning day-to-day, and year-to-year.
Wal-Mart is headquartered in Bentoville, Arkansas, but members of its senior team spend most of their time on the road. Every week, the top leaders of the company fan out across the country. They visit both Wal-Mart stores and its competitors’ and return home at the end of the week with fresh information about what is going on in the marketplace – what is selling where, how the competition is trying to attack Wal-Mart, ideas for new promotions, etc.
Back in Bentoville, they gather to share their findings with each other and revise their strategy for the coming week. On Saturday, they hold a videoconference with thousands of store managers to bring them up to date on the Teachable Point of View* for the coming week’s operations. Then, on Monday, they head out again.
This process has given Wal-Mart the agility that makes it a consistent winner in the marketplace. It is a huge company with the speed and flexibility of a small one. The Wal-Mart leaders’ weekly cycle of going out into the field and then returning home to share their findings is the operating mechanism through which they calibrate and refine their strategy on a weekly basis.
Although the people at Wal-Mart don’t use the term, it is also a Virtuous Teaching Cycle**. Out in the field, the senior leaders are taught by store managers, customers, and competitors. At the same time, they also teach and coach the store managers. Then, when they get back home, the senior leaders share what they have learned with their colleagues and together they revise their strategic point of view. The final step is that they teach it to the store managers before they head out to start all over again. Week after week, they go out and learn, come home to think and revise, teach their new conclusions, and then go back out.
* A Teachable Point of View is a cohesive set of ideas and concepts that a person is able to articulate clearly to others. A leader should be able to externalize the tacit knowledge within them; they must draw lessons from their experiences and then convey those lessons in a form so that others can use it.
** The continuous teaching that takes place in a winning organization is of an interactive, two-way kind. Throughout the organization, "teachers" and "students" at all levels teach and learn from each other, and their interactions create a Virtuous Teaching Cycle that keeps generating more learning, more teaching and the creation of new knowledge. Virtuous teaching cycles are what keep people in winning companies getting smarter, more aligned and more energized every day.