Sam Walton’s Leadership Lessons for Hoteliers
Albert BarraNovember 26, 2018 · 3 min read
Walmart, as we know it today, evolved from Sam Walton’s goal of offering great prices and outstanding customer service. “Mr. Sam”, as he was known, believed in leadership through service. This conviction that true leadership depends on a willingness to serve was the premise on which Walmart was built and has guided the decisions the company has made over the past 50 years. Much of Walmart’s history is tied to the story of Sam Walton himself, and much of Walmart’s future will be rooted in Mr. Sam’s principles.
But this success did not come from nowhere. Sam Walton followed a series of principles born both from his friendly, curious personality and from his ongoing concern for the wellbeing of employees and customers. In fact, the latter was one of Sam Walton’s great secrets to success.
Sam Walton believed that building a successful business comes down to 10 simple rules. These are the rules that helped Walmart become the global leader it is today, and that Walmart continues to apply in its business philosophy. They are as follows:
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Commit to your business. Believe in it more than anyone else. If you love your work, you will be there every day trying to do the very best you can. Before long, everyone around you will catch your passion. It is like a fever.
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Share your profits with all your associates (“associates”, as Walmart calls its employees) and treat them as partners. If you do, they will in turn treat you as a partner, and together you will all go beyond your most optimistic expectations.
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Motivate your partners. Money and ownership alone are not enough. Set high goals, encourage competition and keep the pressure on. Do not be predictable.
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Communicate with your partners; tell them how the business is doing. The more they know, the more they will understand. The more they understand, the more they will care. Once they care, there is no stopping them.
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Appreciate everything your associates do for the business. Nothing can replace a few well-chosen, timely and sincere words of encouragement. They are absolutely free and worth a fortune.
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Celebrate your success. Do not take everything so seriously. Relax, and everyone around you will relax too. Have fun and always show enthusiasm. It is all more fun than you think. That throws the competition off.
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Listen to everyone in your company and find ways to get them talking. To instil a sense of responsibility among those lower down in your organisation and encourage good ideas to emerge from there, you must listen to what your associates are trying to tell you.
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Exceed your customers’ expectations. Give them what they want and a little more. Correct all your mistakes and make no excuses; apologise. Stand behind everything you do and look closely at what went wrong.
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Control your expenses better than your competition. This is where you can always find a competitive advantage. You can make many mistakes and still succeed because you operate efficiently. Or you can be brilliant and still have to close the company because you are too inefficient.
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Swim upstream. Go in the opposite direction. Ignore conventional wisdom. If everyone else is doing it one way, you will most likely find your niche in the opposite direction.
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