5 Tips to Strengthen Business & Team Performance

 I was so pleased to visit with Mars Wrigley President of Sales Tim LeBel and the Mars Wrigley team this week during a virtual meeting of their top 100 leaders representing a variety of business functions across their company. We covered a range of topics from Walmart’s comprehensive response to COVID-19 and how we are taking care of customers, associates and suppliers to the need to move with pace in an increasingly dynamic retail environment and how to achieve the ever elusive work-life balance (spoiler alert: it’s a myth!) I want to share a few highlights from our conversation.

1.      Focus on the Customer

Ask anyone at Walmart who ultimately is our boss and they’ll tell you “the customer.” Sam Walton firmly believed this and nearly sixty years after he opened the first Walmart in Rogers, Arkansas, it’s a principle that remains at the center of everything we do and every decision we make. To remain successful we need to understand our customers’ changing needs. What products do they want? How do they want to shop? How do they want to receive their products? The same is true for our supplier partners – to remain successful, suppliers must stay laser focused on the Walmart customer. This begins by making sure core products are fully in stock and that we also have new and innovative products for customers to discover. It continues with innovating systems and ways of working to ensure you are moving with us as we continue to set the pace of innovation in retail.

2.      Move with Speed

Customer trends are changing and will continue to change. We must follow our customers and move with speed to serve them whenever, wherever and however they want to shop. At Walmart, we are fully dedicated to reimagining the customer experience by putting our customer first and then building our capabilities and fulfillment models to meet their needs. Walmart Grocery Pickup and Walmart+ are just two recent examples of the innovation that comes from having a truly customer-first perspective. We need our supplier partners to join us on this journey. As we continue to innovate how we reach and serve customers, how will suppliers innovate to drive sales and continue to delight our customers?

3.      Set a Growth Mindset

Your results say a lot about the mindset with which you approach your business. Incremental results often point to an incremental mindset. I encourage suppliers to approach their relationship with Walmart with a growth mindset that compels them to find solutions to customer needs. Again, keeping the customer at the center—having a customer mindset rather than a category mindset--changes the way we think about our business. If you tell the team to go create innovation in potato chips, you’ll get 50 new flavors of potato chips. If you tell them to go research what the customer wants in salty snacking, you’ll get a whole new level of innovation on emerging categories like cauliflower puffs, and high protein chicken chips. Do your research. Know the trends. Be data-led. If the data shows a new customer or product trend developing, don’t be satisfied with being #2 to capitalize on it. Walmart surely isn’t and our suppliers shouldn’t be either. Bring Walmart in early to have conversations about trends and innovations you might be planning, maybe even before the idea is fully developed and approved so that we can collaborate and share data and insights that will help us deliver together a better solution to our customer.

4.      Cultivate Psychological Safety

I’m really passionate about the idea of psychological safety and the role it plays in the success of high-performing teams. Research shows that people work best when they feel safe in their jobs. Teams work best when there is a strong foundation of trust and trust is built by learning people’s stories. Engaging with your individual team members on a human level is essential to cultivating this sense of connection, safety, inclusion and trust that is so necessary to the health of a high-performing team. You can’t help but root for someone when you know their story. While video conference calls might feel a bit detached, they also give us an opportunity to connect with our teams on a very personal level. I mean, what’s more personal than having your kids or pets make unexpected appearances in your Zoom meetings?

5.      Bust the Work-Life Balance Myth

If working from home during the pandemic has shown us anything it’s that we are all human and we have lives outside of work. We need to use this new found appreciation for our respective humanity to go easy on ourselves—and others—and finally let go of the ubiquitous work-life balance myth. Perfect work-life balance doesn’t exist. It is physically impossible to be fully present in more than one place at the same time. Instead, we should accept that there will be times when you may need to give more to your work but also recognize that you are more than your job and this means there will be times when you need to give more to your family. When that time arises, my best advice is to be transparent with your leadership and your team. Let them know what you need and have a plan for how to keep the work moving forward.