Turbo-Charging the Exchange of Ideas

The exchange of ideas has become crucial in the majority of today’s work environments. Why? Change is accelerating. Information is proliferating. Product life cycles are shortening. Agility in execution is intensifying. Innovation has become a precondition for sustainability. The maximization of idea-sharing, at all levels, allows organizations to become flatter, more agile, and less dependent on hierarchy, which in turn promotes commitment, self-management, innovation, collaboration, and learning. Consider how one corporate icon does it.

With millions of employees and hundreds of billions in revenue, Wal-Mart manages to share ideas of every kind at every level in its organization. At weekly merchandise meetings employees, called associates, are encouraged to share their ideas openly and with passion. Every idea counts and is taken into consideration. On Saturdays there’s more sharing of ideas, information, and knowledge, along with informal entertainment. Every day in the stores, associates are encouraged to look incessantly for ways to improve the operation. Sam Walton’s legacy of rules, ten of them, still guides the global retailer; here are two of them that address idea-sharing:

• Communicate everything you possibly can to your partners. The more they know, the more they’ll understand. The more they understand, the more they’ll care. Once they care, there’s no stopping them. If you don’t trust your Associates to know what’s going on, they’ll know you don’t really consider them partners.

• Listen to everyone in your company. Figure out ways to get them talking. The folks on the front lines—the ones who actually talk to the customer—are the only ones who really know what’s going on out there. You’d better find out what they know.

Sharing ideas of every kind at every level is a way of life at Wal-Mart and the results are obvious. Not only has Wal-Mart revolutionized the retailing industry, it has become a model of successful management throughout the world. Without question, sharing ideas openly and actively throughout an organization is one of the best ways to build accountability, commitment, and greater collaboration.

Are ideas, information, and knowledge shared actively and readily within your organization? To learn more about turbo-charging the exchange of ideas throughout your organization, we invite you to join the Accountability Community at www.partnersinleadership.com.

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