Be Excellent to Each Other (OPINION)

I speak on a regular basis with people from all over the country who have great jobs, but are thinking that they might one day jump ship to start their own business.

Let’s be honest. It looks like a lot of fun. After spending the first several minutes trying to talk them out of it (because most people really shouldn’t do it), I give them this advice: Be good to the people you come in contact with now, especially when you don’t have to be. Someday, you might need their help.

In the 10 years since leaving Walmart to start my businesses, I’ve often faced the consequences, both positive and negative, of how I treated people during the time I worked there. People who were once my peers are now running divisions of the company. People I worked with on projects from various supplier teams are now in senior leadership roles — and they’re now all potential customers.

My first big break as an entrepreneur came largely as a result of being remembered as “a pretty good guy” for taking care of someone I didn’t really have to when I was a marketing manager for Walmart. But some of the biggest setbacks I’ve faced have been a consequence of not being all that accommodating to someone, even when it would have been easy.

Walmart’s 450 layoffs at headquarters in October may seem small in comparison to the nearly half-million layoffs announced by U.S. companies so far this year, but for the people and families directly impacted, it is devastating.

As I learned that some of those affected were people I had worked with, I couldn’t help but think: of how their behavior might affect their future.

I thought, “She’ll be fine, because she was really good to people when she was in a position of power, but he is going to struggle, because he wasn’t.”

No matter how well technology connects us, the reality is, our individual success will always be determined in some part by the relationships we’ve developed with others. It will never be enough to simply do our jobs well, because success in almost every context is a result of being known, and being well thought of.

Being known, or at least recognizable, is the easy part. Social media has given us all a powerful platform for telling the world who we are and what’s important to us, or at least who we want people to think we are and what we want them to think is important to us.

But being well thought of requires a lot more work. It requires a consistency of performance and persistent engagement with those who matter. The hard part is knowing who will matter in five, 10 or 20 years. So instead of spending your day making judgments of people, trying to decide who is worth a returned phone call or a greeting in the hallway, invest your time and attention in everyone.

That way, when you’re standing in the office parking lot holding a cardboard box full of all that remains of your old job, you’ll have people you can call. 

Matt Fifer is the founder and CEO of Selling to the Masses, a Bentonville-based company that helps consumer product innovators get on the shelves of the country’s top retailers.  Prior to founding his first business (Store of the Community) in 2005, his second (8th & Walton) in 2006 and his third (Selling to the Masses) in 2012, Matt spent 13 years serving in a variety of key leadership roles in the areas of operations, marketing, human resources and in mergers and acquisitions while working both in the U.S. and abroad for Wal-Mart Stores Inc.