HIGH PERFORMANCE STRATEGY

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High Performance Strategy

Introduction

Business managers have to continually advocate for high performance to retain and build competitiveness in the modern-day fierce market environment. However, to attain these high levels of operations, businesses need to invest heavily in team collaboration, individual growth, and competitive culture of high outputs. Amazon and Walmart are some global organizations with a high-performance culture that has sustained them a longer-term competitive advantage. This report examines, compares, and contrasts Amazon and Walmart's high-performance strategies and how such approaches meet individual development needs.

High Performance Strategies

In day-to-day business operations, some strategies need to be applied to move a business from one market position to another. The following strategies help build, strengthen, and sustain teamwork in an organization, translating to a better market position, increasing responsiveness to customers' needs, and creating a conducive work environment.

Effective Communication and Collaboration

The first approach that businesses can use to drive high performance is increasing communication and collaboration. According to Kandula (2010), communication is a straightforward act of sharing views from all business stakeholders to ease operations, clarify activities, and streamline management to improve customer services. However, "team's communication is also received in consonance with the perception of a team member about his/her own role" (Kandula, 2010, p. 124). Additionally, the High-Performance Model identifies excellent communication as one of the main antecedents of great performance in an organization. According to Kirchmer (2017), the High-Performance Model advocates for open and clear communication between teams and leaders to clarify goals, visions, and open avenues of constructive criticism and participation between stakeholders.

Investing in Team Values

The second strategy of developing high performance is clarifying teamwork values. According to De-Waal (2012a), a successful business must invest in the value of its team. However, these teams cannot survive if participants do not understand the core-values that bind the group. Clarifying teamwork vales also means setting up sub-rules and policies that are pertinent to a group, but these standard procedures should be in line with the corporate agenda and where the business wants to be in the future. Creating values boost unity, direction, and a sense of purpose between business participants, with a long-term orientation. Nonetheless, these team cultures must be flexible enough to welcome changes, mainly considering business operations' dynamism in the contemporary business environment (De-Waal, 2012b).

Comparing and Constating how Amazon and Walmart Build High Performance

Both Companies Strive to Reinforce Employees Behaviors

Amazon focuses on reinforcing the behaviors of its employees to boost employees' output. Behavior modeling (fine-tuning team participants to meet the expectation by understanding the knowledge gap, interaction obstacles, and changing their attitude) is among the most reliable ways of deriving output from a team (Armstrong, 2010). Amazon invests heavily in behavior change to create an environment of objective and professional experts in their team dealings. A conducive environment is one that emphasis on "on-the-job training, opportunities for career progression, competitive wages, performance-related pay, stock grants, healthcare, a pension plan, life assurance, income protection, and an employee discount" (O'Connor, 2013, p. 4). On the same note, Walmart invests heavily in training, which aligns with the HPO Framework's continuous improvement. According to Kirchmer (2017), continuous improvement constitutes a...