Reading today’s obituary for John Shields, a former CEO of Trader Joe’s, I was struck by one passage:

Shields said he spent days in stores asking employees, “What are we doing at the office to screw you up?”

“And, boy, I filled up 20 notepads,” he said.

No one knows a job like the people who are in it. Why then is it nearly unheard-of for managers – much less a CEO – to take the time to ask employees what’s going well and what could be improved?

The benefits of these conversations are enormous:  By knowing what’s wrong, the stores could operate more efficiently – good for the bottom line. Employees felt valued, that someone in the home office cared enough to ask how they were doing, and that any complaints they had (apparently, quite a few!) were being heard. And because the workers in the stores constantly interacted with customers, they were able to provide first-hand insight into what the Trader Joe’s consumer wanted.

Did Mr. Shields act on everything in those twenty notebooks? I seriously doubt it. But I have no doubt at all that listening to employees was a significant reason that the number of Trader Joe’s stores grew more than sixfold during his tenure.