After the Disney Employee Engagement Keynote speech, there was a video interview in a nearby Boardroom.
A question centering around what’s the secret to a great employee culture directed my answer in a unique way….
” Everyone knows the benefits of taking care of your personal health. Yet many of us struggle to be excellent at the basics for personal vibrancy. Organizational vibrancy – a great employee culture – is the same thing. We all know the benefits of doing the right things, the basics, and those who succeed are the ones who make the basics their top priority.”
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At Disney, training is highly structured, designed by an expert Human Resources team, and delivered by carefully chosen hourly Cast Members called “Disney Trainers”.
A Disney Trainer is not a full-time role.
You perform your normal Host/Hostess role and when you are needed, you are scheduled to be a trainer and get a small hourly pay increase for the hours you are officially designated as a trainer.
Training Manuals filled with Standard Operating Guidelines for each individual role are followed and administered without deviation.
There are additional layers to training and i am skipping those intentionally to jump to development.
Development at Disney, and any great organization, is the opposite of training.
Development is highly unstructured.
There are no manuals.
There are no trainers.
Development is initiated by great leaders.
Good leaders may rarely initiate development.
There is also very little accountability to insist that development is robust.
Great Disney leaders have unlimited and creative ways to develop others (usually their direct reports, but not limited to that).
For example, during a bi-monthly one-on-one meeting with my leader in 2007 (seven years before i retired), Wayne said, “Not everyone on the Executive Team likes you. When you’re in meetings, just zip it.”
Those two sentences changed the trajectory of the second half of my 15-year Disney Institute career.
In fact, in all of my 30-plus years at Disney, this was the simplest, quickest, and most impactful development any leader bestowed on me.
Contrast that with a seven-month full-time special assignment as a Guest Satisfaction Measurement (GSM), the second most impactful “development” in a long career.
Just to be crystal clear:
Train for compliance with the highest industry standards.
Develop for commitment so strong, you earn the reputation as being a great place to work, because your mission (and the way you connect your team to it) is so powerful.
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Mark Ruis is a successful businessman and yesterday during the Kentucky Derby, the TV spotlight was shown on him for a few minutes.
Why?
His horse is a longshot.
So is he.
He’s an unlikely first-time entrant.
The short documentary about his life highlighted his insatiable work ethic.
And how now – later in life – he tries to get out of as many business trips as possible so he can spend as much time as possible with his Family.
Most executives i know look back and acknowledge the sacrifice they made to achieve what they did – and how now they don’t want to work that hard anymore.
Organizational culture is like personal health: it’s your greatest asset and something you must intentionally focus on for a lifetime.
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This website is about our WORK. To ponder today’s post about our HQ, click here.
If you want to stay on this site and read more posts from this Blog, click here.
Epcot drain hole cover, and an unintentional hidden Mickey.
When i think about commitment at Disney, it reminds me of eggs and bacon at breakfast. The chicken is involved. The pig is committed. Sounds kinda ridiculous until we dwell on the notion for a moment. The difference between involved employees and committed employees is the difference between running with the pack, or clearly outdistancing the competition.
Fun trivia: The only place Guests could find Mickey Mouse when Epcot Center opened on October 1, 1982 was on the drain hole covers, pictured here. Epcot Center opened as “the adult Park” and there were no characters. We quickly discovered this was a huge mistake.
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