In a past podcast, I asked Doug Lipp a world-renowned speaker and acclaimed expert on Disney and explained in his book Disney U: How Disney University Develops the World’s Most Engaged, Loyal, and Customer-Centric Employees; In your work, you try to pass on the Disney way to others? How tough is that?
Doug: It is really tough because leadership often times does not show the commitment that they need. As an example, actually the man that wrote the foreword to Disney U, Jim Cora, who retired as the Chairman of Disney International, opened up Tokyo Disneyland, he opened up Disneyland Paris. He was my boss in Japan. He was tough son-of-a-gun, but also fair. He is an example of the kind of leader that knows both the training world and the operation world, and he gave me an interesting quote, he said that: “I never cut training if it affected our show.” That is huge. He knew that the show was one of the most important part of our culture. He said: “Doug, what if I’m going to frontier land and the bales of hay that are stacked, around there, to make it look good and give ambiance, what if they are weeds growing out of those bales of hay? Do I go after the training team and say, ‘you need to train the maintenance crew and the custodial crew to trim weeds better.” He said: ‘No, this is not a training issue; I’m going after the operations that are being too chincey to buy new bales of hay. Those bales of hay should have been replaced months ago.”
Joe: How do you go about changing culture then? We all don’t have a Mouse to rely on or Cinderella’s castle.
Doug: You ask the leaders to take a look at their state of their business. Is it where you want it to go right now? I always ask leaders to look in the mirror. If there is a culture that is leading to success, you helped create that. If there is a culture of lack of trust or of risk adverse behavior, you helped create that. You have to own that and leaders have to go out and let their teams know what kind of culture they are going to have and they are going to support both in words and in actions. I think that’s was lacking. You own these wonderful posters that say: “Our employees are our number 1 assets” or “Customers are number 1”, but in reality when you interview and do need assessments with middle managers and front line employees, the opposite is so true. They don’t feel valued and customers feel ignored.
Related Podcast and Transcription: The Disney Training University