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August 13 - September 5, 2022
If you want your employees to deliver excellent service, you’d better provide them with excellent leadership.
I learned the hard way that managerial skills are absolutely essential for getting results, but they are not enough to drive excellence. Excellence requires common sense leadership.
I like to say that good leaders are environmentalists. Their responsibility is to create a sustainable business environment—calm, clear, crisp, and clean, with no pollution, no toxins, no waste—in which everyone flourishes.
Good leaders are humble enough to admit what they don’t know, and great leaders are constantly looking for new information.
Even today, as I teach at the Disney Institute and lecture around the world, I continue to learn and grow. As we say at Disney, “In times of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future.” That is what leading is all about.
At Disney we defined our approach to inclusion with the acronym RAVE: respect, appreciate, and value everyone.
1. Make sure everyone matters . . . and that everyone knows it. Business leadership is a lot like parenting: Your job is not just to make your employees happy but to create an environment that enables them to excel at what they do.
2. Know your team.
3. Let your team get to know you. Remember, your inclusive workplace includes you. Too many leaders keep their distance from employees, both physically and emotionally.
4. Greet people sincerely. Many
Reach out to everyone on your team. Everyone wants to be heard and respected. It’s one of our most basic human needs. But hearing all voices is not just vital for building morale and self-confidence; it’s a crucial source of information for you as a leader. Great leaders know they don’t know everything.
6. Make yourself available. Do everything in your power to be there for people when they need you. Like good parents, great leaders are always available.
Always leave blank spaces in your calendar to accommodate the unexpected, because the unexpected is often more important than the expected.
7. Listen to understand.
8. Communicate clearly, directly, and honestly. Good communication is clear communication. Use ordinary language, and say exactly what you mean. If you don’t, people will leave more confused than they were before, and you’ll pay the price in inefficiency and loss of trust.
9. Stand up for the excluded. Be on the lookout for people who feel left out for one reason or another, such as a new employee eating lunch alone in the cafeteria.
10. Forget about the chain of command. The days of the vertical chain of command as a way of doing business are over. Leaders who continue to manage this way are doomed to failure, because a rigid top-down command structure can slow communication significantly and deliver less than reliable information.
11. Don’t micromanage.
12. Design your culture. The Disney Institute defines a corporate culture as “the system of values and beliefs an organization holds that drives actions and behaviors and influences relationships.”
The soft stuff is actually the hard stuff. Managers often say they have no time for the soft stuff because they’re busy with the “important” things: making money, increasing productivity, cutting costs, enforcing rules, keeping labor in line, and the rest of the measurable tasks that running a business requires. But the fact is, if you don’t do the soft stuff well, you will never achieve the payoff you’re aiming for with the hard stuff. That’s why it pays to take care of your people before you take care of your paperwork.
13. Treat your people as you would want your customers to be treated. The bottom line of this chapter is that there is a direct correlation between how you treat your employees and how those employees treat your customers.
Cast Members at Walt Disney World are trained to deliver on these Four Guest Expectations: Make me feel special. Treat me as an individual. Respe...
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ACTION STEPS Ask yourself frequently what you have done to show that everyone is important and knows it. Create an environment that makes every employee and every customer feel special. Treat everyone as an individual. Give every person your complete and unconditional respect. Spend time getting to know your employees. Give every employee the information and resources to learn what he or she needs to know and acquire the skills he or she needs to have. Make yourself truly available to everyone on your team. Give everyone, regardless of his or her position, the opportunity to be heard. When
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Your job as a leader is to figure out what the organization should look like, not just to do your best within the existing design. Unfortunately, many leaders consider organizational details boring, and others don’t think structural changes are worth all the hard work. But I can assure you, good organizational architecture not only keeps costs in line and maximizes efficiency but also streamlines the decision-making process, enhances employee satisfaction, and facilitates creativity and innovation at all levels.
The point is, structure is as important to an organization as it is to a building. No matter what industry you’re in, one of your challenges as a leader is to evaluate the structure on an ongoing basis and not to be afraid to break the mold.
1. Be clear about who’s responsible for what. Every individual in your organization should clearly and completely understand what he or she is responsible for, what level of authority he or she has, and how he or she will be held accountable. Each employee also needs to know what others are responsible for, what authority others have, and how others will be held accountable. Without clarity on those points, confusion and mishaps are inevitable.
Clear communication is one of a leader’s principal tasks, especially when it comes to responsibility and authority. Keep that concept in mind at all times, and your teams will perform above expectations.
2. Remember that responsibility and authority go hand in hand. If you give people responsibility without also giving them the necessary authority to carry out those responsibilities, you are setting them up for failure.
That’s the key point: As a leader you are always responsible for the outcome.
3. Make every position count.
4. Get as flat as you can.
5. Eliminate overwork.
6. Rethink the meeting structure.
One productive meeting a month can be more valuable than one poorly planned meeting a week.
The incident taught me that the best way to evaluate the effectiveness of meetings is to get honest feedback from the people who attend them. Ask if the meetings are held too often or not often enough. Ask if they drag on too long or are too rushed. Also ask if the right people are included. Once you’ve identified the problems, invite key people to think up ways to make the meetings more useful, more productive, and more enjoyable, so that everyone who attends receives good value for the time spent. In my experience, the better prepared the leader is, the more efficient and effective the
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Great leaders keep in constant touch with employees, but they gather them together only when it’s truly necessary.
7. Anyone can take responsibility for change.
8. Be prepared to take risks.
9. Expect resistance.
10. Don’t try to win every battle.
11. You’re never really done.
Here is a delicious irony: The better your organizational structure, the easier it is to change it. Why? Because an excellent structure has built-in adaptability. If you have created a culture of change, in which everyone from top to bottom is empowered to find creative ways to improve the organization, you’ll be better able to adjust to unexpected events and emergencies.
1. Define the perfect candidate. When
15. Look for people to nurture and promote. Every point we’ve discussed about hiring the right people also applies to promotions. Great leaders always have their antennae out for people to elevate to leadership positions, and they use every tool available to guide their selections.
First the managers would have one-on-one meetings with every person who worked for them and look for signs of leadership potential: intelligence, self-direction, initiative, good relationship skills, high energy, and positive attitude. We told them to find curious people who strove for performance excellence; who wanted to grow and learn and take on more responsibility; who went to school and took classes to better themselves; who were always reliable, on time, and didn’t whine when they were asked to stay late or come in early.
Years later I heard this saying in a seminar: “A leader’s job is to do what has to be done, when it has to be done, in the way it should be done, whether you like it or not and whether they like it or not.”
That brings me to another lesson I learned at Disney: Keep in touch with great employees who leave. We did exactly that with the executive I just described.
The bottom line is this: No matter what kind of company you run, your people are your brand; if you don’t have good people, no amount of marketing, advertising, or PR will make up for it. This is why it is crucial for you as a leader to learn how to hire, promote, and nurture the very best people out there. Trust me, it pays off in both employee satisfaction and measurable business results.
Once you have the right people in place, your task as a leader is to give them everything they need to excel.
Training and development permeate every level of the company; they are the primary reason the Disney brand is synonymous with service excellence.
