How can we develop better leaders, improve organizational culture, and create better teams? Perhaps it can happen through magic, that is Disney Magic!

Over its history, the Walt Disney Corporation has produced world-class effective leaders, highly creative and energetic teams, and a lasting culture of performance. In fact, the company has a teaching arm called The Disney Institute, which teaches the secrets of the company that have been discovered over many decades.

Recently I interviewed three former long-term employees of The Disney Institute to learn more about their experiences. Also, we discussed how they are bringing these best practices to libraries across Florida. The Better Leadership team includes James Songster, Sue Schank and Barbara Blake. In a wide-ranging interview, I asked them about their views on leadership, teamwork, and building a powerful culture. Below is an excerpt from the interview.

Doug: What were the key aspects for a successful teamwork and how you trained other people on how to build those key aspects of successful teamwork?

James:  My leaders were able to bring in people that were already in the right mindset. A big part of our philosophy was to choose for the mindset that complements our team and then teach skills, as opposed to somebody’s who’s got this great skill set and now we have to shape their mindset. I think another huge key factor was the way we benefited from being in an environment where we had an amazing collection of differences. We valued and craved diversity because we want as many different ideas, backgrounds and thoughts as we can. It’s a strategic advantage that is complementary to our mission. It gave us a greater ability to serve the clients.

Barbara:  In order to serve our education audience, we created a unique and diverse labor strategy.  In the 8-month season in which we offered our educational programs, we led close to 200 facilitators.  We utilized college interns for a semester experience, part-time staff and we “borrowed” staff from around Walt Disney World to teach our programs.  In this way, we were able to gain an immense range of diversity in our facilitation team.  To manage all these diverse cast members, we needed them to buy into our mission and vision.  They needed to know how to best represent The Disney Company to our audience!  The key to having a staff attuned to the same mission is on-going, effective communication.  All our staff were aware of our mission and values before joining the team, and were then given training to insure they also exemplified those values with every guest group they led.

Sue: I would have our trainer team instill to our trainees that everyone was there because they showed such enormous potential. Every single one was deserving of respect all the way around. It was vitally important that we respected each other. We knew everybody was different as we purposely hired a diverse team, but we respected those differences and respected those people. The talents and the gifts they brought to us were critical for me.

Read the entire interview on the Efficient Librarian website.