January 17, 2005

Disney Doesn’t Talk Service. It Bakes It In.

🚀 Audacious Move™ of the Week

Disney Doesn’t Talk Service. It Bakes It In.

Bold Decisions Create Extraordinary Businesses.

I hope it helps you create yours.

A couple of weeks ago, we interviewed Vance Morris on the popular Fast & Furious podcast.

Vance spent 10 years as a leader at Walt Disney World, so we were particularly interested in what he learned about The Disney Service Experience.

Disney has an extraordinary ability to create guest loyalty.

But here’s what struck me during our conversation:

The magic isn’t magic at all.

It’s the result of deliberate leadership and operating practices that are remarkably consistent with many of the principles I’ve developed over decades of building businesses.

Here are four that jumped out at me.

👀 Visibility With Purpose

Disney leaders don’t lead exclusively from offices.

They are visible where the work is being done.

But I don’t believe simply “walking around” accomplishes much. I call it Visibility With Purpose

The leader is there looking for ways to help people successfully execute the strategy.

The question is simple:

“How can I help?”

That’s precisely what I mean by Serving Around™.

Leadership isn’t about checking up on people. It’s about getting close enough to the action to remove barriers, solve problems and help people succeed.

❤️ Hire Nice People

Vance made another point that sounds ridiculously simple:

Disney hires nice people.

You can teach processes. You can teach procedures. You can teach someone how the business works.

It’s much harder to teach someone to genuinely care about another human being.

That’s why I’ve always believed in Hire for Goosebumps™.

Hire people who love humans. People who instinctively want to help. People who get emotional satisfaction from creating a great experience for someone else.

Then give them the tools to do it.

🎭 Your Purpose Is Bigger Than Your Job Description

At Disney, employees learn that their purpose goes far beyond performing the tasks written in their job description.

They are there to live what the organization stands for.

And leadership continually reinforces it until those behaviours become instinctive.

That distinction is important.

I talk about Line of Sight™—people understanding the direct connection between what they do every day and what the organization is trying to achieve.

But Disney takes it further.

I call it Organizational Instinct™.

Think of it as Line of Sight on steroids.

The objective is to create a culture where people don’t have to stop and consult a policy manual every time something unexpected happens.

They instinctively know how the organization expects them to respond.

At Disney, that instinct is built around creating the guest experience.

In my Code, Organizational Instinct™ is the natural, habitual response an organization has when faced with a customer situation.

It’s not simply:

“What does my job description tell me to do?”

It’s:

“What does this organization stand for—and what should I do right now to live it?”

That’s when values stop being words on a wall.

They become the way the organization behaves.

🔄 Design the Experience From the Customer In

Disney obsessively thinks about the guest journey.

I describe this through Cycles of Service™.

A Cycle of Service maps every touch point between a customer and the organization—from the customer’s point of view, not the organization’s.

Do it for every process involving customer engagement.

Then examine every touch point.

Where can we simplify it?

Where can we remove friction?

Where can we add value?

Where can we improve the flow of value to the customer?

This is Cleanse The Inside™ applied directly to the customer experience.

🚀 The Disney Lesson

Our conversation with Vance reinforced something I’ve believed for years:

Remarkable customer loyalty isn’t created by slogans, training programs or telling employees to “provide great service.”

It happens when leadership, hiring, culture and operating processes all reinforce the experience you intend to deliver.

Disney has been doing it for decades.

Different language perhaps.

Different context.

But remarkably similar disciplines.

The lesson for every business is simple:

Don’t leave customer loyalty to chance.

Bake it into the way your organization operates.

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Extraordinary careers aren’t built by ordinary decisions. They’re built one Audacious Move™ at a time.

Now go make yours.

Cheers,
Roy

• Posted 1.17.05 at 06:00 am by Roy Osing
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