Page 110 - Harnessing the Management Secrets of Disney in Your Company

All for One and One for All 91

believe that he would want to hear our ideas. That’s just the culture at Disney.
The company respects the ideas from all cast members, regardless of their level
in the organization.” By most accounts, Michael Eisner once believed in the
power of soliciting input from all levels of the organization.
Few companies seem willing or able to trust and empower employees to
quite the extent we have witnessed at Disneyland and Walt Disney World.
The Disney approach stems, we believe, from a long history of teamwork
and cooperation between management and employees that dates back to the
way Walt managed the company in the early days. In fact, the Goames inci-
dent is reminiscent of the story recounted in the opening chapter in which
Walt added fireflies to his Disneyland Pirates of the Caribbean attraction in
response to the suggestion of a construction worker at the park.
An astonishing indication of the depth of employee trust and empower-
ment at Disney is the fact that its customer service representatives, the people
who take the tickets at the theme park entrances, have $500,000 in tickets
and cash at their disposal to give out to guests who lose or forget their tickets,
run out of money with which to get home, or encounter any other problem
that merits attention. That’s an extraordinary sum of money to place at the
discretion of employees, but Disney obviously trusts these empowered cast
members to use sound judgment.
What’s more, it’s noteworthy because of what it says about how Disney
has eliminated turf barriers. How many accounting departments would allow
a front-line worker to have such power and latitude? The point is that at The
Walt Disney Company, no single department calls the shots for any other.
In most organizations, people are often so hung up on the rules and
regulations in their policy manuals that they naturally feel unempowered.
This is certainly not true in the ranks of Disney or Nordstrom’s. In fact, the
entire contents of Nordstrom’s Department Stores policy manual reads, “Use
your own best judgment at all times.” Your company can’t be focused on
the Believe principle if you are plowing through reams of policy prose. Less
policy—as long as it’s good policy—brings good results. As we stated in our
book Leading at the Speed of Change: Using New Economy Rules to Invigorate
Old Economy Companies, “policy wonks finish last.”

Factors in Successful Team Building

Not every team experience is going to be a success, of course. There are
those who complain that when they introduced the team concept in their
companies, it didn’t work. But when the team approach fails, there is usually
a good reason for it.