Page 111 - Harnessing the Management Secrets of Disney in Your Company

92 The Disney Way

To begin with, setting up teams is not always easy. Much depends on the
selection of a leader, who will play a pivotal role in determining the results.
This individual has an enormous responsibility to set the tone for the team,
both through personal attributes and through the choice of individual team
members. He or she must be capable of exercising firm and fair leadership
that respects each member’s personal values and understands the role each
individual plays. A successful leader will establish and manage a climate that
encourages creativity while keeping team members on track to accomplish
assigned goals. Finding such a person takes thoughtful consideration, but
we’ve yet to encounter a company without qualified candidates.
The composition of the rest of the team is a major factor in its success or
failure as well. You must first determine all the stakeholders on a particular
project, then move to find the best representative of each of the needed skill
sets. And as basic as it sounds, we always urge our clients to consider the
personalities of potential members. Inveterate pessimists should be avoided.
Management must also make sure to include detail-oriented people as well as
big-picture thinkers. You don’t want to end up with a group in which every-
one looks at the end result but no one is paying attention to all the little things
that will make it happen. Diversity is important, but in the end, it’s all about
synergy, balance, and raising the bar for one another.
How does a leader create an environment in which team members can
thrive? First of all, he or she must encourage the free flow of ideas by letting
team members know that no idea is too ridiculous. It stands to reason that when
innovation is the goal, radical premises are to be encouraged, not squelched.
Group discussion and analysis can often transform a seemingly off-the-wall
notion into a sensible and usable tool.
Group discussion can also turn an entire team around if it’s heading off in
a wrong direction, especially if the team leader loses touch with the team and
its problems. Such is the case of a person we’ll call John, one of 24 team leaders
at a manufacturing company we worked with. John’s team always came in last
among the other 23 teams, and its members could never hit performance targets
quite so well as their counterparts. At one no-holds-barred session we attended,
one woman broke down in tears when she addressed John: “You and Steve (the
plant’s general manager) are forcing us to be a team, and we don’t want to be.”
We had seen enough of these kinds of sessions to know that seldom do the
members of a group collectively decide that they don’t want to be a team, even
if they are aware that it takes a long time and effort to develop that synergy.
No, there were other issues here that needed to be surfaced.