Page 121 - Harnessing the Management Secrets of Disney in Your Company

102 The Disney Way

■ Celebrate and reward team accomplishments.
■ Periodically refocus and rebuild teams in a retreat setting.

Working as a Team

One of the problems that Jerry McColgin had faced in his previous team
experience was the fact that the members were dispersed throughout com-
pany facilities. This time, he insisted, the entire team had to work within
four walls. The company agreed and found four abandoned product-display
rooms for the team’s use.
The company made a further commitment by underwriting the physi-
cal construction of the space. Walls were torn down, new lighting and new
carpeting installed, and desks moved. An active noise system (ANS) was also
introduced into the large open space. An ANS adds “pink noise,” a com-
bination of frequencies that match the human voice to the environment.
Noise was an issue. Some of the members were used to working in a private
office, and the fact that the place was a modern-day Tower of Babel made
it hard to tune out foreign voices. A year later, when the system was turned
off as an experiment, everyone begged for it to be turned on again.
Everything was brand new for the team, which, as Jerry noted, “Right
from the outset sent a signal that this was a unique project, something dif-
ferent, something that had never been done. Nobody had ever had us all
sit together like this.”
Co-locating also sent a valuable message to the team itself. Clearly,
the company was backing the project completely, which was a welcome
signal that they had faith the team could get the job done.
To facilitate the work, the overall team was divided into subteams.
These, however, remained cross-functional, so that people still intermingled.
“I would walk through the room,” Jerry remembers, “and I’d see a manu-
facturing engineer and a design engineer poring over blueprints, each giving
their input. Instead of waiting for a Monday morning meeting, the discus-
sion was taking place there and then, when it was needed. One of the things
the team prided itself on was the absolute lack of bureaucracy.”
No pieces of paper had to be pushed through the system to be initialed
by a management hierarchy. As a matter of fact, as Jerry had promised at
the outset, there was no hierarchy.