Page 173 - Harnessing the Management Secrets of Disney in Your Company

154 The Disney Way

workers’. The misconception that only an elite group need be privy to a com-
pany’s customer-focused mission, goals, and strategy presents a serious danger
to any organization that buys into it. Without a doubt, such shortsightedness
jeopardizes the company’s achievement of its goals. For one thing, it deprives
a company of a vast source of talent and ideas, and for another, it encourages a
division among staff members that can only damage the organization.
To include everyone in training is a crucial first step, but to ensure that
true learning will take place, an organization must also give every employee
in a focused work environment an opportunity to use what has been taught.
Lasting knowledge is acquired when on-the-job experience is used to rein-
force what has been taught in the classroom.
Unfortunately, a great many companies employ the “spray and pray”
method of training. That is, they spray training on people, then pray that it
gets absorbed. That kind of slapdash approach is at odds with what we call the
Performance Learning Cycle, illustrated in Figure 8-1, in which the depth of
training is as important as the breadth. So all companies must ask themselves,
“Are we giving our employees enough of the right kind of training?” That
means providing employees with the techniques they need to achieve the
desired customer-focused results and then following up with a hands-on situ-
ation that offers a chance to practice the ideas and learn from experience what
works and what doesn’t, all under the watchful eye of a veteran coach.

Focused
Experiences Results

Performance
Learning
Cycle

Training
Recognition

Figure 8-1. Performance learning cycle