Page 175 - Harnessing the Management Secrets of Disney in Your Company

156 The Disney Way

the top. When it becomes clear that top management firmly supports the
change effort, impressive results will follow.
When we first began to work with Plumbing & Industrial Supply, for
example, the 38-member company had been trying for some time to imple-
ment a customer-focused culture, but with minimal success. Among other
things, multiple-day Dream Retreats had been held to teach top management
the new concepts, after which team members were supposed to relay what
they had learned to the lower-level employees. Daily responsibilities required
that the implementation be done piecemeal.
Our initial employee survey turned up a telling and disturbing attitude.
The typical comment went something like this: “If the program is so important,
then how come we’re not really trained to do it? We’re only getting a couple
of hour-long sessions while management goes off for days.” The snail’s pace of
implementation was clearly taking a toll.
Although we relayed the findings to management, we recognized that the
company’s small size was at the heart of the problem. Whereas a large company
can afford to take groups of people off on retreat for three days without disrupt-
ing operations, that is not the case at a small company. So we suggested to the
president that the training program be conducted on weekends. “Let people
take one day off and then ask them to work overtime on Saturday or Sunday.”
But the president had another solution: “There is no reason why you
can’t have three sessions of 10 or 12 people, and we [management] can take
over their jobs while they are out. We can load trucks. We can drive their
routes. It would probably be good for us to get back to the nitty-gritty jobs
while the others are off being trained.” 56
Besides being an excellent sign of top-level commitment to the change
program, the president’s suggestion helped repair the breach that had opened
between management and the workers, who had felt they were being treated
like second-class citizens not worthy of training. Within a short time, the
customer-centric culture had permeated the organization.

Make Excellence a Habit

The goal of learning is to develop positive habits that benefit individuals and
organizations. When learning a foreign language, for example—say, Spanish—
first a pupil studies to get good enough to understand and be understood in a
social situation. That is a useful but limited skill. If that person goes to live in a
Spanish-speaking country, his or her limited skill will at first prove inadequate