Last week our office from work attended the Disney Institute professional development day in Regina. They offer four different courses to businesses and PD day's all over the world: Employee Engagement, Quality Service, Leadership Excellence and Business Excellence. Our workshop day was the one on Disney's Approach to Business Excellence. More info: DisneyInstitute.com
I would love to go really in depth on what we learned about, but there is a copyright on the workbook they gave us. So, instead I will talk about the main overall topics we discussed and things I learned and took away from the day. It really was very inspiring and gave me a lot of things to think about the way I approach my job. Plus, it really made me want to go to Disneyland. I've never been.
One of the first things we discussed and worked on as a group was our Circle of Excellence. What five things we think contribute the most to business excellence in our organization. I found this exercise one that my co-workers could agree the most without much discussion. We collectively decided that Efficiency/Quality, Education, Culture, Engagement and Service contribute the most to good and sustained results within our office, and by extension, our institution itself. The term "Culture" refers to 'how people behave' and so our culture consists of trust, relationships, team work and respect.
Next we talked about leadership, leadership values and vision, writing down what we each thought were qualities to look for in a good leader. The section on leadership was quite long, but it covered a lot of good points and gave me plenty to think about.
"Anyone who can influence change is a leader."
This can be applied to all aspects in a workplace, but not just the people in charge and are already leaders. How can you be a leader in your role? How can you inspire and influence change from your position? The next exercise we did was reflecting on ourselves as leaders and working on a Start, Stop and Continue cycle. For myself I wrote:
Basically, I want to start achieving my goals in workplace advancement and making things in my office more equal and efficient. I need to stop stressing over small things in my job that I cannot change, such as policy. I want to continue to build on the great workplace relationships that have already curated throughout my office and larger institution, but also start building new ones to possibly open up new opportunities for myself.
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| "Partners" monument in Disney World. |
The next large topic was on Culture, a term mentioned above referring to 'how people behave'. The Disney Institute proposes that every employer and business has a culture, and that culture is either by design or default. Meaning that it is either cultivated to be a certain way or just is because of the employees working there. Cultures within a work place can be good or bad and that all starts with the hiring process. The ideal is to employ those potential candidates that best naturally behave in the way that your culture is already functioning.
This topic was really engaging to me because our office already has a particular culture, which when I think about it falls into the "default" culture setting. I definitely don't think our office culture was planned, but we have something that works and works well for us. We recently had an employee that didn't necessarily fit into our default culture. They did the right thing and "self-selected out," as Disney calls it, and decided that we weren't the best fit and vice versa. That is the ideal in Disney's eyes, and I agree that self-selecting out for an employee is the better route. Upholding and nurturing the culture leads to sustained results and that is why it is in our Circle of Excellence.
After this we moved on to the customer service experience. We learned about trying to shift the curve of the customer experience from mainly indifferent and undecided about satisfaction to more good or very good satisfaction levels. Disney does not expect their 'cast members' (what they call their employees) to go the extra mile for each guest, per se, but try and go the extra inch for as many as possible. An effort like that can go a lot further and work more towards higher customer satisfaction without causing the employee undo stress to push them-self too far. The exercise in this section was to describe our ideal service in our business, then talk to another person at the event from a different business and see if what they expected service-wise from your business matched anything you wrote down. This was a fun exercise and brought up some things I, or my office, may not have thought of.
The second last area covered was Disney's Four Key Basics. A lot of this information is directly in the book, so I can't go too much into it, but their Four Key Basics are: Safety, Courtesy, Show and Efficiency. They teach their cast members to apply these basics to every aspect of their job for so that they can provide a great guest experience no matter which part of the company they work in/for. And most interestingly, they are to always be applied in the order listed.
Lastly, we discussed innovation. Disney holds innovation right alongside creativity and believes that you cannot have innovation with out first starting with a creative idea. Corporate culture is designed to reward "left-brain" thinking which is associated with data, analysis and number crunching. However, those with creative "right-brain" ideas should also be rewarded because you need both parts to move forward with the best innovative ideas. The ability to not only analyze an idea, but also the ability be creative with.
The day ended with us each getting our own personalized certificate saying that we completed the Business Excellence course. I am totally going to hang mine in my office at work. I would also attend another one of their courses, any of the other ones in fact. I think I could learn things that would apply to my job from every one of them.
Thanks, Disney Institute for a great and educational day!
