Jeff James on Disney’s Approach to Business Excellence

At last month’s ABC Children’s Institute, featured speaker Jeff James, vice president and general manager of the Disney Institute, Disney’s professional development arm, presented the talk “Disney’s Approach to Business Excellence,” in which he explained why Disney places so much value on the customer experience and how it achieves consistent results.

In a world where positive customer experiences are on the decline, businesses have an opportunity to differentiate themselves by offering a world-class customer experience, said James, and engaged employees are what make this possible.

“If you can be healthy as an organization culturally, you create an environment for your employees where they want to be there. Happy employees create happy customers or guests,” he said, and makes them want to come back.

As the business world moves deeper into the “customer experience decade,” as James called it, major corporations are seeking to create customer-centric cultures. Booksellers, he added, should think about their businesses and how they can create a world-class customer experience time and time again.

For a business to succeed, it must have an employee base that is completely engaged and at every opportunity has an interaction versus a transaction with customers. The way to do this, said James, is to have leaders that consistently model the behaviors that they want employees to have.

Disney’s “common purpose,” the essential foundation on which all other service decisions can be developed, is a critical component to its success and to shaping happy employees. “Disney’s common purpose is: We create happiness by providing the finest in entertainment for people of all ages, everywhere,” said James. “That is what we do every day. We all wake up and we think about why we work as cast members at Disney.”

James suggested that employers think about employees’ roles in terms of purpose, rather than task. A task is stocking books all day on a bookshelf, but, hopefully, those bookstore employees are waking up with a higher motivation — a purpose.

Disney’s “brand promise,” another critical element for its success, is providing special entertainment with heart. Everything the company does must pay off against the brand promise or else the Disney brand will feel incongruent in the minds of customers or guests, James explained.

“What’s your version of the common purpose and the brand promise?” he asked Ci4 attendees.

As part of fulfilling their store’s common purpose and brand promise, booksellers need to be aware of how often they are interacting with customers. “If you allow yourself to become disconnected from the front line, you lose all touch with what’s really going on in your business,” said James.

Employee engagement is essential to the success of any organization, he stressed. At Disney, the employees, or cast members, do not operate with a script; they do what they do because of the employee culture, a process that begins with how Disney recruits and continues with the company’s training.

“A selection process that includes deep cultural immersion may result in the best-fit employees. When we bring people on, we start with purpose versus task. What we start with at the top of every one of our ads is something about the purpose,” said James.

Disney also gives employees the power to know what to do in any situation, without a leader or supervisor present, by providing them with the company’s quality standards hierarchy — safety, courtesy, show, and efficiency — which must be followed in order no matter the circumstance.

Peer recognition is also a powerful tool for employee engagement at Disney. “We create environments where our leaders are set up to acknowledge their team members in front of other team members,” by proactively seeking out employees who are doing something right and recognizing it, and occasionally rewarding them, said James. “Money’s always nice, but peer recognition is very, very critical.

“The extent to which you genuinely care for your people is the extent to which they will care for your customers — and each other.” A true, genuine “thank you” means more than almost anything an employer can do, he added.

All businesses want to see strong results, and it is quality service that leads to happy customers. “Customers have to like what you do, and if they like what you do, they’ll come back time and time again,” said James.

“I can go buy a book at a number of different places,” he added, but a bookstore that provides a positive customer experience will be the one that gets the return visit. “True loyalty is earned by delivering on the brand promise consistently over time. In your business, if you deliver on brand promise time and time again, people will come back.”