​We had the opportunity to learn from the best yesterday, the magical folks at Walt Disney World.  Their Business Behind the Magic tour took us backstage, underground, and into the Magic Kingdom to learn about the four core competencies instilled throughout Disney’s operations:  Leadership Excellence, Employee Engagement, Quality Service, and Business Results.    Disney preaches that if you take care of the first three competencies, centered on leaders, employees and guests, the fourth will take care of itself.     So, at the risk of giving the magic away, here are a few of our observations on Disney’s approach to generating business results.

Leadership – From a leadership style point of view, Disney leaders are transformational with a healthy dose of servant leadership too.   Transformational leaders establish a vision and objectives that raise the level of motivation and performance of leaders and followers alike.   Servant leaders put followers first and seek to empower and develop them.   At Disney, 75% of a leader’s time is expected to be spent out in the operations, not sitting behind a desk.  When engaging employees, Disney leaders ask “what can I do to make your job easier?” Employees know their jobs best and are the best source of suggestions for improvement.   And employees are thanked by their leaders for coming into work each day.

Engagement – Employees at Disney are called cast members.  They don’t interview for jobs, they audition.   They each wear a Disney cast nametag when at work regardless of whether they are onstage or backstage.  They greet each other by first name.   Being onstage doesn’t only apply to entertainers in the attractions but to servers in the restaurants, housekeepers in the hotels, vendors on Main Street, and call center employees…anyone with touch points with guests.   Disney cares about its employees which is evident in the variety of support they receive from Cast Member Services.   And communication is considered critical, with information exchanged in many forms so that employees know not only what is going on in the company but when the fireworks are scheduled in each park.

Service – Quality service is delivered at Disney through three principles:  Process, Place, and People.   Talented and engaged people are critical, but they must be armed with proven processes that are applied at the right place and time.   In fact, everything at Disney World is intentional and purposeful, from the spacing of the trash receptacles on Main Street to the layout of the laundry facility.  And multiple recognition systems are utilized to reinforce quality service, from informal thank you notes to quarterly award posters of cast members to the renowned Disney Legacy award program (hint: look for cast members wearing a blue nametag).

Disney is not the first to recognize the importance of any one of these three competencies.   They have, however, integrated and implemented them in a business operating system that works like magic.   Further, because of the excellent strategic fit across its businesses (theme parks, resorts, cruise line, film studios, media, and merchandise), Disney is able to focus and amplify these competencies in a unique way.   This is how Disney creates value, and value creates financial results.    Our tour guide summed it up nicely.  “While many people believe it is the magic at Disney that makes it work, it is really the work that makes the magic.”  Food for thought - what is the magic that your organization provides to its customers, and what core competencies and operating principles have you instilled to make the magic happen?    You can learn more about the Disney approach at www.disneyinstitute.com.

“Strategic foresight.” It sounds like a generic term, doesn’t it? A business leader with insight into the future marketplace may be said to have it. National leaders and military generals may have it too. But strategic foresight is also a field of study. A search of the academic literature reveals over 100 peer-reviewed articles with the term in their titles. For those wishing to investigate, many are published in the journals of Technological Forecasting and Social Change, and Futures.  However, let me save you some time by highlighting a recent article by Iden, Methlie, & Christensen (2017) which provides an excellent summary of the field.   First, it offers a sound definition. “Strategic foresight involves understanding the future and applying future oriented insights to an organization’s strategic activities and decision making.”   I like this definition as it positions strategic foresight as component of the broader field of strategic management.  Second, it summarizes 59 other journal articles, organizing them into the broad categories of approaches, adoption, and outcomes.

One of the most popular approaches for strategic foresight is that of scenario planning. As described by Peter Schwartz (1991) in The Art of the Long View, scenarios are hypothetical, yet richly realistic stories about alternative plausible futures. We're talking about 15-20 years out here, well beyond the typical 3-5 year strategic plan. Think oil and gas prices, and artificial intelligence. Here, uncertainty reigns, and therefore multiple futures must be considered to inform near-term decision making. Thomas Chermack (2011) provides a more recent book entitled Scenario Planning in Organizations, offering a practical five-phase process for creating, using, and assessing scenarios.

So how does this apply to you? The answer lies in another question. What's the time horizon of your strategic plan or business plan? If near-term, as in three years or less, the future may be sufficiently predictable to plan and execute in a linear fashion. But if long-term, as in five years or more, you may be facing risks and uncertainties that can only be dealt with through the techniques involved in strategic foresight.  Which will you choose?

References

Chermack, T. J. (2011). Scenario Planning in Organizations. San Francisco:  Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Iden, J., Methlie, L. B., & Christensen, G. E. (2017). The nature of strategic foresight research: A systematic literature review. Technological Forecasting & Social Change, 116, 87-97.
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Schwartz, P.  (1991). The Art of the Long View.  New York: Crown Business.

Leadership is one of the oldest fields of study of human behavior.  Homer, Plato, Aristotle, and Confucius all wrote of leadership, although the oldest written leadership principles are found in The Instruction of Ptahhotep from 2300 BCE!   One of Ptahhotep’s principles that I like is "If you as a leader decide on the conduct of a great number of people, seek the most perfect manner of making your decisions so that your conduct may be without blame or fault.”  Much of recorded history chronicles the leaders of armies, nations, religions and social movements.  Fast forward a few centuries and the modern study of leadership began in the early 1900’s with a focus on leadership traits like ambition, intelligence, extroversion and even height.  Trait studies soon gave way to a focus on leaders’ skills, behaviors and styles.   Today we are familiar with leadership models like charismatic leadership, transformational leadership, servant leadership, and situational leadership, to name a few.

But what about followers?   Aren’t they important too?   Followership is a relatively new field within the leadership studies.  In 1992, Robert Kelly developed a model of followership highlighting the importance of independent, critical thinking for effective followers.  In the 2000’s, Ira Chaleff added the importance of followers not just serving leaders but serving a common purpose to achieve positive leadership outcomes.   Most recently, in 2014, Mary Uhl-Bien presented perhaps the first formal theory of followership.  Uhl-Bien identifies a rich set of characteristics of both followers and leaders, and how they interrelate, to achieve outcomes in general.  Her theory has two parts, the first of which is called “Reversing the Lens” and shows that followership is the other side of the coin of leadership with its own follower traits, behaviors and outcomes.   The second part, “Leadership Co-Created Process,” focuses on how leader and follower behaviors integrate to jointly create the outcomes of the organization.  This elevation of followers to the same level as leaders, theoretically speaking, is striking and adds significantly to our understanding of leadership.  For example, the theory would help explain how followers influence leaders, how followers might actually lead the organization, and how synergy between followers and leaders might lead to new heights unachievable by either separately.

So why does all this matter?   Well, leadership has been around a long time and isn’t about to go away.  We need leadership.  And countless studies have shown the positive (and negative) effects of leadership on organizational performance.  An appreciation of the importance of effective followership, an integral part of effective leadership, can help your organization reach new heights too.