DISNEY CORPORATE CULTURE EXPECTS LEADERS TO ASK THEMSELVES QUESTIONS

Motivate excellence

Organizational culture or corporate culture is a set of values, traditions and habits that influences employee motivation and behavior, as well as helps to achieve the company’s goals. Organizational culture attributes enable employees to maximize their own performance, as well as company profitability.
The Walt Disney company allows you to see the organizational culture of a global success story up close. The company’s business segments are strategically managed to provide an outstanding range of entertainment products and services to customers in the mass media, amusement and theme park industries. Corporate culture supports the corporation’s efforts to manage strategic growth and related opportunities.

Characteristics of corporate culture

The goal of the company’s corporate mission is to be the leader of providing entertainment and related products. Key features of The Walt Disney Company’s corporate culture:

Innovation is at the heart of Disney’s organizational culture. Its aim is to encourage creative imagination of the company’s human resources to deliver outstanding products and services, as well as business performance. The use of innovations in the company’s long-term strategy encourages the creation of competitive products at the international level, providing new challenges and growth opportunities. The motivational impact of Disney’s corporate culture helps manage business development for long-term success.

Decency. The main direction of the business is the family, so decency and kindness are emphasized in the organizational culture. For example, the company’s human resource training and development programs, as well as management strategies, motivate employees to provide kind and decent service, especially when communicating with customers. This feature of the organisation’s culture contributes to the company’s excellent and positive reputation, strengthening the company’s brand image as a driver of business, as well as competitive advantage.

Quality. This is an important feature of an organisation’s corporate culture, which distinguishes it from competitors in the global market by demanding high quality standards in all aspects of business, including employee skills. It helps the company’s management in implementing an intensive growth strategy, the priority of which is product differentiation and uniqueness. Meanwhile, employees are motivated to continuously learn, as well as develop and improve their skills in order to provide customers with excellent service and entertainment experiences.

Community. The community mindset is one of Disney’s strategies for developing human resources, using an organizational culture to manage employees and their behavior to achieve business goals. For example, a company has programs that motivate employees to see themselves as members of the entertainment community who work to achieve excellent performance. Among other things, the company’s culture encourages employees to be called participants, focusing on providing the best entertainment experience for customers who are called guests. This feature of corporate culture strengthens the morale of employees and stimulates higher productivity, quality, as well as customer satisfaction. The acquired sense of community helps in multinational entrepreneurship, as well as in strengthening corporate social responsibility.

Storytelling. Disney’s corporate culture includes excellent storytelling skills – both the company’s history is a story and the company’s products are stories in the entertainment, theme park and media industries. Products and services are given added value. The corporate culture encourages employees to use their personal experiences to make the company’s entertainment products unforgettable to customers. For example, employees themselves hold performances at Disneyland theme parks and related resorts. Consequently, storytelling is a cultural feature that optimizes The Walt Disney Company’s strategic leadership for an outstanding entertainment brand image.

Optimism. Disney products and services, as well as employee behavior, reflect optimism and positive thinking. This feature of organizational culture embodies hope and happiness, which connects the company’s culture with the goal of its co-founder, Walt Disney, to make people happy. Positivity and optimism also motivate employees to adopt a mindset of excellence that focuses on solutions and opportunities, thus strengthening strategic business innovation.

Training ground at the Disney Institute

For three decades, the Disney Institute’s main thematic focus has been on leadership excellence, customer experience, quality of service and team involvement. Accordingly, training and helping business leaders and professionals in various industries to improve their organizations.

The Disney Institute [1] provides a unique learning experience behind the scenes of its “living lab”, where you can witness the use of the Disney methodology in a real environment, as well as its potential adaptation and application to other business sectors. The Disney Empire is the world’s largest media and entertainment conglomerate with a turnover of $ 65 billion, which is twice the gross domestic product (GDP) of Latvia. The foundation of the training ground is one of the unique business directions of the Disney Empire – theme parks, where invaluable knowledge and experience are accumulated.

Leader action – corporate culture

It is often said that “actions speak louder than words”. These words serve as the key to the culture of a successful and prosperous organization. Often, corporate culture is interpreted as shared values and beliefs of an organization, while leaders and managers may not pay attention to the fact that their behavior and actions reflect the culture and values of the organization.

“We teach business professionals that organizational values and culture are formed organically under the influence of different types of leaders or under the leadership of a consciously proactive leader. An organization can be both an innovative culture and a creative or even toxic culture, and it will result most directly from the behavior and actions of its leaders,” [2] says Bruce Jones, senior program director at the Disney Institute.

Leaders need to be proactive and authentic, acting deliberately and with intent, in order to foster an environment that supports the organizational culture that they want to create, maintain and nurture in their workplace. Why? If the head of the organization does not act purposefully, its culture becomes a “culture by default”, determined and dictated by the existing work environment. On the other hand, when the work and actions of the company’s leaders are in accordance with their set values, then as a result, the workplace culture will also reflect the same values. The Disney Institute emphasizes the importance of leadership in an organization’s corporate culture, encouraging every business leader to ask themselves: “What organizational culture do I promote through my actions?”

[1] Disney Institute

[2] Disney Defines Its Corporate Culture by the Actions of Its Leaders