Every organization strives to be great. Jim Collins wrote a bestseller called Good to Great where he suggests that “good is the enemy of great.” There are quite a few great companies out there. These companies provide wonderful products and services that solve customer problems. They employ thousands of people and provide for their families. They create economic wealth and community benefit that extends far beyond their corporate campuses. Great companies are ultimately run by people though. People make the organization, not the brand, the product, the innovation or even the management. Ultimately, the culture that supports and empowers the team to be the very best version of themselves is what causes companies to be not only great, but excellent. Excellence is driven by culture, but how do you create a culture of excellence?
I recently had the opportunity to participate in a one week, intensive leadership training program at the Disney Institute hosted at the Walt Disney World Resort called Disney’s Approach to Business Excellence. While I cannot share all of their secrets (especially the backstage ones), I can share some insights and how they have impacted how I believe cultures of excellence are created and supported.
In order to share these insights, I feel as though I should share a bit more about the Walt Disney Company and how they have created this culture of excellence. Walt Disney was a creative genius and one of the most imaginative and innovative people of his time. Not only did he create the modern cartoon, but he revolutionized both the film and entertainment industries. He was a dreamer who cast a vision for something so much bigger than anyone could imagine and then he executed and relentlessly pursued bringing that vision into existence. Today, the Walt Disney Company is one of the most financially successful public corporations in the world and they have a culture that creates a cult-like following.
The Walt Disney Company accomplishes the continued embodiment of Walt’s vision each day, well beyond his death more than fifty years ago, by holding true to his promise, which they now call their brand promise: “We produce family entertainment with heart.” Their culture is built upon a simple promise that every cast member, or staff member as we might call them, is empowered to live out daily. This brand promise has created a staff and customer loyalty that has far outlived Walt and will likely outlive most of us today. What is it that makes Disney so successful and how do we bottle it up to put into our organizations?
Three Components of Cultural Excellence
Every organization is founded upon and daily lives out its values and culture. Even an organization which has no stated or communicated values and culture still exhibits them. The absence of culture does not mean it is not there. All organizational cultures are comprised of three components, each with sub components that are interrelated. These components are values, structures and actions.
The values of organization are derived by its story or narrative, typically created by the founders or by those who were involved with the early history. Numerous stories exist of Walt Disney in his early days in the studios and at Disneyland before he passed. What Disney was most known for was his creative energy and passion for excellence. He built his empire around dreaming big, imagining a world that didn’t exist and relentlessly pursuing it. His famous quote embodies this ideal, “If you can dream it, you can do it.”
Building a culture of excellence requires developing a robust set of values that tie to the organization’s vision and mission. The promise and purpose that you provide to your customer is tied into your organization’s values. Values are only applicable if they are defined, communicated and modeled. Take the Walt Disney Company for instance. Their brand promise is to provide family entertainment with heart. For anyone who has watched a Disney film, attended a theme park or experienced any of their products, it is clear to see how they live this brand promise out each and every day. The brand promise is built upon the idea that an organization’s values are lived out in serving its customers. The organizational team, however, must also consider how they live out these values. Disney defines this as the organization’s common purpose, which is to say the theme, ideals and values an organization’s staff can rally around to motivate them to serve customers. Disney’s common purpose is to create happiness. Short and sweet. They are empowered to create happiness by living out four simple values each and every day through simple activities around safety, courtesy, show and efficiency. These are essentially their core values and they tie directly back to the brand promise and common purpose. Putting these pieces together provides the foundation for a culture of excellence.
The second component of building a culture of excellence builds on the foundations established by the vision, mission and values. Every organization and culture thrives or dies on the structure and processes that enable the people to do their job. Each organization has an inherent hierarchy, particular efficiencies and systems that have been put together over the years. Positioning the structure and hierarchy around the values is an important step in living out the culture of excellence that organizations strive for. When values and structures aren’t aligned, you see unhappy staff, broken systems and a general lack of growth and success in an organization. When they are aligned, however, you see organizations like Apple, Facebook, Google, Disney, General Electric and others grow and thrive for many years. Each organization must define their values first in order to prepare the foundation for structures and processes to be updated.
The third component to building a culture of excellence is that of actions and communications. This is the most empowering aspect for individuals as it is ultimately their responsibility to daily live out and embody the culture that is present. Leaders often ask their team to do things, but if the leader isn’t willing to also do it, they aren’t fully implementing the culture in action and communication. As George Bernard Shaw once stated, “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” What gets communicated gets done. What doesn’t get communicated may not. A culture of communication that is supported by consistent processes and structures enables the team to fully live out the mission and values of an organization.
These three components have to be fully developed by an organization and must be tied together closely or the system breaks down. A common misunderstanding among leaders is that the culture will self-heal or that the cream will rise to the top and the bad eggs will go away. Unfortunately, everyone plays a role in the culture, some to make it and some will break it.
Failure is a Part of Building a Culture of Excellence
Disney created a culture of excellence that was built upon values and a mission to provide amazing content in the form of full length feature cartoon films in a time when animation was in its infancy. He broke boundaries and dreamed bigger than anyone else in his time, but he also saw failure as a natural process to building and learning. The idea of failure is often antithetical to success in our times, but Disney and many innovators before and after him have valued their failures as pivotal moments in their future successes.
It is good to have a failure while you are young because it teaches you so much…and once you’ve lived through the worst, you are never quite as vulnerable afterward – Walt Disney
What does failure have to do with building a culture of excellence? For many, failure is the worst possible option. Many leaders believe that failure is not excellence and they force perfection on imperfect people. Failure is an important aspect of building a culture of excellence because it empowers individuals to try new things, innovate, seek efficiencies and be human all while doing what their leaders ask of them. Failure, however, is not an excuse for not trying nor is it an opportunity to justify a lack of action. Failure is a learning tool and something that modern cultures of excellence have embraced. The innovation revolution of the late 1990s through today exemplifies a culture of failure, whereby technology companies rapidly evolved business models and products to change the internet and mobile landscapes. A highly successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Seth Godin wrote, “Fail fast and cheap. Fail often. Fail in a way that doesn’t kill you.”
Failure is essential in innovation and creativity. Innovation at its core is change. Change is driven by individuals who are empowered by their leaders through a culture of excellence. Leadership is responsible for establishing, managing, modeling and implementing the culture of the organization, while supporting the individuals in the organization towards realizing their goals. As a leader, it is your responsibility to encourage controlled failure through the support and expression of ideas, testing of assumptions and empowering of solution implementation. Celebrate failure as a learning opportunity and then work towards the next great innovation.
Building a Culture of Excellence in Practice
Leaders are the drivers of culture, but leaders do not stand alone. A friend once said to me, when I asked him how he defined successful leadership, that leaders are the ones being held up on the shoulders of their team, not standing on the pile of bodies they’ve conquered. A team makes the leader and the leader empowers the team. As the leader, how do you define and create a culture of excellence? I’ll share a few insights about how the Walt Disney Company does this, but I can’t tell all their secrets! The Walt Disney Company views their culture through the lens of a continuum of connected pieces of the culture.
The first component of this continuum is their focus on their customers. Customers are the lifeblood of any organization and a company whose customers are loyal will almost always be profitable. When you think of the Walt Disney Company, consider the rabid fans, the couples who get married on site, and families who travel to Disney World every year. Loyalty comes from a relentless passion to serve customers and live out Disney’s brand promise every day. As the leader, you must consider, what is your organization’s brand promise, what is the common purpose that your team rallies around, and how do your values tie into the organization’s mission and vision? Define these, put structures and processes around them, and empower leaders and followers alike to action and celebrate success with consistent communication about your culture.
The second component on this continuum is exception service. Organizations like Disney have produced a quality service engine that empowers their cast members to put the customer above the transaction. If a child drops an ice cream cone, a cast member is empowered to get another one and give it to that child. This allows them to fulfill their common purpose of creating happiness and in turn create loyalty among customers. Consider how your team is empowered to solve problems and what roadblocks (think structures and processes) prohibit them from successfully delivering the service you desire to see.
Excellence in leadership is the fifth part to Disney’s continuum of excellence and encompasses the idea that leaders live out and communicate the culture. One of the ways that Disney did this is through storytelling. He was known as a dynamic storyteller and in a classic example of this, Disney brought his animation team to their studio one evening and spent more than three hours detailing his vision for Snow White in epic fashion. Leaders are storytellers and cast the vision for a culture of excellence.
Finally, a culture of excellence is built upon Disney’s fifth component, continuous feedback and improvement. An organization cannot sustain by doing the same thing over and over again. As Albert Einstein famously stated, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Therefore, successful innovation comes from the learning process derived from continuous improvement. Innovation, however, is driven by a constant loop of feedback that boils up from staff members who work daily with customers or behind the scenes. These change-makers must be encouraged to share feedback in order for the loop of improvement to occur. Think about how your organization values and uses feedback, celebrates innovation and drives changes to better serve customers.
Building a culture of excellence takes a top-down strategic focus coupled with daily effort modeled by leaders encouraged across the organization that empowers team members to embody values that are derived from your organization’s mission and vision. Consider how you as the leader or follower can participate in strengthening your company’s culture towards excellence.
Jeremy Vickers, Ph.D., serves as Associate Vice President of External Affairs at Baylor University where he leads institutional events, community relations and external affairs. He is passionate about innovation and entrepreneurship and channels that passion to serve organizations where he can support both growth and change. Jeremy lives in Waco, TX with his wife Jackie and four children.