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Welcome to this week’s episode of the HRDQ-U In Review podcast, where we bring you the latest insights and practical tools for enhancing soft skills training in your organization. This webinar is brought to you by HRDQU.com, and I am your host, Sarah, Learning Events Manager at HRDQU. And today we have Lenn Millbower joining us to discuss a recent webinar he presented, Mickey, Donald, or Mufasa: What Disney’s Leadership Strategies can Teach your People.

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I’ve had the pleasure to collaborate with Lenn many times over the past few years and he has so many interesting experiences and stories to share about his time at Disney. And I’m excited to jump into some of that conversation today. So welcome Lenn, thanks so much for joining me. Oh, it’s great to be here. Always glad to do it. And before we jump into this, the webinar content here, let’s bring everybody up to speed. Let us know a little bit about who you are, what you do and what brought you to where you are today. Sure. I found out

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over time that my clients started calling me the mouse man. So that’s how I bill myself as the mouse man. And what I find I do a lot, of course, they do keynotes and workshops and training groups. Like one of the groups I worked with was the government accountability office, know, big time stuff, U.S. government. But mostly I find my focus is on organizations that have just grown up and all of a sudden realized they’re getting big business, but they haven’t quite figured out.

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how to make things work. So their leadership styles are  kind of funky and  personable rather than  professional.  Their  processes are weak and they’re not really focused on what their purpose is  in being an organization. And I help them tie all those pieces together into  a nice little package that can accelerate their growth.

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into  the stratosphere of whatever they want  to be. And so that’s what I do. And it’s really exciting. And  I learned how to do this from 10 years on the road as an entertainer, magician, musician, and then 25 years at the mouse. And  Sarah, we can talk about that more or not more, depending on what you would like to do. Yeah. So.

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You know, actually let me know, we’ve never discussed this before. Did you always want to work for Disney or work in Disney? Did you always have a love for it or is it something that you found you fell into throughout your career? As of course as a child growing up in the 50s and 60s, Walt was on TV all the time. So I had an infinity for him. Kind of like  your favorite uncle with the Twinkle and the Sigh and the magical things happening around him.

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But I was really an entertainer. was a magician. I actually did some ventriloquism and was a musician  and  performed in a variety entertainment troupe all around New York state. And then eventually got a degree in music composition from Berkeley College of Music and went on the road with show bands for 10 years. Our last year, we were on a cruise ship for the whole year. And frankly,

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After the cruise ship gig ended, we broke up out of boredom. And at that time, the  takeover battles for Disney were happening and I got  re-energized into  mouse land,  so to speak, and  asked the stockbroker friend of mine what I could do. He said I could either buy stock or I could go work for Disney. And buying stock wasn’t an option. So  I went to the mouse and

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That was basically my second career. So my first career was an entertainer. My second career was in Disney operations and ultimately in training and development. Wow, that’s so interesting. I always enjoy hearing all the stories that you have to share from your time on the road and working at Disney. let’s let everybody know what kind of exciting things are  you up to now? What are you working on  currently? Well, it’s very curious. I found that the work has come to me

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It’s not that I’m out there soliciting work. It’s just  reputation, I guess. But what I find I end up  helping with is organizations that were small started in somebody’s living room or whatever and ended up kind of big, but we’re still running things very, very funky, chaotic, small time.

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mom and pop organizations, if you will, and all of a sudden now need to figure out who they are and put their big boy pants on and go out into the world. So I have three clients at the moment. One is a health insurance company, one is a hospital system, and one is a utility company. Now you wouldn’t think any of those have anything in common, but they do have one thing. They’re local and they’re small and

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growing rapidly. And what I do is I come in and I give them a cultural makeover. The way I describe it is that people think that Disney is magical. It’s not magic. It’s a method. If you learn the methods or Disney-inspired methods, then you can make your own magic. And that’s what I help these organizations do. And that’s what I’m into these days. Great. And let’s bring it back.

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here now to the webinar that we did together,  Mickey, Donald or Mufasa, what Disney’s leadership strategies can teach your people. Now for any of those that hadn’t  attended that webinar with us and as a recap for those who did join that session with us, can you let us know what the key takeaways were for registrants at that event to bring everybody up to speed?  Sure, sure. I have to back up and  explain that this all comes from

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my work and my book, Care Like a Mouse. And in that book, say that  organizations that succeed like Disney have a great message. They have strong interactions with  employees and customers. And  the context within which  their offering occurs  is  flawless. So it’s those three things. So  the component of that

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that was the focus of Mickey Donald and Mufasa is interaction. And Disney had this formula that they got from Harvard University and it’s a formula I believe in a great deal. It is this, a great leader delivers a satisfying, I call them customer experience. Satisfied customers deliver a satisfying customer experience. Satisfied customers.

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become loyal, spend more money, come back time and time again, recommend the business  to others and business profits result. Now, part of that is that interaction piece I mentioned a minute ago. And Mickey Donald and Mufasa talks about Walt’s growth from just homegrown after all his business started in a garage and the garage in his uncle’s backyard. And Walt’s journey.

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growing as a leader from  being everybody’s buddy to being the kindly guy uncle with a twinkle in his eye that we know from the TV show. The three phrases that, and I’m approximating because it’s not like  a switch was thrown and he went into a different phase. This was an evolution in him. His first phase I would call the Mickey’s phase, because he was everybody’s buddy. He was a pal.

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The reason he was  such a buddy and so close to his people, in fact, they called him Diz. It wasn’t Mr. Disney. It wasn’t Walt. It was Diz. Hey, Diz. But the reason for that was he couldn’t pay anyone any money. He was broke. In fact, early on, went bankrupt. So he was not a person in a position to  entice people to work for him because he could pay them. What he did do was he entice them with a vision.

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And that vision was  flawless animation,  animation as an art form, taking technology and using technology to make  things move, to tell stories, which is what the whole Disney organization has always been about. So that was his first phase was everybody’s buddy. And that phase, the Mickey phase worked until they started to make money. And by the time Snow White hit,

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Snow White was a man of success, something like 38 million, which doesn’t sound like much, but it was a lot of money in the 20s when Snow White hit. And his people had worked hours and hours, and of course they were being paid by then. But as the money had come in, his people started noticing this person over here was getting more vacation time than I was getting.

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My chair is smaller than someone else. They have a bigger office. They have a larger desk. I’m not being paid adequately for the time I’m putting in. And it got a little nasty about the same time World War II started happening and the government took over the studio and Disney was  relegated to making training films rather than these  marvelous animated classics he’d made before.

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And  every decision had to go through him. during that period of time, he became really surly. He was like the Donald, if you think about Donald Duck and how surly he is. He was not fun to be around. In fact, the security guards would call ahead once, Walt drove onto the studio lot to tell people whether the cuddly bear or whether the grizzly bear was on the lot that day.

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It all ended badly with a studio strike where the studio would never be the same after that. Walt had tried to create  Utopia in his Mickey phase, in this boss phase, this Donald phase. All that fell apart and he retreated. And there’s a quote from him. I’m going to paraphrase.

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because I don’t have it right in front of me. This is Walt Disney talking. This is not the Walt Disney we think we know, but this is  an actual quote. I tear the hell out of them. I just pound, pound, pound. Okay, here’s another quote. Sometimes I fire somebody just so they don’t get too cocky, and then I bring them back in a week or two. See, that’s not the guy we’re familiar with. And this boss period,

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didn’t work at all. He retreated from his studio and he ended up only going back to the studio to help when they had a problem. And during this period, he started tinkering with trains and a little building off to the side. And it’s a good thing he did because the tinkering with toy trains led to a train in his backyard, which led to the creation of Disneyland. During this period in the webinar, I call this the Mufasa stage and what he was

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And this is the guy that those of us who remember him remember him as. The twinkle in his eye, the smile on his face,  the kindly uncle who  you just can’t wait to turn the TV on for. So those were the free phases, Sarah. There’s the Mickey, the Donald, and the Mufasa. And when Walt became the Mufasa in the  50s, he had basically found his sweet spot. And the message of the webinar is that

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You can be everybody’s buddy, but not too much because  when things go good, things fall apart.  You don’t want to be the surly boss because you just build resentment. But if you can be the guide, the Mufasa, the wise one who everybody comes to for help in critical situations, you’ve got a much stronger organization. Great. I think that was a  perfect synopsis to catch everyone up to speed and give a nice recap there.

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while we now lead in to this next section here where we actually  compiled a list of a few questions  from  all the content and  questions that we had from our audience  during our webinar.  And the first question that we want to know is Walt Disney is an American icon, but was he a great leader? He was complicated leader. He was…

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You rarely got a compliment from Walt Disney. When you got a compliment, you heard about it from someone else. If he didn’t like something  you were doing, he wouldn’t holler at you. He might needle you a little bit, but he would paint a picture, a vision of what he wanted and how it could be so much more. And he’d say things like, have you thought about, or what if we did…

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Or, you know, this spot here is lacking.  And  when he really liked a solution you came up with, he would say, that’ll work. That was a compliment. People would post on their wall, that’ll work. Walt said, that’ll work to me today.  So he wasn’t what you would think of as a leader who’s glad handing  and  handing out the compliments right and left.

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He was a leader instead who was inspiring people. And frankly, there are some people who quit because he was hard to work for because he had this knack for finding the talent in people  and pulling out things from them that they never envisioned they could deliver.  The true mark of how influential he was with his people was they were all crying on the day he died.

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in spite of the fact that he rarely handed out compliments. So it’s quite an amazing thing. Wow. Wow. And so what behaviors did Walt demonstrate and expect his park leaders to follow? Well, let’s go back earlier than that because there were some things Walt specifically did in his behavior. He stayed real. He insisted on being called Walt.

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The reason Disney ended up with name tags, I believe, is because the organization got too big for him to know everyone’s name. But he explained his need to have everybody call him Wal because he wanted people to be able to come up to him.  He once also said, I’ll take an idea from anywhere. If the janitor has a good idea, I’ll take it. In fact, he once asked the janitor  in a studio what color the walls of the studio should be.

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And when they janitor said, well, why are you asking me? You’ve got all these colors. He responded, well, but, but you, um, you see these walls every day. thought you might know better than anyone else. So he stayed real. He dressed down almost a little, uh, rumpy wrinkled. So he wasn’t this big high flute and dude. He, he tried not to be hoi, hoi ploi. There’s this, uh,

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I can’t imagine  the waiter in France and Paris when this happened,  Walt loved chili and he loved two different kinds of chili mixed together. One had more  beans and one had more meat.  And he goes to this  restaurant  in France  and Paris and gives the waiter two cans of chili and asked them to heat them up for him. All right. That’s the kind of guy it was. Jell-O was a great dessert for him.

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What he also did was he hired experts  and he would inspire them as I was explaining to you  and he would push excellence on them. So how does this translate into a park? Well, there’s one story that explains everything.  Actually, I’m going to give you two. When he walked through the park with the leaders who would be in charge of the park, they asked him where the office building was for them.

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where their offices would be. And he said, there ain’t gonna be an office building here. I want you out in the park. I want you walking around with the guests, seeing what works for them and helping our cast members. So eventually there’s office buildings now, but he wasn’t big on you being in the office. He wanted you out and about. And the other story I want to tell is about the situation. He’s walking through Tomorrowland.

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with the supervisor for Tomorrowland at Disneyland and he points out a trash can that’s overflowing  and the supervisor says the wrong thing. He says, oh,  I’ll call Castiglione. Well, of course, being a Walt, he walked right over  and started pushing the trash down inside the can and picking the trash up off the ground and  that supervisor was very soon gone because everybody at Disney picks up trash.

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In fact, if you’re wondering why central Florida looks so clean sometimes,  I think it’s because almost everybody there has worked for the mouse and they all pick up trash. You can  tell the Disney employees in the local supermarket.  the ones picking up things off.  That’s hysterical. Really, Florida is always so clean whenever I go take a visit. There is never trash anywhere.  Yeah, well, there is, but you’re just not used to seeing it. Now,  what you can see if you watch close is you’ll see  leaders walking through the parks.

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and out and about and with their cast members. And  if you see two leaders walking around the park together, that’s  a one-on-one meeting between a boss and his direct report or her direct report. And  those meetings, as much as possible, they try to do in the park,  not in some back office. Because the reality is the suits in the office, don’t…

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know what’s actually going on.  It’s the guys walking around that know.  Another thing I should mention,  and if I’m getting ahead of your  questions, I apologize for that in advance, but it’s appropriate time to bring this up.  Disney has something it calls the leader basics, and it expects its leaders to do three things, to be positive, to be knowledgeable, and to be accountable.  If you’d like, I can go into that a little more.

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Yeah, let’s go into that. That seems like the  perfect segue here. Okay, so positive means I demonstrate commitment to my cast members. Knowledgeable means I know and manage my operation and teach it to my cast members. And accountable means I lead and monitor cast performance and enact operational improvements.  Think about those three words, positive, knowledgeable, and accountable. Those three words  summarize  everything a

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a leader of any quality should be doing. Now we can get a little bit deeper into that because there are some sub bullets. So let’s take positivity. I lead with a positive attitude and demonstrate commitment to cast members. So here are four bullets under it. Foster a positive and safe work environment. I take a sincere interest in and make my cast members feel welcome, included, and valued.

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I treat cast members with courtesy as if they are guests and I actively listen and quickly follow up on their issues.  The advantage of some statements like that  is  you  can coach, guide, mentor, discipline, and even terminate when you have to. And not just the frontline, but your leaders as well.  It is pretty clear.

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What, what is expected of you when you have those kinds of, uh,  of attitudes. So,  um, let’s see, let’s talk about knowledgeable.  I am available. I’m visible. I set a positive stone. I’m capable of stepping into assist.  I demonstrate the ability to do the job. Now here’s an example. When I was writing fireworks training for the  mouse, I realized that.

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the leaders  didn’t know the fireworks.  And the reason they didn’t was usually they were dancers whose needs have gone out and they went into management and they’d be calling the fireworks show. But if they asked why  a gerb didn’t fire, the gerbs kind of fireworks, the  technician could give them almost any sort of jive and  the leader wouldn’t know if it was true or not.

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So one of the first things we did when rewriting this fireworks program, was a two day training for,  initial training for fireworks technicians. We established the policy that the leaders also had to attend that program and pass the test as well.  Boy, you never saw some guys scribbling notes so furiously in your life, but  they knew the job then. And that’s the way to do it.

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the third part. We talked about knowledge, we talked about positivity.

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Let’s talk about accountability. Accountability. I recognize and appreciate my cast members’ efforts. I consistently enforce rules and priorities. I trust my cast members to make reasonable decisions. And I  communicate  what is going on to my employees.  Again, those three things are a very strong leadership message on how you should behave. And I think

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The reason  many organizations get themselves in trouble  is they make things too complicated. Like their mission and vision statements are gobbledygook. The behaviors leaders are supposed to demonstrate are like 10 different behaviors.  The key is to keep it  simple  and explainable to everybody so there’s no secrets.  Absolutely.  And you know, was just, I was just thinking it brought

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back to my memory immediately. I was recently in Disney and I actually got to see  one of  Walt’s, you know, that you talk about, one of his  requirements  put into action where you’re talking about how leaders and they have meetings out in the parks and  are immersing themselves while they’re having those company meetings and things like that. We were in Epcot and it was in the evening and we were just walking around and we actually stumbled upon

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a group of team members that were sitting down in the bleacher area near the water and they were having a company meeting and we didn’t even realize at first, we were just chatting along and then we were like, oh, and it immediately brought me back to your webinars and all the times that we’ve connected, Lenn, where I was like, there it is, I got to see it in action, which was pretty cool. Yeah, that is cool. And it’s there, it’s just most people never notice it.

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Here’s a quote from Wall that I like. think the part  I’ve played is in coordinating and encouraging. It’s like conducting an orchestra. They’re all talented, but they need to be pulled together. And you think about the three,  Mickey as the pal, you can pull people together for good times, but for tough, tough discussions, it’s hard to be their pal and pull them together.  When you’re the surly boss, it’s

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pretty hard to get people to think for themselves and to create better than what you could do on your own. Because after all, didn’t draw, he needed people to draw.  So the Surly boss didn’t work. But the Mufasa attitude  of coordinating and encouraging  and  conducting the orchestra  is  very much the right approach. And I think it works  both as  a senior leader,

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It works as a frontline leader. works as an individual contributor. And I think it actually just works in life as well. Wow. Well, I think that that was a great way to tie off that to Q and A there with that quote that I think really kind of was a great descriptor  of what the webinar was about that you shared.  And before we close out today though, Len, can you let listeners know where they can learn more about your work and where they can connect with you?

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Sure, I’d be glad to.  My website is likeamouse.com, likeamouse.com,  and that’ll take you to all the various offerings. My book is called Care Like a Mouse, and it’s available on Amazon as well as on my own website.  If you’re looking for the book, though, make sure you get edition two, because edition one is the old version.

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Twitter at Like A Mouse Tips  and I’m on LinkedIn under my own name and  Facebook under my own name as well.  And  I’m always up for a conversation with folks. I mean, we’re all in this together. We’re trying to make this  a  better world and particularly have organizations that are serving a purpose beyond just making a profit, but making a profit.

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and making the world better at the same time. so please give me a call, give me an email, give me a shout and let’s see what kind of magic we can make. Great. Yes. Make sure that you connect with Lenn on all of those platforms there that you can reach out and check out his book as well. And, you know, thank you so much Lenn for your time today. Oh, it’s an honor to do it. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it.

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