Leadership lessons from Disney: stop using the same language other organizations use

Language drives (and reflects) behaviour (or behavior if you are reading this in the US). It’s common in organizations for the customer, other departments, management or the front line (whoever 'other' is defined as) to be panned when they are out of earshot, talked of as ‘them ’ or ‘the ones who make our life difficult’.

Philippe Starck, th emad but brilliant designer, when he was helping the French company Thompson, said the prevailing attitude in mediocre companies is "It’s cr*p, but it doesn’t matter; the consumer will make do with it". He insisted at Thompson on replacing the word ‘consumer’ with a family member, to break people out of that mindset.

As he put it: "It doesn’t sound the same at all if you start over again and say ‘It doesn’t matter; my daughter will make do with it’. All of a sudden, you can’t get away with it anymore. There is an enormous task to be done with this kind of symbolic repositioning."

I heard Jay Rasulo, when he was CEO of Disneyland, Paris, widen this point further, making me realize how the language used in your organization is a massive leadership issue, and one which most leaders ignore or just don't recognise the importance of. Rasulo said:

"Just as a spoken language preserves a country’s culture, our language and vocabulary does the same thing for us. The language reminds them (your people) on a daily basis why they are there."

Hence the Disney language that talks of 'cast members' instead of employees. The same point applies to the language used within your organization to describe what your people do, as well as what they say.

The old story about three masons illustrates it. I heard it quoted by Horst Schulze, founding president of the Ritz-Carlton hotels, and I think Kate mentions it elsewhere in The Hub:

A man saw three masons working on a building and asked them what they were doing.
"I’m putting bricks together," said one.
"I’m building a wall," said the second.
"I’m building a cathedral," said the third.

"They were all doing the same thing. The difference was in their attitude," said Schulze. And attitude is expressed and defined in the language your people use. FedEx’s company-wide motto 'Whatever it takes' is not just a slogan. It sums up a unifying sense of purpose and commitment that makes FedEx distinctive.

Learning point: Your internal language defines your culture. If you use the same words as your competitors to define what you do, then how do you expect to be distinctive in a crowded marketplace? Generic managementspeak, which is what you find in organizations across the globe, is not leadership speak. Great leaders, like Walt, invent a language for their organization. Diney has 'cast members' not 'employees'. How have you, as a leader, harnessed this brilliant free tool called language, to help carve out a unique high performance culture the way Disney has? Do you have any language at all (apart from acronyms and jargon) that is unique to your organization. If not, how do you expect to be unique AS an organization?