A leadership development program is only as good as its practical applications.
Disney doesn't just tell its employees about customer service values established in the 1960s; it gathers good customer service stories from around the company to share with its leadership classes, and takes employees backstage at its parks to see its complex support environment. When on the road doing classes for outside organizations, instructors create a virtual experience using film and photographs.
"We want those case studies to be as current as possible, as relevant as possible," Jones says. "We're always careful to make sure what we're talking about is not just baked in historical context." Disney treats itself as a living laboratory to see what approaches work, and shares those successes in its classes.
Businesses should also pick instructors for the program who have a track record of good leadership. Otherwise, employees won't embrace the message.
"Leadership is as much performance art as much as it is everything else," Murphy says. "They can talk a good game, but if they go out into the real world and an employee starts talking to them and they roll their eyes, well, they haven't learned much."
Even in a struggling business, some pockets of the organization are usually still doing well, leadership instructors say. Staff development allows organizations to extrapolate lessons from those pockets to the whole company.