Team Disney Anaheim building

Rather a cute title for a class, isn't it? As you might guess by the name, the idea here is to make sure that Disneyland Trainers are fully versed in the proper Disney way to go about doing things, because these trainers influence so strongly how the Cast as a whole performs.

This class is fairly new, if I remember correctly. There might well have been a version of Trainer certification before, but if so it was called something different and I was never scheduled for it. They just one day told me I was now an Official Trainer. Whoopee! Actually, I kind of enjoyed the distinction, I guess. Nowadays, this class serves as official certification to be a Trainer, so it's gained in importance. Remember how I told you that Trainers guide new hires through everything these days, so the Buddy System has a significant impact on new hires. And besides all that, when I attended I got a free T-Shirt with the experience, which identified me as a DOT: Disneyland Operations Trainer. That was neat.

What the class actually consists of is a sort of curious mix of pragmatism and re-brainwashing. It's almost like doing Orientation again, actually. And it makes sense. Now that you've had a chance to go out there and see how things work, here are the Disney guidelines once again. They make much more sense now, because you're not so overwhelmed, and once you've seen the real-life situations, the Disney framework for them is just easier to understand.

Case in point: the Four Keys to Disneyland's success. This was just so much rhetoric during Orientation, and if you're a natural born student as I was, maybe you even memorized them during Orientation. I can roll "safety-courtesy-show-capacity" off my tongue just as quickly as "opposite of b plus or minus the square root of b squared minus four AC, all over two A." Stop laughing at me. I admitted up front I was a geek (honestly, I did not look that up right now). Any Lead worth his salt should know the quadratic equation. Er, I mean the Four Keys.

As I was saying, The Four Keys (nowadays Efficiency has replaced Capacity) make more sense when you are re-trained than when you are first trained. You've worked in your location for a long time now, so examples spring to mind. Let's say you load Storybook boats. Safety comes first, to the exclusion of all else. Courtesy next, even before Show. That means that if you must break Show to be courteous or safe, then do so. Someone venturing too close to the water? Be decisive if you must, but be safe. Show, as you notice, comes before Efficiency. That means we should not break Show for the sake of being fast. This, to my mind, is the one area of the "Four Keys" that Disneyland preaches but does not always really mean.

I think it was during "Train the Trainer" that we saw the video "The Guest." Though the title sounds like it was a Disney production, in fact it was some outside company. The class leader told us each copy costs us $5000, and could we believe that Disneyland purchased three copies? He was trying to make a point that DL cared so much about the message here that it would invest $15,000 in the betterment of its workforce, but the point was lost on me. I was musing why DL didn't just buy one and pirate the others if they needed more.

The video humorously re-makes the point about GUESTS. It's not Disneyland-specific; it's for any service-industry business. Customers should be treated like guests in the home. Be courteous even when they misbehave. They might get away with misbehaving, but we cannot. The costs of re-acquiring an annoyed ex-customer are much much higher than retaining one, even if it means we take on apparently extra cost now (such as minor freebies or discounts). In other words, do what it takes to make them leave happy. The humor came about through the various scenarios: a rude Guest and a polite host, a polite Guest and a rude host, or a rude Guest and a rude host. It really drove home to point that paying customers expect a level of service that exceeds even simple courtesy. Satisfaction with the level of service, particular in an industry with so much competition, is just as important as the product itself to the Guest and his decision whether or not to return.

The Trainer class does not address specifics by location. It doesn't tell you how to train someone on the Monorail or working the Emporium's cash registers. They assume you know that; your knowledge is why you were selected to become a trainer. Instead, here it's all about the appropriate attitude, and transmitting that to the new hires as we train them.

I shall be brief with this one, as I believe it was simply a precursor to "You Create Happiness," a similar program for Leads. In many ways, it is also a re-sprinkling of pixie dust on battle-hardened veterans of Disneyland, in an attempt to remind them of the important lessons from Orientation. Again, I found it highly useful. You get a good perspective not only on Disney policies in general, but also on the purpose for their existence. And such perspective only comes if you take such classes once you're armed with gads of experience.

There are significant differences from the Trainer class, naturally. This is a course for Working Leads, so there is more at stake and more to cover than just the pixie-dust approach to viewing the workplace. There are management issues. Motivational tools. Crisis management. And, best of all, I got to fire off a chemical fire extinguisher for the only time in my life, just so we'd know what to expect and how to do it.

Some of this stuff was hands-on, such as the outdoor firing of the extinguisher, but for the most part this was a class that took place indoors. It is workshop format, meaning that things begin with a traditional front-facing classroom full of rows of seats and an easel-based series of posterboards to augment the lecture, followed by questions and amplifications, and finally small group activities that drive home the messages.

The thematics of the course tended to focus on effective management. More to the point, the pixie dust view of life was mixed not so much with work applications as it was with coworker interactions. Teamwork rises to the fore, and is consequently stressed quite a bit. For details on how all that played out in the classes themselves, you're going to have to check back for the later courses at the Disney University.