Nolan Martin :
Welcome to the NEGOTIATEx podcast. I’m your co-host, co-founder, Nolan Martin. And with me is Jolly St. Nick. I mean, Aram Donigian, our partner in crime. I’m here to introduce our guests. How’s it going, Aram?
Aram Donigian :
Hey, I’m enjoying the holiday season here, Nolan. You look like you’re enjoying it, a Florida style, no Christmas hat, no Christmas garb. What’s going on?
NM :
I’m getting ready to actually take out the jet skis in December. So well worth it.
AD :
I am not jealous. I will take snow this time of year anytime. Let me introduce our guest and for folks that are joining us, you’ll notice the little holiday spirit we’ve got going on. If you join us by YouTube, our guest today is Lenn Millbower, a former Disney training leader. Big picture thinker, adult learning expert, five time published author, keynote speaker, and workshop facilitator.
Lenn is also the founder and president of Offbeat Training, LLC, an organization that specializes in teaching Disney inspired methodology so business professionals can make their own magic. Lenn has one of the most unique backgrounds of anyone we’ve ever had on this podcast. And Lenn, that is saying quite a bit. Lenn has worked as a professional magician and musician who performed extensively throughout the United States, Canada, and on cruise ships. He received his Bachelor of Music in Composition from Berkeley College of Music.
And a master’s in human resource development from Webster university. Prior to founding offbeat training, Lenn was a training leader at Disney world learning solutions, where he managed the team that wrote and documented all operational employee training. In recognition of his work on the opening team of Disney’s Animal Kingdom, Lenn received Disney’s highest internal recognition award Partners in Excellence.
Over the past 30 years, Lenn has worked extensively in training and education, instructional design, customer service, leadership, innovation and presentation skills with a variety of organizations. Clients include health care, governmental, military, supermarket, insurance, industry, organizations. His lauded learner focused strategies give him a real world perspective on the relevant application of brain-based adult learning methodologies.
Lenn’s engaging, interactive, and enjoyable entertainment based training approach energizes participants while fully demonstrating the effectiveness of his techniques in real world applications.
Lenn focuses on practical steps that participants can immediately apply. The results speak volumes. One client increased profits by 50% per day. While another client improved its patient satisfaction scores by over 15%. His most recent book, the Santa system: 10 Leadership Lessons from the North pole was released in November. And as an analogy, both fun and very serious about the business of achieving organizational results through people. In it, Lenn visits Santa’s workshop and shares what leaders can learn from Santa’s unprecedented and unmatched success.
Lenn, Happy Holidays. Welcome and thank you for joining us today.
Lenn Millbower :
Merry Christmas! Happy holidays. I’m glad to be here. I put my eggnog aside for a minute and talk to you guys.
AD :
I did the same thing with my mulled wine.
NM :
Well, Lenn, as you reflect on your professional journey, what key people or moments most significantly impacted how you think about organizational success today?
How Serendipitous Opportunities Sculpted A Creative Career [03:12]
LM :
I have to confess I did not seek to be where I am now. It all happened to me. I don’t know whether you call it God or Kismet or whatever it is, but my job has been to open the doors that are placed in front of me. My entire life, I’ve had people saying to me, yeah, you’re creative. You should do this. And offering me an opportunity.
I started out with Doris Yeager. She was the director of a children’s variety entertainment troupe in upstate New York. And I was a magician for her and ended up being her musical director. I went to, as you said, Berkeley College of Music. Then all that time on the cruise ship with various bands and eventually ended up at Disney. And frankly, the leadership I experienced at the mouse is somewhat reflected in the Santa system analogy.
Two people that come to mind, Mark Potter, he was my manager when we were opening Disney’s Animal Kingdom. And the amazing thing about Mark is he managed everybody differently, each according to their needs. And he was such an effective manager. Another one was Sharon Medill, and she was a former. Mary Poppins, and boy, it showed everything Sharon touched was practically perfect.
The interesting thing is the Disney organization is one that says, I want you to do this. You say, I don’t know anything about that. They say, that’s okay. You’ll learn. That didn’t happen to me. What happened to me instead was you’ve got a unique talent. We’re going to do this with you. And so I kept getting these plush assignments that fit my skill set.
Two of the major things were orientation programs, character training. I actually got to write the Disney, Mickey Mouse and the gang got to write the character training program three or four different times. I’ll close this out by saying my most interesting time is in the morning, I’m working with the Snow Whites and the afternoon I’m working with the pyrotechs. And so in the morning, it’s [makes sounds], and in the afternoon, it’s blow stuff up, lose a hand.
AD :
What I appreciate about what you said is this core skill of yours, being able to be creative. Creativity has such application in so many contexts. I’m sure we’re going to hear more about your own personal journey with creativity and how it served you well as we go through this.
LM :
Yeah, I think it’s important to say that I believe everyone is creative. It’s just that they have different skills. It’s a misnomer to focus on somebody who’s doing creative out of the box things and say, no, you’re so creative, and I’m not. Because I look at somebody who knits a quilt and I think, how in the world did they do that?
To me, that’s creative. I reject the idea that some people are creative and others are not. We all are talented. We just have different skills.
AD :
I so agree with that. Could you share a little bit about the approach you take for transforming training programs and perhaps share an example of how a client was able to apply your techniques to enhance employee performance?
Redefining Corporate Culture: Crafting A Community Through Creative Insight [06:00]
LM :
Sure. Again, this is something that just happened to me. I got a call one day from Martin Lindstrom. He’s an international branding guru, and he was working with a hundred store grocery chain in the Carolinas, and they wanted to make grocery shopping and experience. They wanted to Disneyfy it.
And so they ended up on my doorstep. What I discovered was that I tend to get these organizations that are mom and pop companies that have grown into something bigger. But because they’ve been mom and pop companies, so for instance, 100 stores, Lowes didn’t even have a training department. That just astounds me.
So what I found myself doing is reworking the cultures of these organizations. And I’ve done that successfully for five different companies now. Basically what I do is I listen to what the company says. And I distill it in a way that they never thought of, but is absolutely in step with what they really think.
AD :
What do you mean by reworking the cultures?
LM :
This health insurance company I worked with recently, and I talked to, they were Smart. They let me talk to over 50 percent of their employees. I had two weeks straight of meetings and I’d ask the same question. What do you like about being here? What do you not like?
And then I’d give them a sheet of paper and say on a scale of 1 to 10, the score, whether you would recommend working here or someone else. And they all came in at nines and tens. And the things I heard about working here is it’s like family. We’re all friends. It’s a community. I took that and distilled that into the neighborhood. And the word one was in their name already.
So I said, we are one and one stands for outstanding neighborhood experience. And then I took their 10 or 12 different behaviors that were expected and turned it into the neighborhood watch. It is my behavior. Let’s say, I’m not sure I can say it. Remember these welcoming, authentic, truthful, consistent and humble and reworked the whole culture around the idea of the neighborhood.
The key is it has to come from them, but synthesize through me for Lowes foods. It took me months and I finally came up with, we grow community. We could be the team, the store could be the company, could be the community that the store is in. Grow has learning and nutrition and they would support local farmers. So growing. And community was all the things I mentioned and we, and to this day, when you hear their CEO talk, he talks about the community.
NM :
Well, it is the holiday season in your most recent book describes a trip you took to the North Pole. So tell us Lenn, how did you end up in Santa’s workshop?
North Pole Insights: Blending Disney Magic With Santa’s Workshop [08:40]
LM :
Angelina was her name. She showed up at my door and said she had a celebrity couple that wanted to interview me. They’d read my Care Like a Mouse, which is my Disney techniques inspired book. And I actually looked out the front door to see if they were out there because she said their time is precious and they haven’t got a lot of time.
Then she waved her hand like this. And the next thing, I’m standing in this gingerbread looking hallway with this short rotund guy dressed in red velvet saying, ho ho ho. And I was at the North Pole and that was Santa. He took me into his office. And his wife, Merry, MERRY, promptly barged in, and it turned out that she had recommended the book to him, and he’d read Care Like a Mouse, so he wanted to show me around the workshop because he felt that some of the things in Care Like a Mouse copied what he did at the poll and it’s interesting it came out he mentioned a lot of people that have gone to the workshop that I wasn’t the first and one of them that actually went there was Walt Disney and they had an exchange of ideas so it’s not surprising to me that the Disney techniques were similar to the North Pole techniques.
But he said something very interesting. He said Walt was so inspired by what he saw at the North Pole in Santa’s Workshop that he bought the land in Florida and he was going to create the city of tomorrow called Epcot. But he was sworn to secrecy. Nobody could know he went to the North Pole. And then sadly, he passed away before he could really make that city happen.
So there’s a theme park, which I worked in and love, but it’s not what Walt had planned. The interesting thing is if he stayed at the North Pole, they seem to live forever, but then we would have been deprived of all his amazing contributions to the entertainment world.
AD :
What I thought when you said they were excited about the book, Care Like a Mouse, it was reminding Santa of his visit, when no one was stirring, not even a mouse, but maybe that was the wrong connection. I want to hear about your visit. And I’m really curious about some of the lessons that you learned as you observed. I know your first one is be your best, share the rest.
LM :
Santa in his office, once Merry comes charging in, he makes the point that he could not do what he does without her. That he is, if you will, I hate to say figurehead because that implies less methodology than there is, but he’s the guy everybody knows. They don’t know Merry Claus. They know there’s a Mrs. Claus, but they don’t know much about her. But Santa is so busy being Santa that he can’t really run the organization.
And that’s not his skillset. He’s not a process guy. He’s not even a service guy. He’s an icon. Merry, on the other hand, is people, people, people. At one point, later on in the book, as we walk through a wintergreen clubhouse, I say to her, don’t all these elves coming up to you, bother you ask her, don’t they take away from your business? She said, no, the elves are my business.
The point of that first lesson is many of us try to do everything ourselves or try to be into things that we’re not good at. So we can get good at them. A better approach is to take what you do well and just do more and more of that and find others to do the things you don’t know.
You don’t do well. Now we’ve been talking about Disney. So I actually referenced Disney in the book because Walt was a creative, but he needed money. Roy, his brother, his older brother was the guy who ran the company, took care of the people and found the money. They used to joke that Roy’s job was to find the money and Walt’s job was to spend it faster than Roy could find it.
But y’all know Walt’s name, like you all know Santa’s name, but Santa couldn’t exist without Merry. And we all couldn’t have existed without Roy, so be your best, but share the rest is the lesson.
AD :
Yeah, getting those partnerships right is so difficult to find, leveraging team members strengths, discovering them. It takes some humility on Santa’s part too to recognize where he might have gap and need support from Mary or the elves or the reindeer or other. It seems like it really supports the purpose statement of Santa’s workshop. And in your book, you list the purpose statement as we bring joy to the world.
Yeah. What did you see in the workshop that kind of gave this idea of organizational focus and engage in different employees?
Crafting Emotional Connections: The Power Of Purpose In Business [12:59]
LM :
As I was alluding to with that health insurance company, purpose and with lowest foods purposes, a lot of what I do, once you have a puffy phrase that defines your company. You can really hone in because it’s an emotional message.
Walt Disney said, others use logic. We tap into emotion. Basically they’re missing the point. And everything about Santa is emotional. But it serves a logical purpose. But when you can, in three or four words, define what you’re about in a purpose statement, then you can focus your entire organization on that purpose.
Because, for instance, with a discussion with an employee, now, were you bringing joy to the world when you did that thing you just did is a marvelous way of focusing and actually point was we deliver joy. Now I have something it’s a bit later on. I’ve actually got a piece of paper. I want to quote this to you. Great leaders make happy elves. Happy elves make happy toys. Happy toys make children happy. Happy children make parents happy. Happy parents help make the world a better place. We deliver joy to the world. That’s where it comes from. It was striking when he took me into Holiday Hall. Holiday Hall’s like the big gathering room, but it’s also the connective room to all the different locations in the North Pole.
So they’ve got these doors that tractor trailers and the like can go through but the doors, you don’t see them until they’re needed. The pillars around the room are candy canes columns, and you pull a candy cane off and it grows right back. But anyhow, we walked into that room and he said, welcome to Holiday Hall.
And then he said, ho ho ho team, what’s our purpose? And they all hollered, we deliver joy. And then how do we do that? And they all said, help. And what does help stand for? And they all shouted, happiness, excitement, love, and peace. And then Santa explained to me, when people feel four things, when they feel happy, when they feel excited, when they feel loved, and when they feel peace, we’ve delivered joy.
And that’s why we deliver Christmas presents. See, now there’s a clarity about what I just said that absolutely defines what the organization is about. And also what it’s not about.
AD :
And not only that, it engages all the stakeholders in what you share to all the stakeholders from Santa to the elves, to the children, to us as parents, we’re all engaged in that.
LM :
We are. And let’s talk a regular business. When you have a purpose statement and you’re brave enough to share it with the world, you have to be careful. I think about that airline that had a fly the friendly skies, and then they dragged the guy off the plane. You’re going to promise something. If that’s your purpose statement, you have to deliver it.
I think for the longest time, Southwest was really good about that. And I would have made the argument then that Southwest Airlines actually, the real thing is we connect people. Travel’s how they do it, but they’re really about connecting with people and connecting people to each other. When you are that clear, people want to work for you. Companies want to invest in you, stockbrokers and the like. Customers want to buy from you.
NM :
Very cool. So Lenn, where else did you visit at the North Pole?
Empowering Decisions From The Toy Factory To The Boardroom [16:02]
LM :
Well, we went to a lot of places. We went to the toy Toolery. Now that’s the factory. And I noticed that there were a lot of lines, but they weren’t all running.
And it turned out that toy manufacturers since the early 1900s have taken a lot of the toy development. I asked Santa how do you control the toys then? And it turns out they have something called field elves. Now I should say that elves are tall and thin, and do not have pointy ears. They’re originally from the Netherlands, thousands of years ago.
But because they never die, they don’t age, they’re still there. So there are some elves that are out in the field. So for instance, if a Santa in an apartment store is drunk, he’s liable to have an assistant walk up to him and say, Santa, you’re drunk, you can’t do that again. And that’s usually a field elf, incognito.
So these field elves are permeating the toy industry. As we may talk about later, there’s a place called Nani Central. That’s where all their computer stuff is. And if there’s a bad toy, Nani Central has influencers that you think are just normal influencers, but they’re actually elves working to be influencers.
And they let everybody know this is not a good toy. So I asked him about Legos and parents stepping on Legos, Santa laughed. And he said, oh, that’s the parent’s problem. We’re not talking people out of Legos, but the toy toolery, they shared something else that is very interesting beyond purpose and that is priorities.
And the idea behind priorities, if you have a set of ranking priorities, people can excuse me, elves, in this case, can make decisions based on those priorities. They do not have to get a manager for every situation that comes up. Cause you see some of these organizations, you’re mad, you need help. And they say let me get the manager and you wait 20 minutes.
And by the time that 20 minutes is up, you’re really steaming. You’re just so fit to be tied. Why couldn’t the employee make the decision right there. The answer is they could. It’s managers too tightly controlling. So priorities is something Disney’s done. It’s something I have all my clients do.
That one company, the health insurance one, I’m not sure I can quote this off the top of my head, but their priorities were, is what I’m about to do ethical?, Is it empathetic, is it economical, and is it efficient? And when they can answer those four things, then they know they’re good. So at the North Pole, what they said is, we want to deliver a smile.
So the smile, is it safe? Is it magical? Is it inclusive? Is it loving? And is it efficient? When what you’re about to do is all those things. You can make a decision and be fully able to defend your decision. I think priorities is a place where many organizations miss the mark because frankly, and this is something I deal with a lot of organizations, leaders trying too hard to take control of everything and then working themselves to exhaustion wondering why they have to do everything themselves.
Priorities is a way past that. Somebody makes a decision you don’t like, you can say, what were you thinking? What priority were you using when they did that? And you can re-educate. Or, you can coach, discipline, terminate, although not at the North Pole, or congratulate. But the point is you can have a conversation now about how it aligned with purpose and delivered on our priorities that we say are important.
AD :
Love the clarity on priorities. And I appreciate the fact that you said this isn’t natural for most leaders. I would imagine in a place like the North Pole where you clearly have a hard deadline every year.
You’ve got to be ready to go come December 24th, there would be a tendency in that environment for leaders to become a little bit more micromanaging. It’s wonderful to hear that it’s this clarity around priorities. And I also assume some trust between Santa and his elves that allows him to know that they’re going to execute based on those priorities.
LM :
This brings me to another principle, be approached, not avoided. The idea is there are these leaders that when they walk into the room, everybody stiffens up the conversation, stops, watch, pretend they’re not watching. And then there are other leaders or they’re like. Merry! Merry Claus, I went through the Wintergreen Clubhouse, that’s the Elves Hangout, with her, and she was inundated with Elves, one after another, and it was a master class in how to handle people, although in this case, elves.
Nobody wanted to avoid Merry, everybody wanted to talk to her, and why? Because the Elves were her business, and she made sure they knew that. There’s one example in the book where this newly promoted elf comes up to her and says she has a problem. And the problem is with another manager who didn’t get the job she wanted and got, who runs to purchasing a truck, and this other manager’s buying run down trucks from the state of Florida and then repairing them.
And the reason he’s doing that is one they’re cheaper and two he can funnel all the money into his team and the repairs but she ends up with these broken down trucks and Merry rather than saying I’ll go talk to him says okay, here’s what I want you to do I want you to come to a meeting in my office and we’ll see if we can come up with a plan. And I want you to go talk to him and propose this meeting and if he says no so she shouldn’t insert herself.
Then there’s another instance we’re walking through. This one, Gusta, I think her name was. Hey, we’re getting married next week. He says, now, you and your husband, one of you will need to transfer. Do you have any idea who it’ll be? And she says I’m already his boss here. So I told him I’m going to be the boss at home. So he’s probably going to transfer. The point is, she asked, but in a non-threatening way.
I saw her pick up trash. I saw a vendor approach her. Interesting thing about the vendor. He looked older. When I asked her about it, he said he was an elf, but he opted out of the workshop. So once you do that, you age and you get the health issues and all that stuff. So there’s real pressure to stay in the workshop. The workshop keeps you young.
Now you mentioned something a little earlier about December 24th. Yes. And I’m jumping ahead of you, but there is another lesson. You’ll probably want to ask me about this. Is there really just one Santa?
AD :
We were going to ask you, is there really just one Santa?
LM :
And the truth is there’s 21 of them.
AD :
Wow!
LM :
Here’s why every country, many countries have their own Christmas traditions. So in Japan, Santasan is the Santa and fried chicken is the Christmas morning treat Kentucky fried chicken, in particular, then you’ve got Aussie Claus
AD :
I could go for fried chicken on Christmas morning.
LM :
Yeah, well, the Japanese do. You’ve got Aussie Claus. Australia, his troops like him because he goes for a walk about all the time. And then you’ve got Father Christmas, who’s the UK Claus and he’s very correct and proper. And you’ve got Belfana, who’s the Italian witch, and you’ve got the Yule Lads who play, who are very mischievous. And you have Krampus, who, from Germany, looks like a real beast. It’s like the Beauty and the Beast thing, and he just looks really nasty. But he’s really a teddy bear once you get to know him. So these guys are the chief Territory officers, because you would think it’s impossible for one Santa to deliver all over the world in one night, and it is impossible.
And some of these countries celebrate Christmas on December 6th, some on other days, some it’s a New Year’s thing. The original Santa said, I can’t do all this by myself. So he started appointing these CTOs and they report to Mary. And Mary reports to Santa.
AD :
What’s a CTO?
LM :
Chief Territory Officer.
AD :
Oh, got it. Okay, good structure. So much more structure than I realized Santa had. I really thought he was a one-man band until now.
LM :
Yeah that’s what that poem would suggest to you. You think about this. You’d have to have the skills of Amazon, Microsoft, Apple. You’d have to have horticulture, agriculture, housing, maintenance, vehicles, animal husbandry, medical. The list just goes on and on of the specialty. There’s no company that could do all that.
NM :
Hey everyone, Nolan here. I have to jump in and end today’s podcast for Part A of the show. Be sure to rate, review and subscribe to the NEGOTIATEx podcast if you haven’t already. And also join us next week for Part B of this awesome interview.
