Dan Cockerell - How’s the Culture in Your Kingdom?: Lessons from a Disney Leadership Journey

Praise for Hows the Culture in Your Kingdom?

As a student of leadership in the U.S. Navy as well as the Walt Disney Company, I am impressed with how Dan has laid out his leadership lessons through engaging storytelling, thoughtful insights, and specific behavioral examples for readers to adopt.

Brian Britton

U.S.N.A. Class of 1989

CEO, National Heritage Academies

Dans first writing effort, Hows the Culture in Your Kingdom? , is an incredibly insightful and inspiring collection of experiences, offering insights and perspectives rarely found in typical books focused on leadership, management, and culture. The real-life lessons and learnings represent a rich collection of tools that can benefit every part of an organization.

Workplace culture should be at the core of each business. It is something more than a simple management objective. It has to be treated as a living, breathing thing something that requires attention and constant feeding. What Dan has done is provide a highly relevant collection of management topics, each of which contributes to the building and sustainment of a vibrant workplace culture!

Congratulations and thank you for putting your Disney experiences to paper. This insightful treasure has to be a must-read for leaders.

Karl Holz

President (Retired)

Disney Cruise Line

Lessons from a
Disney Leadership Journey

NEW YORK

LONDONNASHVILLEMELBOURNEVANCOUVER

Hows the Culture in Your Kingdom?

Lessons from a Disney Leadership Journey

2021 Dan Cockerell, former vice president, Disneys Magic Kingdom

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or otherexcept for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published in New York, New York, by Morgan James Publishing. Morgan James is a trademark of Morgan James, LLC. www.MorganJamesPublishing.com

ISBN 9781642798449 paperback

ISBN 9781642798456 eBook

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019951489

Cover & Interior Design by:

Christopher Kirk

www.GFSstudio.com

Morgan James is a proud partner of Habitat for Humanity Peninsula and Greater Williamsburg. Partners in building since 2006.

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Valerie My love, my ghostwriter, my partner Lets enjoy this ride!

D uring my 41 years of service in the US Army, I led soldiers in both peacetime and in combat at every level. I can certainly recognize good leaders when I see them. Daniel Cockerell is not just a good leader. He is a great one.

Having known Daniel for many years, I watched from afar as he climbed the leadership ladder at Disney with amazing speed. His success was not based solely on his charm, but rather his ability to apply good leadership principles and develop a productive climate in every organization that he led. This created a culture of excellence in each case.

In this book, Daniel Cockerell addresses the issue of building a culture of excellence in organizations. In doing so, he discusses the areas of Leading Self, Leading Team, Leading Organization, and Leading Change.

Daniel is a brilliant storyteller who uses personal experiences from his 26-year career with the Disney Corporation to illustrate key leadership lessons. It is superbly done.

He aptly takes key leadership principles and distills them down into plain language that can benefit leaders at all levels. His insights are absolutely relevant to any profession. Throughout the book, he is genuine, engaging, and effective.

Daniel goes beyond just providing thoughts on leadership theory. He provides concrete steps and recommended techniques that leaders can employ. It is something that leaders at all levels crave. While reading this book, I felt that I was having a conversation with a good friend. benefiting from his 26 years of lessons learned.

The leadership insights that Daniel shares in this book will benefit anyone who aspires to lead. Whether you are leading a military organization, a business unit, or a non-profit organization, you will definitely benefit from this book.

Lloyd J. Austin III, General, U.S. Army (Ret.)

I n 2018, I stepped down from a twenty-six-year career at the Walt Disney Company. During the nearly three decades I spent at Disney, I held nineteen different positions, from parking attendant at Epcot to vice president of the Magic Kingdom in Orlando, Florida, the largest theme park in the world. At the Magic Kingdom, I led a team of 12,000 cast members, the term Disney uses for employeesand a term that aptly reflects the collective commitment to creating a unique immersive show for all visitors.

Because I spent all of my professional life at Disney, the kingdom metaphor in the title of this book should come as no surprise. After all, we all operate in several bubbles or kingdoms of sorts: our personal life, our team, our organization. When I joined Disney in 1991, I knew very little about how to apply leadership in the real world or how to achieve success in a professional environment. Even with the best training in the industry, it took me a long time, many mistakes, and a lot of self-reflection to learn how to lead well and create the right culture. At first, I assumed leadership was all about what we did for our organizations. As the scope of my responsibilities grew, I realized that in order to have an effective and positive impact, I needed first to lead my direct reports well, hoping to steer them toward my goals for the organization.

Eventually, it became clear that none of this would happen if I, myself, wasnt fit to lead. Only then could I have the strength and ability to lead my team and subsequently impact the organization as a whole.

That single realization that self-leadership is paramount to team or organizational leadership was the most valuable lesson I learned in almost three decades at Disney. I structured my leadership training around that very lesson, helping all cast members turn into leaders by first leading themselves well.

Since leaving Disney, Ive made it my mission to help leaders in other organizations do the samelead themselves, their teams, and their organizations effectively, in that orderbecause the reality is the moment you start leading yourself well, your team and organization will begin to improve, too. As the speed of change reaches new heights, it requires us to be more malleable, adaptable, and innovative; this is akin to operating in transformation mode and constantly assessing how we can adapt to a new reality, be it economically, environmentally, or technologically.

Just like the impeccable housekeeping that cast members perform at Disney to deliver excellent guest experiences, we all need to do personal, internal housekeeping on ourselves to become impactful leaders in our personal and professional lives. It begins through a process of ongoing self-reflection, personal growth, and a commitment to self-discipline. This is true no matter which kingdom you lead.