Two Disney Institute programmes — quality service, and staff selection and engagement — were run for martial arts school owners in October 2012. The subject was the thing the industry was worst at.
In October 2012 martial arts school owners in the NAPMA coaching programmes worked through two Disney Institute programmes: one on quality service, and one on staff selection, training and engagement. The sessions ran long — thirteen recorded segments across the two — and came with Disney’s own written material, including its service manual and its grooming standards, The Disney Look.
Why staffing, and why Disney
The martial arts school has a structural staffing problem that most small businesses do not. Its labour pool is its own customer base: instructors are grown from students. That produces loyalty and produces, just as reliably, a shortage of anyone who has ever been managed professionally. An industry where the owner was usually the best instructor, and where the second-best instructor was usually a teenager who had been there since he was nine, had no native model for hiring, standards or engagement.
Disney had one. It is an organisation whose entire commercial proposition rests on tens of thousands of front-line staff behaving consistently, in costume, in heat, in front of tired families — and it had productised how it does that. For a school owner, the relevant lesson was never the theme park. It was that service quality is a designed system with standards written down, not a quality of character you hope to hire.
The Disney Look, distributed alongside the sessions in 2014, made the same point in its bluntest form: an organisation that is serious about a standard writes the standard down, to the level of grooming, and then holds it.
The record
The session recordings and workbooks are Disney Institute’s own instructional property, delivered under licence to the participants of that engagement, and are not republished here. What this magazine records is the event: that in 2012 the professional martial arts industry paid to have its operators taught service and staffing design by an organisation from outside the industry entirely.
It is worth noting what happened next. Much of the vocabulary the industry now uses for staff development — written standards, defined roles, onboarding, engagement as a managed activity rather than a mood — entered the profession through engagements like this one.
Published by Martial Arts Professional as part of the industry-history record of what the profession was learning from outside itself.
