About the Book: Pete Blank’s Employee Engagement – Lessons From the Mouse House
Pete Blank’s Employee Engagement is an easy-reading, light-hearted book that took me a few hours to read. It reminded me of some basic practices that often get forgotten in day-to-day business. It is available on Amazon for £10.55, where it has several positive reviews. In the book is also has comments from 6 top US businessmen about their thoughts on the content, all of which are highly positive.
Explaining Engagement
The author worked at Disney Resorts for 13 years. His last role was the Learning and Development Manager of Disney University. The book uses real-life stories of employee engagement from several different Disney leaders. They help to explain the practical reasons that employees are either engaged or not. Everything in the book is common sense but, unfortunately, it is still not all common practice in business.
Pete Blank’s Employee Engagement includes an action planning page at the end of each chapter. This helps you to reflect on what you can do differently in your own team or organisation. This really stood out to me as MBM is the home of Sticky Learning and this supports you in embedding the skills.
Biggest Takeaways
The book has two Disney training models in it, which, personally, I really liked in relation to employee engagement: The ‘Jobs’ model and the ‘Role’ model. The Jobs model looks at the four core areas to increase motivation. In addition, the Role model looks at four areas leaders need to excel at to engage staff.
Final Thoughts
This book will definitely show you how to get a little bit of Disney magic into your teams’ employee engagement. While not taking a massive amount of time to read and understand, it is nevertheless entertaining to hear real-life stories from such a large organisation. My favourite quote in the book is from Walt Disney himself, he says ‘Happiness is a state of mind. It’s just according to the way you look at things. So I think happiness is contentment, but it doesn’t mean you have to have wealth’.
