Walt Disney’s Biggest Leadership Secret? His Quiet Brother

Walt Disney was a visionary. He was a dreamer.  

What I love about Walt is that he had this huge imagination -; he knew what Disney looked like the day he stepped foot on the grounds. 

As much as I admire Walt, he’s nothing compared to his brother Roy. 

Everything that Walt Disney dreamed of, Roy made it happen.

Roy was in the bank account, he knew exactly how to get things done and make dreams happen.  

Not only did Roy get Walt into animation, he also implemented Walt’s vision right from the beginning. According to the Walt Disney Family Museum:

“Roy O. Disney forsook banking work and a hospital bed, where he was recuperating from tuberculosis contracted during wartime, to start as the cameraman, bookkeeper, and even cel washer for a time at the little animation studio in 1923.”

As a banker, Roy provided the financial genius that Walt didn’t have. Walt knew how important Roy was to his successes:

“I always go and check with my brother. Always. But I don’t always agree with him. Roy had faith in me. I think that Roy has done a lot of things against his better judgment because he felt that I wanted to do it. Most of our arguments and disagreements I think have been because Roy has felt that he had to protect me.”

In other words, if you’re a visionary like me…

You need to find a great integrator. Someone who can turn your dreams into reality and get work done. I learned about the power of integrators -; and the limitation of visionaries -; from Gino Wickman, an entrepreneur who helped 140,000 companies and wrote Traction.

In his book Traction, Wickman said: 

“Vision without traction is merely hallucination.”

As a visionary, I love it. I wouldn’t be able to function without my integrators helping me get things done. And, one of the biggest problems I see with entrepreneurs is the failure to implement, which leads to my next point: 

In his article, Wickman listed the qualities of an integrator:   

• Great executor 

• Great manager

• Is good at holding people accountable

• Creates consistency and prioritization

• Harmoniously integrates the leadership team

You need multiple integrators to manage and lead your business, but your most important integrator is your Chief Operating Officer -; someone who can systemize and operationalize everything so that you can’t help but grow. Getting a COO on board was a catalyst moment for my business: we grew from 28 employees to over 200 in 2 years. 

So how do you start hiring great integrators? Here’s what I recommend: 

1. Hire out your own weaknesses. To hire the right integrators, you need to know where you are the best at and what you’re the weakest at. You want to hire people to take over things that you suck at, so that you can stay 100% focused on your genius. Here are a few of my many weaknesses: I’m not good at time management, not great at organization too… I probably couldn’t even pack my own lunch 🙂 Thankfully, I’ve got all these people around me that help me make things happen. 

2. Have a bird’s-eye-view of your team. The other thing I’d do before hiring is looking at my org chart. You want to know who is doing what and why, and more importantly where the gaps are. Your org chart should help you do three things: a) define what each role is responsible for b) set up goals and KPIs for each role c) create a system to keep them accountable. 

3. Become a magnet for great talents. The best people are usually people who are already doing the same things in other businesses (ideally ones that are similar to yours). To get them to join your business, offer them a better deal -; a deal that they would be foolish to refuse. For example, we pay more than our competitors to get great talents. We also do performance pay. (I talk more about attracting A players in this article.) 

Now, no matter how great you’re at hiring, it’s no good if you can’t keep people around. Here’s one thing you need to be prepared for: 

While a dreamer and an integrator work together, tough conversations will happen. And that’s normal because you have different personalities, different ways of thinking and doing things. But you need to talk things out, stay open and understand that they’ve got a point too. If you can’t handle tough conversations, you won’t have a great company. Here’s a quote from a book I love called Fierce Conversations:

“Never be afraid of the conversations you are having. Be afraid of the conversations you are not having.”

So how do you set the context for a tough conversation? Here’s what I’d say: 

“I want to make sure you understand that you’re important to me and because you’re important to me we need to work together and figure this out because you don’t want to lose me, I don’t want to lose you.”  

Even with all their successes, Walt and Roy Disney had tons of conflict -; they argued, fought, and even stopped talking to each other for years. But they continued to collaborate towards Walt’s death. Even after Walt’s passing, Roy kept his younger brother’s dreams alive: