Lessons Learned

We had a meeting today.  It was actually incredibly informative.  And it made me feel really important, you know, being a meeting and all.  It was complete with a Powerpoint presentation.  However, there were only four slides.  And one of them was the intro slide that just said something like "Ops Meeting, May 5, 2012" or something.

I've really been learning a lot lately about companies and how they're run.  And how everything is interconnected. I mean, just how the simple act of dropping a position for a few hours could affect that area's workload for a year from now!  There is so much detail and research done to figure out things like budgets and workloads and efficiency it blows my mind!  I've been learning about budgets and how money is spread throughout organizations.

I've learned how much our department depends on other departments.  We are all so interconnected.  The front line workers really depend on our department to get things right.  When other places make mistakes, it messes us up.  And when I make mistakes, it messes them up.  We all really, really depend on each other.

We looked at some charts and graphs in the meeting today showing trends in our area.  The goal was for the red graph to show a downward trend, and the blue one to go upward.  As they showed us certain areas that were doing better than others, I was surprised that no individual names were mentioned.  While Disney certainly has enough research to pick and choose names of the individuals making these graphs worse, the leaders didn't do that.  They simply pointed out that, as a team, we are improving, but certain areas are struggling more than others and we need to continue to work hard to get these numbers in the right directions.  It made me realize how I really am part of a team.  And that as much as I can succeed individually at what I do, and even get recognized for it, the team as a whole needs to be successful.  And if the team isn't successful, then my success isn't really even there.

I've learned about being detail oriented.  It's oh so easy sometimes to try and change a CMs shift as quickly as I can and skip over important steps.  Like in some situations it is kind of annoying to take those extra steps to recalculate someone's breaks.  But, if I skip it, first of all that's illegal because that person's getting paid incorrectly and could go to the union and create all kinds of mayhem.  But second of all, chances are I'll get a call a few hours later from their leader telling me to fix it anyway.  Or I'll just be creating more work for someone else.  It's best just to do things right the first time and not try to skip steps because I think I'm in a hurry.

I learned a lot about people working as a front line Cast Member.  But now, I'm definitely grateful for the experience of working in an office.  It's not something I want to do long term, that's for sure.  But for now I'm really learning a lot and loving every minute of it.  Even if it gets stressful at times.

Also, I've learned about Murphy's Law.  And how it applies.  Every single time I choose to answer the phopne, my radio will go off as soon as I pick it up.  Every time.