Defining Tenets
Short, memorable principles for deciding when nothing else spells it out — for a person, a team, or any other group that needs a shared reflex under pressure.
Referenced from both Team's Tenets and Leadership Tenets — the underlying idea is the same at every altitude, so it lives here once instead of twice.
Tenets vs. Values
The two describe how a group or a person operates, but at different altitudes. Org-level Values from Vision & Mission are broad and shared — "integrity," "excellence," "ownership" — true for everyone and rarely argued with. Tenets are specific to whoever's actually deciding — a person, a team, or any other group that needs a rule for the moments a value alone doesn't resolve: the thing you reach for mid-decision, worded sharply enough that a plausible alternative is clearly wrong. "Be excellent" is a value nobody disagrees with and nobody can act on directly; "safety first" is a tenet, because it tells a Disney cast member exactly what to do the next time speed and safety pull in different directions.
What Makes a Good Tenet
Short and sayable — if you can't say it from memory in a hallway conversation, it's too long to actually reach for under pressure.
Specific enough to pick a side — a real tenet makes one option clearly right and a plausible alternative clearly wrong. "Be excellent" doesn't choose anything; "speed wins over polish before launch" does.
Earned, not aspirational — describe how a decision actually gets made, not how you'd like it to look from the outside. A line that's never once been followed under real pressure isn't a tenet yet, it's a hope.
Few enough to hold at once — most working sets land around four to six. Past that, they stop functioning as a shared mental model and start reading as a list nobody actually remembers.
Revisited, not static — the right call during a scrappy launch isn't always the right call at scale, and the right call for a person at 25 isn't always the right call at 45. Treat them as a living guide you update, not a plaque you hang once.
The sharpest real-world example isn't a leadership team's offsite poster — it's Disney Parks' Five Keys, the ranked priority order every cast member is trained to fall back on. Ranking them, not just naming them, is what makes this a genuine example of criterion 2 above: when two keys pull in different directions, the one listed first wins, no judgment call required.
Safety — never traded away for anything else on this list, no matter how reasonable the tradeoff sounds in the moment.
Courtesy — genuine warmth and respect in every guest interaction.
Inclusion — welcoming and respecting every guest and cast member, added as its own key in 2021; ranked here because it shapes how the keys below it get applied, not as an afterthought.
Show — the atmosphere and experience guests actually came for.
Efficiency — working quickly and smoothly, but never ahead of the four keys above it.
A long line (Efficiency) versus a guest who needs a full, unhurried explanation (Courtesy) isn't a judgment call a cast member has to improvise alone — Courtesy outranks Efficiency, so the line waits. That's the entire value of a tenet: not inspiration, but a tie-breaker someone can actually use in the moment, without having to ask a manager first.
A tenet that sounds good on a wall but has never once changed what someone actually did in the room isn't a tenet — it's wall art. Test any candidate the same way Disney's Five Keys hold up: can you point to a real moment where it broke a tie, not just a quality you'd like to be associated with?
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