Sonya Shelton, former global head of internal communications at The Walt Disney Company, recounts working during the high-profile shareholder revolt led by Roy Disney against CEO Michael Eisner. She describes the environment as chaotic—'like a company going through a divorce'—and explains how she protected her team by creating a separate, supportive team culture. Shelton reflects that the experience taught her empathy for leaders, resilience in crisis, and confidence that surviving that period prepared her for any future client challenges.
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So you're talking about the last job I'll ever have. I was the head of internal communications at the Walt Disney company globally, which is amazing because it's known for its fantastic culture. But I was there at a time when nobody in my position had experienced this, and nobody in that position will ever experience it again. And we were having a member of the Disney family, Roy Disney, leading a shareholder revolt against our CEO at the time, Michael Eisner. And so it was based on basically, like, a company going through a divorce, somebody who's part of the Disney family, trying to get rid of our CEO, and at the same time, it's all over the media firing shots at each other. Right. And it really did feel like the company was going through a divorce. Now imagine I'm the head of internal communications being told, remind people why it's great to work for the company, why they should be focused and productive despite all of this drama that's happening outside. Right. It was really stressful, and it was not a great environment to work in. And I really realized the impact to me as a leader, and it created a lot of empathy in me for leaders and whatever they're going through, because sometimes we can know better, but we get impacted by our environment. And so until my team told me what was happening, I was taking what was happening to me and I was passing it on to them. And then once they gave me the feedback of, we can't keep up with you, things are crazy. And I said, well, I can be in this big company. And this goes back to what I was talking about earlier. It doesn't matter what position you have, you can show up as a leader. I was working in this big company, but I said, nope, I'm going to create a bubble around my team, and we're going to have a team culture that has nothing to do with the company culture, and we're going to decide what it's like to work together. And so even though the chaos was happening and all the craziness was happening around us, we shifted how we worked together and got through it as a team in a completely different way than anybody else in the company. So I really learned a lot from Disney on what to do well when it was going well. But I also learned a tremendous. I would say even more from going through the challenging time of the shareholder revolt, because it gave me the empathy and. And also, nothing scares me when working with clients. Like, I don't. I've never come across. I worked with a lot of different companies in a lot of tough situations. And nothing's been like that, right? If you can make it through that, you can make it through anything. That's what I'm hearing.
