Broadway and Water Street: analysts on stage
by Carrie Sackett
What do Broadway performers and S&P analysts have in common? A lot more than you would think! Imagine fifteen analysts in a room passing imaginary "energy balls," creating nonsense stories, and lying profusely. It turns out that creativity, spontaneity, and active listening are skills used as much for a teleconference call as they are for a Broadway performance.
Anyone who's ever done a teleconference call knows the difficulty in speaking to an audience that you can't see. And anyone who has ever listened to a call knows it can be hard to stay focused on the content of a dry presentation.
S&P decided to invest in upgrading the quality of our calls in order to better showcase our analytical expertise. Ed Tyburczy and I sat down with Performance of a Lifetime (POAL) to ask them to design a training that would help S&P spokespersons feel more comfortable in front of that 37th floor teleconference speakerphone. POAL, a training and consulting firm for Fortune 500 companies, uses the tools of theater along with its expertise in human development to help business people learn to improvise.
The Public Finance staff stepped up to the performance plate and participated in two pilot teleconference training sessions. Clearly POAL's out-of-the-box approach was a success, even as the need to better tailor a section of the training was recognized. Since then, 10 trainings have taken place across CMS in New York and Chicago. Each training session begins with group performance warm-up exercises and active listening games designed to stretch people's zone of comfort, taking them beyond their day-to-day life roles. Once their comfort zones have been stretched, participants are led by POAL's David Nackman and Adam Grupper in two hours of mock teleconference calls in which analysts and the moderator are given direction to create a more conversational-sounding, less scripted- sounding teleconference call. Even David was impressed with the results. "Conventional wisdom says that people in finance aren't creative. S&P analysts are one of the most creative groups of non-professional performers I have ever worked with. People were willing to experiment and put those experiences to use in their work."
So if you are called for a teleconference training, you might be pleasantly surprised.
Here's what some participants have had to say about our teleconference performance training:
"After their first moments of skepticism, people were smiling. They were getting creative...The less we are reading from a page, the smarter and more engaging we come across and our analytical expertise shines through."
— Gregg Stein, Media Relations, Industrials
"It was actually fun. The training got the group working together. The approach was different from what I expected. It was a positive change of pace. We were asked to do something creative. It confirmed the idea that a lively interviewer style is strong. It gave us new ideas too. We cut loose from writing things out. We were more interactive with the audience and each other this way than if we each had a 'set thing' to do that wasn't connected to the thing that came before."
— Tanya Azarchs, Financial Institutions
"The suggestions given by David and Adam were fantastic, because they found ways to further enhance the quality of each person's performance-even the most skilled presenters."
— Mary Donadio, Industrials
"The instructors made us feel so comfortable during the training session leading up to the mock teleconference calls. Even the language was performatory; they talked about the 'art' of teleconferences. The training allayed any fears or tensions involved in doing a call."
— Stephanie Stephens, Public Finance
"I was surprised by how creative people were. The training showed how much more of a discussion than a lecture teleconferences can be. And we could clearly hear how they were more interesting to listen to as a dialogue. It's broken up more so that the topics are clearer."
— Gerard Painter, Financial Institutions
"You witnessed people improve right in front of your eyes. Sometimes all it took to sound more conversational was a suggestion to shift one's hands from being tightly clasped under the table, to moving freely above the table as you would really do in a conversation."
— Ed Tyburczy, Analytical Education
"Our communications capabilities can always use a little brushing up, and this was a rather interesting way to get us to focus on how we are communicating as a team to our clients by teleconference."
— Howard Mischel, Global Bond Insurance Ratings Group