Team building on the fly
by Harry Chittenden
Team building is the problem child of the meeting planning profession. Essentially a metaphor, team building is supposed to stand in for (and enhance) cooperation and creativity in the workplace. But unless it's solidly developed and customized it becomes, at best, an afternoon of harmless fun, at worst an exercise in embarrassment or humiliation. Most deadly is the perception of team building as a cliche. The ho-hum factor can be hard or impossible to overcome if corporate attendees view a pending program as simply one more afternoon of faith falls or cardboard boat construction.
Enter the stand-up comedy technique of improvisation. A number of companies, served by specialty team-building consultants, are discovering that "improvisation with a purpose" can help attendees work together creatively and dynamically. It's a kind of spontaneousness attendees can relate to — we're all children of the media, after all, with its celebrity give-and-take and talk shows — and this level of comfort with the format also can help enormously.
But attendees still can be wary of the unknown.
Candace Sherman, vice president at Thompson Financial, a publishing and marketing firm, recently arranged for people in her very diverse office to do a session with Performance of a Lifetime, a New York company that uses theatrical improvisation for team building.
"We had editorial people, sales people, marketing people, all in the same office space. Our goal was to work better together and function more like a team," Sherman says.
Cathy Salit, the head of Performance of a Lifetime, had interviewed Sherman and had the Thompson Financial employees fill out a short form. Apart from that, none of the attendees really knew what to expect. Sitting in the back row of a small theater in lower Manhattan, Sherman felt nervous about what was going to unfold. Most of the attendees sat in front. They also seemed edgy. When Salit, after a short speech and a few jokes, told the group that each of them would be coming up on the stage and, in the span of one minute, acting out the story of their lives, several of the attendees turned toward Sherman with withering stares and glares. Their glances spoke volumes: "Here it comes, another one of those embarrassing, pointless team-building sessions."
But then something happened...people began to respond in fun and creative ways. "They acted out anything that popped into their heads," says Sherman, who had become more relieved by the second. "One person did the exercise as a phone conversation with her mother. People you see everyday took on a totally different persona."
The stares and glares subsided. When everyone finished performing their "lives in one minute," the group broke into teams and with help set about to improvise a play based on selected life stories they had just seen.
Says Sherman, "I think we all felt afterwards that we knew better who our colleagues are and what makes them click. There was a palpable change when we next walked into our office. It really had an impact on our work environment from that day forward."
Salit's company and similar firms are serving a growing demand from corporations that want more teamwork from their employees. Improvisation, the training ground for so many of America's great comedic actors, is rapidly emerging to play a whole new role in corporate America.
"If you improvise," Salit says, "you learn active listening. You use creatively everything that is going on around you." She says that in improvising it is impossible for a player to make a mistake because other players will take the "mistake" and turn it into an "offering," defined as anything that a player says or otherwise suggests during an improvisation. Other players build on the offering and the scene goes forward. Whatever, is offered is justified by the other players. If there is a rule, it's that nothing is negated. Everything offered is justified and enhanced. Thus, players have a way of bonding with each other and relating in new ways. They build a culture of support, trust and collaboration.
One reason improv can be successful as a team-building exercise is that it is great fun. But the concept has been around for a while. Chicago's famous Second City, the improv school and cabaret that has launched the careers of such comic greats as John Beluschi, Dan Ackroyd and Mike Nichols, among many others, started Second City Communications in 1990 to develop a niche in the corporate market. Today SCC's CEO Joe Keefe estimates that the firm will produce about 550 events, 200 of which will be workshops related to team building. The others are shows that SSC produces for purposes like introducing new products or just entertaining.
Keefe says that improvisation is powerful as team building because it cultivates what he calls "hyperactive listening." Workshops provide a sufficient investment of time so that real listening can happen. Players need to listen because they need to understand fully what their fellow player is offering.
"You listen to understand," Keefe says, "rather than listening to reply. You listen to what is being said and how it is being said and what the speaker is feeling. Team building is as much emotion as logic. Good ideas come from what you feel."
Keefe explains it is important that stress not interfere with good listening. That's why it's good for workshop participants to be a little wary, a little uncomfortable when they undertake improvisation. Not only do you learn to listen under stress, but you learn to support your team members under stress, which is one of the main functions of team building.
After this creative process is finished, the team can then establish questions by which to judge what emerged from the creative activities. Keefe calls this type of group dynamic creativity management and claims that its benefits are available to everyone who engages in the activity.
Charna Halpern heads ImprovOlympics, in Chicago, and co-authored the book, "Truth in Comedy," considered a bible among young improvisers around the country. ImprovOlympics also produces team-building workshops and seminars, and Halpern has no doubts about why these are effective.
According to Halpern, improvisation actually teaches teams the skills they need to be effective. Successful improvisation includes listening to one another, treating each other with respect, building on each others' ideas, and more.
Also important is accepting and building on other's ideas. If one team member says no to another, then nothing more will take place along that line of thinking. But if the member affirms and builds on the idea presented, then something — perhaps a positive something — can happen.
People often enjoy the improv process, no matter what their background. Most of the work is based on theater games. Sessions start with a simple game that "tricks" everyone into being playful with each other. Participants generally laugh a lot and find themselves and their team members surprisingly funny.
John Thompson, a senior implementation manager at Ameritech in Chicago, had his sales planning reorganization group do a half-day session with Halpern. Ameritech had just been taken over by SBC Communications, a company based in Texas. Rumors were rampant and almost all bad. The Ameritech CEO had left the company, none of the employees knew who might lose their jobs, or who was going to have to move to Texas. The group was worried to say the least.
Thompson says that the group spent the morning in career planning sessions, an activity that seemed ominous under the circumstances. In the afternoon it joined Halpern in a room at ImprovOlympics, and she started with a game called Rant, in which players get to rant vociferously about something they hate. It fit the moods of those in the room and was enough to get them out of comfort zones and participating.
"In subsequent games," says Thompson, "we kept coming up with new ideas, thinking outside the box. It is easy to fall into the trap of doing the same old thing the same old way as you did it in the past. But doing improv we kept trying something new. It all seemed to relate to what we were doing at Ameritech at the time."
Improvisation is a long way from the team building where groups dangle members from ropes or spend days in the wilderness without a shower. But given the incredible pressure that so many employees are under everyday, it's no wonder that lightening all this up with a little play and comedy is a team-building approach that more managers are willing to try.