Leadership
Client need: executive team leadership development
For a global software giant, the rapidly evolving marketplace demanded a thorough transformation of products, services and delivery methods. To drive this transformation, the executive team would have to learn to partner, collaborate and innovate together, as an actual team — a significant shift from their historically successful but siloed ways of working. Performance of a Lifetime (POAL) was asked to help them build this more collaborative and innovative way of working.
Our method: improvisation-based training and performance
Our aim was to support this very smart and successful team in going beyond simply knowing and understanding the new behaviors required. A shift of this magnitude is actually a growth challenge, requiring an environment in which participants could do substantive work on the human, creative and interpersonal aspects of this transformation — and begin the new kinds of conversations needed to propel the organization forward.
We opened the session with our working premise: as the executive team they were rewriting, reshaping, and redirecting their company’s “play,” and that required developing new leadership performances. Our task would be to look at some of the “scenes” that made up the existing play — their interactions with one another, with their clients and with their respective organizations — and begin to reshape and rehearse the new performances that were needed.
We led the team through a series of improvisation and theater exercises designed to access their innate capacity to perform — to play, make things up and experience new ways of interacting — and to build core leadership “muscles”: creativity, risk-taking, embracing the unexpected, and collaboration. We took them outside their comfort zones, since that’s where real growth and lasting learning takes place.
With a creative and collaborative environment established, the team then took on the task of creating and performing a series of short plays about their key leadership challenges. They broke into small teams and brainstormed, improvised, and rehearsed. Finally, each team performed for the full group.
And their performances were eye-opening. Putting these leadership scenes onstage created a crucial distance from reality and the restrictions it imposes. Participants were able to explore and candidly reflect on the characters and dynamics of their culture and process, to “try on” different points of view and experiment with new behaviors in real time.
Following the performances, the POAL facilitators led the team in a discussion of what they had discovered. Participants spoke about having deepened their collective understanding of the challenges they faced, including what they would need to continue to grow as leaders. They talked about the value of collaboration, and of achieving a comfort level with ambiguity and the unknown. They were eager to establish an approach to creativity and innovation that would allow careful, thorough and critical ongoing work on the current organizational environment and behaviors.
They acknowledged this would be a significant challenge — as the smartest people in the room, they were used to “knowing” all the answers. And they were smart enough to see that now, they also knew something about (and had just completed a visceral and unique experience with) the power of leading with creativity.
