In my creative work with companies I have seen the benefits of play at work with sales forces. Sales is a stressful job. If you’ve ever seen Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross you’ll have an idea of how stressful. “Getting to the Yes” is really hard sometimes. You face a lot of rejection. It takes a lot of emotional stamina and even the very best sales people get burned and lose effectiveness.
I’ve taken a room full of sales people and executives and asked them to play acting games with me for a bit. They were uncomfortable, to be sure, but eventually they were laughing and having a great time. In the end they came away having learned to make the sales process a game, which improved their state of mind and made them more effective salespeople. That’s a demonstration of the Play principle from A Whole New Mind at work, which is a basic building block of being an actor.
As a college Freshman I spent two entire semesters playing games in an acting class. These classes taught me how to be open to experimentation, learning, and how to not fear failure. People laughed at my major and asked me if I was going to wait tables for a living, and now they pay me to teach them how to play again. Somewhere along the way these high-powered business executives forgot how to do that. I’ll admit it: this makes me incredibly sad for them, but happy for my bank account.
How to Teach Stuffy Executives How to Play
Every CEO is going to ask this question first: how does this make more money?
Intuitively, most people understand that if they are having fun at work then they are going to be more productive. Being happy means you’re relaxed and endorphins are flowing. Too much tension and you eliminate creativity.
- A Thiokol factory in Utah increased productivity by 50% simply by allowing their employees the option of participating in a paper airplane making contest.
- The likelihood of an employee staying at a job more than a year increases from 77% to 90% if their manager has a strong sense of humor.
If you can present business cases like these to an executive, then they are going to be much more likely to listen to you tell them how to play more at work.
The next step, of course, is to teach them how to play at work. I usually start by just playing. Many people have a difficult time playing at work, even if it’s outside the context of their normal job. Play workshops are most effective if you can get them outside of their office, away from their desks, and in a fun environment like a convention hall or another casual place.
Get Them Away
Once you have them away from their usual environment, I’ll get them to play. I might start with a simple game like Story, Story, Die – a game where you compete against other people making up stories. If the group is new to each other I might start with a get to know you game. Other artists might start by having people paint each other’s names on a large piece of paper or working on a collaborative piece of silly drawing or sculpture with clay or other inexpensive material. Another great idea is having someone document the process through graphical facilitation while it’s happening.
Play Games – But Make Them Think
After playing some introductory warm up games and doing some thought provoking exercises, it becomes time to play games that make people think about their work, if tangentially. One of my favorite exercises is, “Why Do You Always Wear Black?” It’s a short series of lines from a famous Chekhov play called The Cherry Orchard. I’ll have a sales team act out this four line section of the play with others watching. We’ll play out different scenarios where one of them might be angry, one might be trying to get something, or something else.
Roleplay
From here, we’ll go in to roleplaying sales scenarios with pretend customers, using ideas we’ve generated from other games that we’ve played that day. Sales people often find that they will come up with new ideas on how to talk to their customers, as well as finding that they are getting better at listening to what the actual problem is and how to respond to it.
Discover Their Own Creativity
If there is time after these roleplaying activities I’ll often ask employees to come up with ideas that would help remind them of what they’ve learned that day. People have come up with ideas ranging from signs on their cubicles, to recordings of what they did that day, to fake weapons that remind them of resolved conflict.
Another great idea, once everyone is feeling creative and full of ideas, is to invite them to share what their favorite ways to de-stress are, and figure out how to incorporate those into the office. I’ve seen everything from a little basketball hoop to foam swords.
Artists of different types wlll come up with different ideas that will help people have more fun at work. Visual artists might help a person create a visual representation of their ideal day at work that they can look to when things aren’t going well, or help a whole office create a mural wall that they can add to when new successes come up.
As an artist, how would you help a business experience more fun and play?
Leave a Reply