“Improv” skills: a hidden source of business excellence

Most people are anxious about public speaking, with estimates as high as 75% of the population. A YouGov poll found that 15% of Britons have an overwhelming and debilitating fear.

 

But being able to express yourself clearly and confidently during anything from a team catch-up to a company-wide presentation or sales pitch is a key quality for business leaders. It will help you win contracts, galvanise employees, attract investment, communicate goals and, ultimately, facilitate your career progression.

 

Help, however, can come from an unexpected source. Improvisational theatre skills are not just for performers on shows like Whose Line Is It Anyway? Training in improv can transform a businessperson’s communication and confidence.

 

I’m a professional actor and improviser with almost 20 years’ experience, who has performed around the world. I use skills from these art forms in my role as a public-speaking trainer, having worked with numerous business teams and leaders, including ITV, Kenwood, Computacenter and Vista.

 

Almost any business leader can boost their performance using improvisational theatre techniques and tricks.

 

 

Make speech more engaging

Like all trained actors, professional improvisers learn how to project with clarity and modulation.  This skill is a huge advantage for business leaders, whether you are confident about your public speaking or not.

 

Learn how to control your pace, including using pauses to give your audience time to absorb a point, and focusing on slow, deep breaths to lengthen spoken phrases. 

 

Speak to the back of the room, so everyone can hear you, just as you would performing improv in a theatre. Avoid sounding samey or shouty by lowering your voice for little side comments or observations, and increasing the volume to emphasise important points.

 

 

Free your creativity

Improvisation develops storytelling, imagination and divergent thinking, which can help you be a more inventive, inspiring leader.

 

Humans love stories. They are a great way to make your communications more memorable. But we are often not confident when it comes to telling them, mainly because we haven’t had much experience of doing so, especially in the business world.

 

A simple improv exercise is to tell a story (real or made up) to another person, in pairs. The listener’s role is to be an attentive, positive audience. However, if you are ever ambiguous in your story (e.g. “I went to a city”), their job is to name that city, and you must accept that that is now the truth. If we are ever ambiguous in our business communications, the audience will often fill in the blanks – and we often don’t get the chance to correct them.

 

 

Perform under pressure

Being able to think on your feet is a hugely valuable quality you develop when practising improv. It will help business leaders answer unexpected team questions, deliver difficult news or deal with awkward clients. You never know what your audience will ask next, or when slides or video-presentation technology might fail you, so you need a mindset that will quickly adjust to what to do next.

 

One game I use with clients involves each person in the room continuing a story, one line after another. If someone pauses too long before speaking, they are out. It’s a tremendous way to get people to process rapidly and imaginatively.

 

 

Be more fluent and persuasive

Improvisation is essentially the skill of making things up as we go along. It mirrors the conversations we have with colleagues, which are rarely scripted and, even if they were, the other side isn’t going to follow your script.

 

Businesspeople can learn that mistakes, such as stumbling over your words or going down a blind alley, are fine. It’s how you respond to them that counts. If performers say something that doesn’t make sense or isn’t funny but come up with a witty ad lib or plough confidently on, the audience will remember that, not the error. The same is true when presenting or talking to business colleagues.

 

 

Better group collaboration and leadership

Improvisation is rarely a solo adventure. You are typically performing with one or more other people. Two principles of improv I like to follow are “I’ve got your back” and “we’re in this together”.

 

Improv exercises are a great way to develop that core business skill: listening. If we don’t listen fully to what our improv partner is saying (and doing), the scene falls flat and doesn’t go anywhere. If we fail to listen properly to those around us in a workplace, we miss vital information that can shape our business decisions and change the direction of a project or company.

 

One improv exercise involves repeating the last word or phrase your partner said and using that to start your next sentence. It’s a nice way to ensure that you are really being attentive to what is being said – and the person talking feels listened to. Another one we use is pausing for three seconds before replying. Often at work, instead of listening, we are just waiting for an opportunity to speak. This exercise can make your responses more considered, calmer (if the conversation has been getting heated) and more accurate.

 

Non-verbal communication skills

People often worry about what to do with their arms and hands when presenting. We find that as an improv-based training session progresses, people become much more relaxed and don’t overthink things, so their natural style emerges, and they start to come alive.

 

We can also use improv exercises to practice effective gesturing and eye contact with the audience.

 

 

Dealing with anxiety

Several studies have shown that learning improvisation skills has positive effects on depression and anxiety, in particular public speaking anxiety.

 

Anxiety is usually the result of lack of skill, lack of confidence, or both. Improv exercises help to develop skills step by step through a mixture of solo, pair, and group exercises. With every successful completion of an exercise, confidence grows.

 

It’s much more effective than throwing people in the deep end and hoping they swim, something a lot of businesses are guilty of. Making a new person present to 200+ people can lead to a horrible experience and the speaker never wanting to do it again.

 

When performing improv, certain audience members may look distracted or restless. You mustn’t think that’s because they are bored or don’t like you. They may be stressed at work or have family problems. They’d rather you were up there than them. They probably don’t want you to fail – they want you to entertain them. And an agent or theatre booker has decided that you are good enough to do that.

 

Similarly, in business, you have been selected to give a speech or lead a department, because senior management or a board thinks you are a strong fit. Your audience or team want to learn from you or be motivated, so keep that in mind.

 

 

Learning communication skills through improv is fun

Sessions are often full of laughter making people more relaxed and more open to challenging and developing themselves.

 

Participants in a session I ran for Arbor Education, for example, reported that improv allowed people to be silly together, capturing the positive emotions needed to break down their fear of public speaking. Previous, more traditional, comms training they had taken part in had failed to do this.

 

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Dr Alexander McWilliam is the founder and managing director of Improv4Business.

 

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com and FG Trade