Our captains know a thing or two about entrepreneurship and leadership. And they always try to find new ways to improve not only the business or their skills, but also the teamwork. So, a few months ago, our web designers and developers went training in a fun and surprising way. Improv training. With lots of lights, the entire scene and spotlight for ourselves, we got to unleash our inner powers and became real comedy actors or drama queens or anything we felt like.
Basically, everyone brings something on the table, their skills along with personal issues or fears. It’s important to try to overcome that, for you and for these people you care about. What better way than playing? After all, we all learn by playing, yeah, even when we’re grown ups. All thanks to Martienii, the lovely trainers who came up with fun improv exercises based on our business core values – respect, passion and honest and frequent communication. But ‘nuff said. Action!
#1 Focus & Communication: Let me introduce yourself
You can imagine the fun when you’re with a bunch of shy tech geeks who just loooove to be in the spotlight. Because that’s why we work behind the scenes, right? Fortunately, the warm-up was simple: we got superheroes names! Basically, we just had to tell a feature of one of our colleague, starting with the first letter of his name. It was obvious that we found creative and weird names like Iri the Imaginary, Bogdan the Best at Heart, Radu the Robot and so on.
Radu the Robot and Iri the Imaginary were among us
#2 Teamwork & Creativity: Superheroes telling stories
We all want to be that Superman (or Batman, we don’t discriminate) saving clients. That’s why we had to play the hero (!) for our teammates and to make his wish come true. If he wanted to be invisible, we had to tell his story and become invisible. Or fly. Or rolling on the floor dramatically, like a movie star on the verge of death. Or anything like that.
Literally ROFL
#3 Fun & Work under pressure: Unlocking skills
Wait, what? Yup, we “went” to Fast Food Stanislavski, where we had lots of fun. Not just we had to mimic a familiar character related to our job’s tasks, like being obsessed by deadlines (sounds familiar?) or always aggressive or eager to impress the boss – all this, without the other knowing. But because there were some unexpected cute wolves in sheep’s clothing, so to say, when some of our eJumpers – the shy guys, as Diana King used to sang about – began to behave totally different from ther usual selves. Those quiet ones couldn’t stop talking and improvising, while the shy one got pretty courageous and involved in their character. Hah, talking about unleashing your inner beast, well this is how we learnt more about our hidden “treasures” of our team.
Laughing and laughing
#4 Leadership and competition: level up!
We got to have great friendly competition games. One leader to rule them all… Wondering what we had to do? Well, writing a poetry, draw a logo, find a motto about our core values, creative stuff like that, on the moment. And you know what? It was awesome to see how “I can’t” became “What the heck, let’s DO THIS, it’s fun”. See the proof:
#5 Improv training is learning while having fun. Or having fun while learning
From learning to communicate better and boosting creativity to becoming a better professional and human being, adapting to every situation, improv training proved to be a flexible and playful way to teach us about our hidden traits and building a better sense of teamwork. “To pretend that improvisation is not happening in organizations is to not understand the nature of improvization”, as Frank J. Barrett, professor of Management and Organizational Behavior said a long time ago, regarding the fact that people are often jumping into action without a clear plan or a specific reason, when the situation asks for it. Why not jumping into a fun one with your team?
Go Improv Yourself! It’s fun!
