Recently, I had the pleasure of engaging in a Q and A with Cathy Salit, head of Performance of a Lifetime and author of Performance Breakthrough: A Radical to Success at Work, Hachette, 2016. Salit applies principles from the world of acting and Improv to work scenarios in order to help individuals and teams improve their performance in the workplace. Sometimes the rest of your life benefits, too.

I decided to go back and dig a little deeper into the principles espoused in Performance Breakthrough, because they match some of the ideas I’ve argued for in this blog for a number of years. Thanks to Cathy for a thoughtful and useful book that repays in-depth study! In what follows, I’ve borrowed the basic ideas behind her concepts and expanded on them a little. The idea is to take them as tools to use consciously in order to see what new thinking you can inspire, and what new behavior you can promote.   And do read Cathy’s book – it’s full of great stories about people trying out these principles and getting fabulous results.

1.Embracing Awkward Growth. The radical notion behind this principle is to be open to try things you’re not expert in, don’t believe, have rejected, or feel incompetent at. It’s a wonderful principle to explore because it allows you to evade the trap of getting stuck in your own success, constantly repeating over and over what you already know how to do.

If the world were unchanging and the competition asleep, you’d never have to worry about growth. It would be safe to stay in the same rut for the rest of your working life. But we’ve all had the experience of things not only changing, but changing faster and faster. Same old, same old is a luxury we can no longer afford. We have to be open to the future – it’s here already, after all. And the only way to embrace that future is to try and to learn new things that we’re not necessarily good at now.

What can you try for a day, a week, a month that you feel incompetent at right now?

2.Re-building Teams. As I’ve argued in this blog and in my book Power Cues, the neuroscience shows that we’re not actually the Marlboro Men and Women that we often believe ourselves to be. While I’m all for individual responsibility – indeed, I was brought up by parents who constantly intoned “Every tub on its own bottom” (apparently, it came originally from John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and was adopted by Harvard for its unofficial motto) – nonetheless, the science shows we’re actual communal beings. We crave connection. We prefer to do things together. We love sharing emotions.

Salit argues for expanding your group consciousness in many different ways at work, and tells a number of stories that show groups leapfrogging problems and creating new approaches to longstanding issues by coming together as a team in new ways. She recommends casting a team like a director might cast a movie – matching people and roles with some thought as to how they might play those roles out. Do you cast according to type, or against type? Anything to shake up the old approach you’ve been using. Good stuff.

What team can you reconstitute to give it fresh ways of thinking?

3.Listening Anew. Good listening is a profound activity. People need to be heard to be validated as human. We’re a social species. Increasingly, though, listening is a forgotten skill. Why? We’re constantly awash in information. Why should we voluntarily listen any more? There’s simply too much to take in. And yet, listening to the people close to you — your team, your company, your sphere of influence — is more important than ever.

At its most basic, listening offers feedback. Feedback, which is often critical, is simply a response, usually involving evaluation of some kind.

To go a little further as a good listener, try paraphrasing what your audience is saying. This activity is surprisingly difficult for the poor listeners of the world. For the rest of us, it’s easy enough if we can swallow the temptation to give our own opinions. Paraphrasing means simply saying something like, “So let me be sure I’ve understood. What you’re saying is that the green ones are tastier than the brown ones?”

Paraphrasing is a powerful technique because it gets your receiver agreeing with you. He or she nods and says, “Yes, that’s correct. That’s what I said.” From that simple agreement, you can build a persuasive relationship because you’ve begun to create trust and liking.

Finally, you can take the listening game higher. The most powerful form of listening — the one that people most strongly react to, feeling that they are both heard and understood — is a form of empathic listening where you identify the emotion and state its underlying causes without trying to solve the problem: “So, Bill, what I hear you saying is that you’re angry with me because I haven’t fully appreciated the lengths you’ve gone to in trying to win over our Latin American customers. Those efforts have caused you a lot of sleepless nights, time away from the family, and marital problems. Is that right?”

This form of active listening is the hardest to undertake. What you will find is that if you’ve done it well, people will agree profoundly and powerfully with you. Good listening can be transformative.

Whom can you listen to in these deeper ways that you haven’t in a long time?

4. Creating from Complaint. More specifically, create something out of nothing – or less than nothing. Take a disaster and turn it on its head.  Or, as the business cliché has it, as soon as you find yourself in a lemon forest, start making vats of lemonade and selling it to the less industrious people all around you. These days, we seem to find ourselves in those sorts of forests more and more often. So we should be really good at making lemonade.

Instead, what we’re good at, for the most part, is complaining. Let’s be honest; most of us would rather curse the interesting darkness than light the proverbial lemon-scented candle. Why is that? Responding creatively to adversity means letting go of our preconceptions, usual habits, and old ways of thinking in order to build something new and fun out of something that usually just makes us groan.

Salit has a wonderful example of a woman who, rather than criticizing her husband for being late – again (he had a problem with showing up on time) she told him he’d have to dance with her for five minutes every time he was late. The first Saturday night of the new regime, hubbie had to dance for fifteen minutes. Apparently, they both thought it was hilarious, she wasn’t angry, and he — well, let’s hope he improved his on-time performance – or learned to love dancing.

What in your life that you’re complaining about now can you replace with dancing?

5.Improvising Endorsement. Readers of this blog will know that I’m a big fan of rehearsal. That would seem like the opposite of improvisation, but it’s good prep that allows you to improvise confidently and successfully. So, rather than being opposed, the two principals work together very well. The trick is knowing when to prep and when to wing it.

One of the most profound insights of Improv is the “Yes, and” principle. It says that, rather than saying, “No, but,” when your colleague offers you something, you build on it by saying “yes, and.” It’s a marvelous idea, and one that – if you and your teammates practice it – will bring a lot of joy to the workplace. Often, in all too many workplaces, people have said “no” so often that it becomes automatic. They don’t even hear themselves saying it, and it they don’t realize what a pall it casts over the workplace. Perpetual criticism and negativity become habits, and the result is a dreary place to work.

Try the alternative – if only for a week – and watch the fun and creativity quotients suddenly jump up to pre-2008 levels.

Can you eliminate the word “no” and replace it with “yes, and” for an entire week in all your business meetings and conversations?

These very basic and profound principles can help you find new ways to communicate and new ways to work together to improve your current habits and patterns. And that is always welcome. Thanks again to Cathy Salit and Performance Breakthrough.

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