![]() The truth about team building nobody tells you: Trust isn't built during retreats, it's built when everything is falling apart. I watched a senior leadership team spend thousands on luxury retreats with ropes courses and trust falls. Two weeks later, they were back to undermining each other in meetings. Why? Because real trust isn't built on mountaintops or over cocktails. It's built in the trenches. In my decade plus of working with executive teams, I've noticed a pattern: The moments that truly bond teams aren't planned. They're when: 💥 Someone admits they don't have all the answers 💥 A teammate covers for someone during a family emergency 💥 The team pivots together when a project fails 💥 Someone says "yes, and" to an idea instead of shutting it down Last month, I was facilitating a workshop with a tech company's leadership team. For months, they'd been stuck in a cycle of perfectionism and blame. During an improv exercise, their CTO hesitated before sharing an incomplete idea. Instead of the usual eye-rolls, their CMO immediately built on it. "Yes, and what if we also..." The energy shifted instantly. By the end of the hour, they'd solved a problem that had stalled them for weeks. That's when it hit me: Trust isn't an event. It's a practice. Companies spend billions on orchestrated team-building, but miss the daily micro-moments that actually create psychological safety: 👉 Supporting half-formed ideas 👉 Acknowledging contributions 👉 Demonstrating reliability in small ways 👉 Responding constructively to failure These everyday behaviors create trust far more effectively than any retreat. The most cohesive teams I've worked with don't wait for scheduled bonding. They've embedded trust-building into their daily interactions through specific communication practices. Want to build genuine team trust? Stop scheduling it and start practicing it. I've compiled a few of the most effective daily trust-building exercises from our improv-based workshops into a free guide for HR leaders and team managers. What's your experience? Has a formal team-building event ever created lasting change in your organization? If not - contact us - we can help. Contact #TeamDevelopment #OrganizationalTrust #LeadershipCommunication #PsychologicalSafety#ImprovMindset
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![]() “…there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” Hamlet, act 2, scene 2. I had a chance to see Eddie Izzard’s one person Hamlet. It is an amazing performance, watching her do every character at once, sometimes simultaneously. I have read, performed and studied Hamlet for years. About 30 to be exact. Every time, I hear something new. Perhaps it is because I am in different stages of my life, and different parts resonate with me now that didn’t at other times. This one got me thinking: Act 2, Scene 2 “…there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” In my work, we talk a lot about emotional intelligence. All I could think of was Jack Canfield’s theory: Situation+ response =experience The situation is what it is. We can’t control it. What we can control, is how we respond to it. THAT is what shapes our experience. How we think about something, and choose to respond is what makes a situation good or bad. It is our thinking that makes it so. Thank you Shakespeare for the eternal lessons of life. If you're leading a team, managing change, or navigating conflict, how you think about challenges shapes how you respond—and how your team grows. Through engaging, interactive workshops, I help professionals develop emotional intelligence and an improvmindset, and practice communication skills drawn from 30 years of performing and being an actor. Want to bring these lessons to life for your team? Let’s connect. Reach out to book a workshop that transforms mindset into action. #LeadershipDevelopment #TeamWorkshops #EmotionalIntelligence #ImprovMindset Hey look! I had an AMAZING interview with Jason Cavness! ![]() It's not just about HOW you listen. It's about how you RESPOND. A 2020 Qualtrics study found that 92% of employees believe it’s important that their company listens to feedback—but just 7% said their company then acts on feedback well. However, engagement among workers whose companies acted on feedback more than doubled. If you want to learn more about effective lsitening and how it can improve your employee engagement: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DSG2F9WC ![]() Conscious businesses are built on intentional leadership—and one of the most powerful (and often overlooked) skills is deep listening. Real listening isn’t just waiting for your turn to talk. It’s tuning in beyond the words, picking up on what’s not being said, and responding with awareness. Let’s say a leader notices a normally reliable team member seems off. Instead of assuming or brushing it aside, they check in. Through a real conversation, they learn the employee is dealing with a personal health issue and struggling to keep up. Because the leader listened—really listened—they can adjust the workflow, rally support, and keep the project on track before things spiral. Want to build this into your leadership training? Try this: 🔹 Ask yourself, “What did you hear?” 🔹 Then go further, “What wasn’t said?” Deep listening saves time, energy, and resources while strengthening trust. It’s a game-changer. Are you ready to level up your lsitening skills and leadership presence? Let’s connect. Contact #ImprovMindset #ListenwithoutAgenda #Leadership #DeepListening ![]() What’s the Most Impactful Thing You Learned in 2024? According to a recent HBR article, many leaders name the importance of thoughtful listening and fostering strong, supportive relationships. How do you do that? Read my book! https://a.co/d/2riJ5Vf #ListenwithoutAgenda Available NOW at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Bookshop.org and anywhere else! ![]() My dog loves his patterns. Breakfast time. Post-breakfast snuggle. Go outside. Sit while my parents have coffee and tea. Go on a walk. Come back and relax. Play with the ball. Go on a second walk. Dinner. Get on the couch for a few minutes. Go to bed. It’s all very regimented, and specific. And it needs to happen at the same time every day, otherwise he gets visibly distressed. Have you ever worked with someone who is like this? Very set in their patterns, and gets ruffled when the patterns change in any way, shape or form? It is always difficult adapting to change. And yet changes are constantly happening. How we continue to provide people with the tools to accept change, and work with change the goal. #adaptiveleadership #flexibility #resiliency #improv #improvmindset I love my dog dearly. And I know how to work with him. It’s a good learning lesson for me. ![]() I grew up looking at this sign often and I never realized how funny it is. It was just some thing that was always there. Street Rd. Nothing special about it, nothing funny about it, it was just the name of the road. This is a Road named Street. Street Road. It wasn’t until I took my wife to visit the area where I grew up and she looked at it and said “Street Road. That’s funny“. Suddenly, I saw the name in a new light. Why would you name a road Street Road? Sometimes you overlook things that are right in front of you, because they blend into the everyday surroundings. This is why it never seemed funny to me that near where I grew up we have a road named Street Road. (The word road is beginning to look like not a real word.) I always told new employees in my company that I really valued their input and questions when they started working. They were the only people who didn’t have the rose-colored glasses on, so they could see things that I could no longer see - for me, it was all normal. I had to rely on the newcomers to let me see things in front of me that maybe needed addressing, or changing. But it had become so familiar to me, that my eyes just glazed over when I saw it. There was an exercise I did in graduate school to help with noticing things as they are. It involves touching objects — calling them by their name, then moving to the other side of the room and touching a different object, then calling it by its name. As in, I would touch a chair and say “chair“. Then cross the room and touch a backpack and say “backpack.“ The second step is starting to move faster — touching objects and calling them by the names of things they are not. Example: I would touch the chair and say “orange juice.“ And then cross the room and touch the backpack and say “vacuum cleaner.“ The goal of the exercise was to disconnect the defined name of an object from the object itself, so that you stopped ignoring something because it had a specific name (and therefore a finite and specific value) and started focusing on objects for all the value they had. When you looked at the chair, you didn’t see all of the detail, or dirt, or scratches. You just acknowledge the “chair” and then moved on. This exercise helped me to focus on the specifics and the details of objects by disconnecting the object from its predetermined, and agreed upon, name. In business, we can potentially get ourselves in trouble if we use the same solution for every problem. We ignore the details in front of us, keep the status quo, because change is scary and difficult. But what if we challenged ourselves to see new solutions? New options for situations we have looked at every single day? Well then, the possibilities are endless. We can look for our own personal Street Road. (Still funny.) ![]() You might have heard of OMG or ROFL. Well, here’s a new acronym to help with your communications at work: LARO What does it stand for? Listen, Acknowledge, Reflect and Offer. When you are in a work meeting, and people are blocking the forward motion of the conversation by saying ‘yes, but that will not work because of…’ or ‘we don’t have the resources for that…’ or ‘that’s a bad idea…’, they have lapsed into CRITICALthinking rather than staying in DIVERGENT thinking. CRITICAL thinking is about evaluating, DIVERGENT thinking is about problem solving and solutions. There is a time and place for both methods, however, shutting down creative problem solving at each turn is not a useful strategy. Try LARO to keep the conversation moving forward: - LISTEN to the objections that people are bringing up. - ACKNOWLEDGE they are bringing up a valid point. Critical thinking is necessary for strategic planning. - REFLECT back what you hear. This allows the person to know that you heard them, and understand what they are saying and feeling. - OFFER alternatives to move them into the possibility of problem solving. Use sentences like:
![]() As an improviser, I stepped on stage not knowing what I was going to say, or what was going to happen. I had no set, no script and no costume. I got used to dealing with the uncertainty of not knowing what would happen. As we start 2021, I think it’s important for us to accept that we don’t always have control over what will happen. 2020 definitely threw us a few curveballs! We learned to pivot - we found new ways to communicate and new ways of creating work. We never know what will happen next. Let's embrace not knowing, and being comfortable with the uncertainty. (And if you do know what is going to happen, then email me. I’d love to know what your crystal ball tells you!) |
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