Here’s is a short clip from an employee engagement speech I gave recently.
What if there was a button that you push to could get every one of your employees engaged and excited about what they’re doing? Would you push it? I fell into improv about eight years ago. And I did it just for fun. I said, you know, hey, I’m new to this town, maybe I’ll meet some new people. That sounds a little bit fun. It sounds a little scary, but I’m going to do it. And what I found was that many of the principles that improv teaches, I could apply to business because, at the time, I was a director of client services for an advertising agency. We handled big clients like Rolls Royce and Trump Entertainment Resorts and Chuy’s, all kinds of just very diverse clients. And I cannot tell you how many times I’ve had somebody in my office, one of my employees crying because what a client said or didn’t say, did or did not do. And, you know, in call centers, we never know what’s going to happen next. We don’t know what that next call is. And their job… for instance, will call her Julie. She walks in every day on and she sits in her seat, and says, “Whew! , let’s do this.” Do you think that that would be contagious? Do you think that it might affect the attitude and the tone of the rest of the group?