Paul Mathew on Theatre, Teams, Trust.

Link to the original article penned by our guest writer, Neha Verghis is available here - https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/theatre-teams-trust-tate-leadership-consulting-pvt-ltd-ug0cc/?trackingId=yEsG9gJw8vwNnjlJd0%2F0og%3D%3D

Thanks Paul Mathew T (TATE LC's Advisor) for sharing your thoughts on the article. Excerpts from the original article are quoted within [ ] and Paul's responses, thereafter!

[..........A theatre ensemble acting to reach a single aim—its ultimate production—is comparable to the idea of team building and unity in order to achieve a common purpose.]

A theatre production is a pure and classic model of skilled, ambitious, and egoistic people from across different domains, coming together to align their energies to a common goal and collective success.?It does not matter whether they know each other or like each other.?It does not matter how experienced or inexperienced they are; everyone invests in not only their domain or their role, but in each other’s roles and functions.?

The difference is that everyone knows that unless the audience (customer) applauds the play, no role, no performance, no function has fulfilled their purpose.?The other person’s performance is as important to my success as mine.?

Simply put, it is this clarity of a common goal, and alignment to a collective success, across interdependent roles and functions that covert even a random group into a high performance team.?The challenge of leadership is to create teams.?Once you become a team, you want to WIN.?No natural team is comfortable being second, irrespective of the rewards.?Customer delight (audience applause) is the greatest reward.?If you work at this core, people automatically and instinctively:

Integrate, respecting functional hierarchy without human hierarchy

Communicate, so that the other person experience what I want them to experience

Collaborate, investing in each other’s performance and success, for selfish reasons

Optimse the opportunities that is offered by constantly changing stimuli

Take on accountability by way of Situational Leadership – the team becomes the leader

Enjoy the excitement of pressure – celebration and not stress

Enjoy the workplace. (Mountaineering is fun for the mountaineer, in spite of the pressure and the risks involved.?Theatre puts the cast and crew into such intense pressure that bio-rhythms can get disrupted.)

Theatre offers the opportunity to EXPERIENCE all these behavioral possibilities as basic instinct (wolves, bees, dogs, birds) and then explore the environment that makes this possible, as relevant to the workplace.?This becomes possible without theorizing, jargon, or complex definitions.?The learning happens through the experience and sharing of insights by the participants themselves, providing greater ownership of one’s learning and the confidence to implement the insights.

[.............Training workshops are safe spaces for people to be entirely themselves, to be seen and heard.]

Through theatre we drop the personality.?Personalities are like mud-pots inside the ocean.? Different colours, sizes, shapes, designs.? The water inside each mud-pot is the same as in every other mud-pot.? However, no matter how long they lie together they are limited, confined, isolated.? Break the mud-pots and you become the ocean itself.?Theatre offers an opportunity to experience the ocean that we are and not as the confined water in the pot.?The power of theatre is to offer this experience in a fun and non-threatening process that helps to deal with self-consciousness, and break the boundaries of seniority and designation.

[...........They are a “collection of interdependent skill sets]

Interdependent skillsets aligned to the same goal, collective success, same audience experience, and most importantly, TRUST in each other’s clarity and commitment.?Without trust in the other person’s clarity and commitment there is no team.?

[.............believes it is integral to transform or “define the environment” the employees are in rather than trying to change themselves altogether.]

Don’t try to change people.?That would be an unpredictable, complex, and often, thankless exercise.?But through theatre we realise that the environment that elicits and sustains natural team dynamics can be created in minutes.

[...........This is when they become a “Spect-actor”, says Mr Mittal. Naturally, the participants feel their goals align which enhances their performance altogether.]

These options are offered by powerful theatre based tools like ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’ and ‘Playback Theatre’.

[...........When it comes to dealing with conflicts at the workplace, it is important for each team member to understand their objective. Possessiveness of a certain idea curbs creativity]

Different views from different sides of the mountain tell us what is around the whole mountain.?This being so, different perspectives or even contradictory views offer us greater understanding.?Theatre taps the richness of contradiction without it degenerating into conflict.?‘Managing’ conflict is a misnomer.?If contradiction degenerates into conflict, we have already stopped managing.