How Improv Can Make You a Better Business Leader

Dr Alexander McWilliam, founder and managing director of public-speaking training consultancy Improv4Business, explains how techniques from improvisational theatre can enhance your skills and career.

In a business leadership role, the ability to speak with authority in front of an audience is vital.

You may need to inspire employees to take a new strategic direction at a company town hall, pitch a service to a potential client, present to investors or simply lead an effective team meeting. Your speaking tone and technique can determine whether people follow you and trust you as a leader. It can have a profound influence on the trajectory of your company and personal future.

As much as 75% of the population is anxious about public speaking. One YouGov survey found that 15% of Britons have a debilitating, overwhelming fear. But CEOs, the C-suite, managers and most other employees can find help from an unexpected source – improvisational theatre.

I have spent close to two decades as a professional actor and improviser, performing across the UK and internationally. I now use skills from these disciplines in my role as a public-speaking trainer, working with companies such as ITV, Kenwood, Computacenter and Vista. The disciplines and exercises used to train and develop improv skills can have a hugely beneficial impact on business leaders.

Creating tone and engagement

Most of us use only a narrow range of our vocal capability, including in speeches. Trained improvisers and actors learn to shape and control their pitch, pace and volume pitch to connect with their audience. Learning to do the same as a business leader makes your voice a powerful tool.

Using pauses in your speech, for instance, gives listeners time to absorb a point you’ve just made. Taking slow, deep breaths will lengthen your phrases, avoiding garbled speech and making you easier to understand.

Speak to the back of the room, just as you would performing improv in a theatre, so everyone can hear you.  But vary your volume to hold people’s attention in a way that a monotone or shouty delivery certainly won’t. Learn to speak a little softer, but still clearly, when making an aside, say, and increase your volume to emphasise an important point.

Thinking on your feet

One of the best transferable lessons from improvisational theatre is life doesn’t always follow a script. In improv, the unexpected is not a crisis, it’s the norm. Performers are trained to respond to it with confidence.

In business speaking, you need to learn how to respond to a staff question you were not expecting, deal with a slideshow that freezes mid-presentation or a prospective client with left-field expectations.

I use an exercise in my training where members of a group must continue a story one after each other, each person adding a single line. Anyone who pauses for too long is out. This creates rapid, imaginative thinking under gentle pressure.

Improv teaches you that mistakes are not a problem. What matters is how you respond to them. When a performer stumbles, but carries on gracefully, perhaps with a witty aside or clever ad lib, it’s the recovery audiences remember, not the slip up. This is true, too, in every board or team meeting, pitch meeting or town-hall speech.

The power of the story

Humans tend to respond much better to a narrative, than they do to a speech that’s just full of data and straight facts. It is more persuasive.

Improv training teaches storytelling as a skill any businessperson can develop. It also fosters imagination and divergent thinking.

A simple improv exercise is to tell a story (fictional or factual) to someone else, in pairs. The listener’s role is to be positive and engaged. However, if you say something ambiguous or vague (e.g. “I went to a foreign country”) their job is to name that country, and you must accept that that is now the truth. The task teaches precision and specificity, because in business if you leave gaps, your audience will tend to fill them in, potentially undermining your message and aims.

Listening as a leadership skill

Sometimes in workplace meetings, instead of really taking notice of what a colleague is saying, you are concentrating on formulating your response or just waiting for an opportunity to say your piece. But in improv, if you are not fully listening to your scene partner, both what they are saying and how they are saying it, the scene collapses.

In workshops, I ask people to begin their contribution to a conversation by repeating the word or phrase their partner just said. It gets people into the habit of really being attentive, and ensuring the person talking feel listened to.

Another technique is to wait three seconds, before replying to something someone has said. It might feel awkward at first, but it leads to more thoughtful, more relevant, more factual and, during tense discussions, calmer responses.

Performing improvisation is rarely something you do by yourself:  you’re usually working with two or more people. Two improv mantras I follow are “we’re in this together” and “I’ve got your back”. Learning how it works almost inevitably makes you a better business collaborator and leader.

Non-verbal communication.

CEOs and other senior businesspeople, however good at speaking they may be, often worry about what to do with their arms and hands when presenting. But as an improv-based training progresses, people become relaxed and don’t overthink things, so their natural style and movements emerge, and they become more fluid and engaging.

We can also use improv exercises to practice effective gestures and ways to make eye contact with the audience.

Overcoming anxiety

Fear about public speaking is usually down to a perceived lack of skill, low confidence, or both. Improv exercises develop technique and self-belief gradually thought a mixture of solo, pair, and group work. They are much more constructive than a business throwing someone in front of an audience without good training, even if they are a CEO, and seeing if they’ll swim.

When on stage, improv performers may be aware that some people look bored or restless. But a successful improviser will tell themselves this isn’t because they aren’t enjoying themselves or dislike you. They could have domestic problems, be stressed about a work issue or just tired. They’d rather you were up there than them and want to be entertained. Similarly, in business, teams and corporate audiences want to learn from you, and a board or HR department has put you in a senior role because they think you are the best person to guide employees and clients.

Learning through laughter

Improv sessions tend to be much more fun than other communication-training sessions. Participants at an Arbor Education session I ran, for example, reported that improv allowed them to be silly together. It broke down barriers and gave people the positive mindset needed to lose their inhibitions around public speaking, something previous traditional training had not been able to do.