Last week, ASC Education embarked on a bit of an experiment
by holding our first-ever week-long Leadership Seminar. We've been holding
shorter seminars, anywhere from a quarter-day to two full days,
since 2003, but this was our first go at expanding that model. A group of
professionals from International Paper joined us Monday evening through Friday
afternoon for a week examining persuasive techniques in Shakespeare's plays,
practicing communication and presentation skills, and exploring problem-solving
techniques in teams.
The group consisted of individuals from many facets of the
company – sales, IT, marketing, transit, legal, food services – and was truly
international, with members from China, Venezuela, India, and Poland. Most of
this group had little to no experience with Shakespeare, and for those
international participants, it was literally a foreign language to them. So we
had quite a challenge ahead of us, to get this group not only to see what
Shakespeare could teach them about leadership, but to get them to have a good
time doing it.
It totally worked, and in large part precisely because of
Shakespeare's stagecraft. All we had to do was show them the tools; once they
got those down, they could see all the directions that he writes into his plays
– everything from prop needs to movement to emotions to status markers. With
that empowerment behind them, they easily grew out of their fear and into not
just appreciation of but enthusiasm for Shakespeare's plays.
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Leadership Seminar participants from International Paper, back three rows, with ASC coaches and staff, front row.
Photo by Ralph Alan Cohen |
We structured our week as follows: Each morning, we examined
"Shakespeare's Models of Leadership," examples of effective or
ineffective leaders in Shakespeare. This included everyone from the obvious
examples and heavy hitters – Henry V, Richard III, Antony – to less-overt or
less-well-known examples of leadership and communication: Claudius, Feste, Jack
Cade, Beatrice. The IP group got to watch our talented actors present scenes
and monologues, and then Ralph talked through them, drawing attention to
particular points of persuasion, audience appeal, personal presentation, and
other aspects of communication. These examples gave us a ground level to start
from and a common experience to point back at as examples throughout our other
activities.
Early in the week, the group also heard from a few real-life,
modern-day experts in communication and leadership, including Ronald
Heifetz, the co-founder of and senior lecturer at the Center for Public Leadership
at Harvard University and author or co-author of several important books on
leadership, including Leadership without
Easy Answers, Leadership on the Line, and The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing
your Organization and the World. In his lecture, Heifetz talked about a
leader needing to be able to "look down from the balcony" – referring
to the ability to step back and look at the big picture. That language stuck
with the group throughout the week. Again and again, they considered the
benefits of standing apart from a situation, taking up residence on that imaginary
balcony and exploring the advantages the new viewpoint provided them. Several
of the participants mentioned Heifetz's lecture as a critical
component to the week, providing them with inspiration and with some concrete
ideas to return to as they worked through their own leadership styles.
In the rest of the day, we explored language analysis and
presentation in two ways. The first was by having the participants construct,
practice, review, and alter "challenge statements" – brief
descriptions of some challenge they are facing in their professional or
personal lives. Confused? Here's one that one of our actor-coaches, Gregory Jon
Phelps, wrote during our planning sessions, which we gave to the IP group as an
example:
"When presented with the task of writing this Challenge
Statement, it seemed at first to be an easy assignment; its purpose clear,
structure simple, and design helpful toward fully understanding the
participants’ experience. However, the actual creation and construction of this
statement, given all the possible subjects from which to choose, has, indeed,
proven to be a challenge. The solution is simple: set aside the time it will
take to write the statement, be alert and focused, and a subject will come to
mind. It still seems easier said than done, though, since it is the actual deed
itself, not the theoretical planning, that must be completed. Once the time has
been blocked off, all other distractions have been dealt with properly, and an
environment conducive to writing has been established, I’m confident that I
will be inspired with a subject, that it will be effortless to write the
statement, and that it will prove to be no challenge at all, but, in fact,
quite fun."
The goal is to be simple, succinct, and persuasive – to be
concise, but to make a strong point. We gave our participants a lot of
different things to consider. Who might their intended audience be? How can
they appeal to that audience? Are numerical details important? Or a personal
anecdote? Do they want to present a problem and then suggest a solution? Or
just focus on the problem itself? There are a lot of options; the goal is for
the participants to find the approach that will work best for them, to find the
way to tell the story they most want to tell. Working through these, we asked
the participants to consider both their physical and vocal presentation, using
lessons learned from the coaches as well as from Doreen Bechtol's morning
warm-up sessions, as well as the structure of their thoughts, their word
choice, patterns of speech, and specificity of language.
The second exploration challenged the participants to put
together scenes out of cue scripts. In many ways, this involved leadership in
practice more strongly than anything else they did during the week. Due to the
nature of cue scripts, each member of the team only had part of the information
necessary to build the scene, so they had to figure out how to communicate
their needs to each other. The exercise also stresses the importance of
listening, since one character might have embedded stage directions not in
their own lines, but in what someone else says.
Both of these challenges made some of our participants
pretty nervous on the first day. I could see the standard markers of hesitation
and fear. We strove to combat those reactions by creating safe spaces for
experimentation, and part of that meant starting in smaller, non-threatening
groups. We started the week in small groups of three or four participants,
attached to one coach (myself or one of the six actors working with us through
the week: Miriam Donald Burrows, John Harrell, Daniel Kennedy, Gregory Jon
Phelps, René Thornton Jr., and Jeremy West). Those small groups worked through
both the challenge statements and the cue scripts on Tuesday. Then, on Wednesday,
we teamed up into groups of five and six, with two coaches: slightly wider
range of feedback for challenge statement, slightly larger and more complex
scenes to work through. Thursday, we glommed further into groups of ten and
twelve, with three or four coaches, and on Friday morning, the entire group
presented their final challenge statements and final scenes. This structure
allowed the experience to build from simple to complex, as well as fostering
the participants' increased confidence each step of the way.
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IP participants rehearse a scene from Julius Caesar,
with acting coach Daniel Kennedy visible, lower right.
Photo by Cass Morris |
It was amazing to watch. On Tuesday, my group members needed
a lot of help from me. The coaches weren't meant to direct, but I found that I
did need to ask a lot of leading questions about both the challenge statements
and the scenes. Is there another way you can try that? Was that a conscious
choice, or an accident? Is there a place you can choose to move? What in the
text tells you that? Who are you saying that to? So, too, my group had a lot of
questions for me – about the language, about pronunciation, about character
relationships. I gave them only the bare necessities, nudging them to look in
the text for clues.
And they got there. By Friday morning, with four coaches in
the room, they barely needed us at all. Many times, I would notice myself or
one of the other three coaches in the room start to open our mouths to suggest
something or to ask a question – only to shut them again because the group had
already gotten there, had already found the clue in the text. The language was
no longer a barrier. They were hunting out clues, listening for embedded stage
directions, considering the stage picture and the requirements of the scene,
making decisions about who could and should stand where, and when they should
move. I could hardly keep from bouncing with glee, it was such a thrill to
watch them, knowing how far they had come in just a couple of days. What's more
– they were laughing their way
through it, enjoying even the errors, making big and bold choices and
delighting in the process. I love things like this, because it verifies what we
claim about Shakespeare – that he wrote those clues into the text, that he
wrote for actors, with the ideas of
staging in mind.
Over the course of the week, we coaches became pretty
attached to our groups. Having the privilege of seeing a group through from Day
1 to Day 5 was incredible, and when one of "mine" nailed something in
a presentation, I felt a burst of pride (and sometimes couldn't stop from doing
a joyous fist-pump in the air). As we merged with other groups, it was also
great to see how their members had evolved, what challenges they had faced that
were similar to or different from ours, and how they integrated those ideas
when working together.
The final challenge statements were a world apart from where
the participants had started at the beginning of the week. Instead of mumbling
voices, shuffling feat, hunched shoulders, and aimless sentences, we had bold
tones, clear enunciation, excellent posture, straight backs, and focused
statements. From hesitancy and obfuscation, we got confidence and clarity. (And,
as a bonus, I think we all learned something about both the mechanics and the
business of producing paper). The best part, though, was that I could sense the
confidence our participants had gained over the week. At the beginning of the
week, it had been a bit like drawing teeth to get anyone to volunteer to speak.
By Friday morning, they were queuing up, eagerly anticipating their turns to
take the stage.
One of the most touching moments was when one of the Chinese
participants gave her final speech. She hadn't been in any of my working
groups, so I hadn't had the opportunity to see her through that process of
evolution. Instead, I got to see a night-and-day difference. The first day, she
had been shy, uncomfortable with presenting in a foreign language, apologizing
for herself (even though, as we pointed out, absolutely no one was judging her,
since she certainly knows more English than any of us know Mandarin). On the
last day, she delivered her challenge statement in Chinese, rather than in
English. Having no Chinese myself, I didn't understand a word, but I could still
see a world of difference in her presentation. She was confident, she stood
tall and straight, and even though I didn't know what her words meant, I could
tell which ones were important. She was choosing places to pause, choosing
where to get louder or softer, and using her body to tell the same story of
emphasis as her words. It was remarkable, and I know I wasn't the only one
getting a little choked up, seeing how far she – and all the others in the
group – had come.
Following those scenes, we had one last conversation with
the whole group, and here, the participants confirmed a lot of what I'd been
seeing in practice. Getting to hear, in their own words, what this week had
meant for them and what they had learned was incredibly valuable, and also
quite touching. Several of them found the cue script exercises to be valuable,
particularly for what it taught about giving and receiving focus, about when
it's a leader's job to speak, and when it's a leader's job to listen. Others
had awakened to the value of trying out a speech different ways, with different
inflections or different word choices, of playing around with the language, and
of giving themselves permission to try something that might not work in order
to find the thing that would. Still others appreciated the opportunity to be
vulnerable and to go through the process of self-auditing and reflection. They
talked about the value of asking questions, of showcasing different aspects of
communication, of learning about different kinds of leaders, and of finding
inspiration in unexpected places.
One of the greatest joys in my job is getting to see people
awaken to both the great value and the great joy of Shakespeare, and last week
demonstrated both of those as thoroughly as I could imagine. Expanding the
Leadership program to a full week gave me and the other coaches the opportunity
to see the transformative nature of
this kind of work. Best of all, throughout the entire week, I never heard a
single person say, "No, I can't do this" or "No, I won't do this." Skeptical as they
were at the outset, they were still willing to try – and once they took that
first step, the infinite variety lay ahead, just waiting for them. I can't wait
to do it again.
