Using Improv To Unite Your Team

As it turns out, the same old, same old won’t cut it in the workplace to inspire collaboration and engagement from your team. Go figure.

Francesca Gino (@francescagino), a behavioral scientist, Harvard Business School professor and author of the book Rebel Talent, details how improv creates perfect pathways to encourage collaboration and spark creativity in teams. In her academic research, Gino studies teams all over the world and argues, “the group that communicated best, with everyone contributing and learning, wasn’t in a corporate office park; it was in an improv comedy class.”

After taking a 10-week improv course with her husband as an alternative to a date night, Gino found that the tenets of improv set ground rules and use techniques that deliberately foster collaboration.

Read about the three improv skills Gino says can be particularly helpful to leaders interested in engaging their teams in this Harvard Business Review article.

More of a listener than a reader? That’s cool. We were fortunate enough to speak to Francesca Gino on our podcast Getting to Yes, And. Listen to her talk about the value of improv in business in her episode Why It Pays to Break the Rules.

Illustration by Paul Garland