I am a dance and theatre artist. I am also a double MBA with a degree from a top management school. If the first line made you want to click the close button, if the second line made you want to click on my LinkedIn profile then you are not alone. What you thought of is a typical response one expects from people reading something on a corporate networking platform.
“Tell me about business, how do I achieve numbers, or issues the industry faces. What good is this theatre or entertainment for my business/job/industry? This is something I would do in my free time so why bother now?” This is typically how most people view the entertainment industry.
Why do I call it an industry? Because that is what it is. Just like any other industry with its share of big fish and SME’s, with both organized and unorganized players. Not convinced? Ok how about this- Have children? Ever purchased masks or superhero costumes or princess crowns or other merchandise? Congratulations, that is the entertainment industry negotiating sales with you using their best negotiator – YOUR CHILD! As of 2017, the Walt Disney Company employed 195,000 employees in 45 countries. It was also named one of LinkedIn’s top companies of 2017. Theatre and music icon Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber is worth 715 million pounds (2016 estimate) and owns the company ‘Really Useful Group’. I hope that makes you take the rest of the article seriously.
So how can theatre make a difference to your organization? At the end of the day it is the people who make any organization. Set that right and you will succeed. How do you get uninterested people to be interested in a training programme? How do you ensure that the learning doesn’t evaporate in one week but stays on with them? How do you make employees understand customer issues especially when you are in a service industry? How do you make employees “see” how “they” come across to customers/clients in order to enable a change? How do you make lessons on decision-making and leadership fun? How do you shape future leaders? How do you make people think different? Ever thought how you could make learning about ethics and gender sensitivity fun? Try theatre based training please.
Traditional training methods and tools may give the impression of serious learning but they add a huge load to an already stressed and overworked brain. Learning is supposed to be fun. When you teach differently it is interesting and easier to learn. Theatre does exactly that. It is different and that is its USP. Theatre can be applied to training across a vast variety of topics like decision-making, change management, leadership, team building and managerial communication.
Using stories from traditional theatre and linking them to corporate issues, using traditional theatre to play strategy games, participants undertaking a story building exercise to understand customer service and team building, cross industry learning using theatre are some innovative ways to make learning fun. There is little child in each one of us no matter how old we are. Theatre based training caters to that child within you. It makes you look at ‘corporate issues’ from a totally different angle. You learn without going through a tedious process of learning.
Still not convinced? I am a management grad and I can happily give you market capitalisation data, and host of charts and graphs that resemble an ECG reading. Let me spare you of all that. Want to see a little trailer of how theatre can be used to convey issues like ethics, gender sensitivity and organisational functioning in an entertaining way? We present Three Stories – Indian theatre in English on 24th March, 2019. Come and watch us. And yes, you can still go ahead and see my LinkedIn profile to know more about what we do 🙂
Originally published on LinkedIn on 31.Jan, 2019: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-theatre-can-make-difference-your-organisation-rao-1c
