Will Your Employees Actually Use New Skills?
So you've booked a training for your team. Maybe it's an improv workshop (great choice, but I'm biased). Maybe it's something else. Either way, there's a question nagging at you: will your employees actually use new skills?
It's a great question.
And the honest answer is, it depends.
It depends on whether you treat gaining new skills like a one time shopping trip, or like the undertaking of a practice you are committed to. I've been organizing and leading improv workshops for companies for over two decades, and in that time I've seen lessons from a two hour session stick around for years. I've also seen them evaporate before the team made it back to their desks.
Here's what makes the difference.
Why Most Corporate Training Doesn't Stick
In my experience, corporate trainings tend to fail for two reasons. They're too brief, and they aren't memorable.
The first one is simple math. A training session lasts a couple of hours.
It's here and then it's gone.
How can such a fleeting experience compete with the day to day. I mean let's face it, your team spends roughly 2,000 hours a year at work. And while they are there they tend to do things the way they've always done them.
The second reason is a little sneakier.
Most professional development looks a lot like other professional development. A slide deck, a video, a worksheet, a coach.
There's nothing wrong with any of those (I've learned plenty from all of them), but they're so common that they can easily start to blend together. Quick, name three things you learned at the last compliance training you attended.
Yeah, I can't either.
This is where improv has a real edge. Getting up on your feet and learning about collaboration (or communication, agility, confidence, etc) kinetically is a very different experience from reading about it or watching a video about it.
Your team has sat through a hundred presentations. They have probably never played Environment Charades with their department head. They'll remember that.
And memorable experiences last longer.
Two Hours in the Gym Won't Make You Strong
A while back, a client asked me to lead a team building workshop for a dysfunctional work group. And I don't mean a team that was struggling a bit with communication. I mean a team of people who actively disliked each other and were in open disputes.
My client thought they were challenging me when they asked if a two hour improv workshop could really help? But the question was more ridiculous than it was confrontational.
Imagine walking into a gym and saying to a personal trainer, "I have a team of 20 people who are extremely weak physically. Can a two hour session with you make them strong?"
Of course not! Even Rocky needed a whole montage.
Two hours in the gym is a great start to building an impressive phsique. But it's hardly a complete solution.
And the same is true for honing sharper communication skills, developing better collaboration tendencies, and building trust between colleagues.
To build a strong team, you have to practice the behaviors that make a team strong. Again and again and again. And when you've done all that, you should do it again.
How to Turn a Two Hour Workshop Into a Four Week Experience
You can't make a workshop last longer than it lasts. But you can stretch the experience around it. At The Radical Agreement Project, here's what I offer every client to allow for just that.
Two Weeks Before: A Blog Post and a Short Survey
I ask clients to send attendees a blog post a week or two before the event. It introduces the ideas we'll be working on and the reason for the workshop. Partly that's so people walk in prepared and set up for success. But mostly it's a gentle invitation: let's think about what now what we'll be thinking about then, just for a few minutes, a couple of weeks early.
Attendees also get a link to a five question survey. It takes almost no time. But the act of answering those questions connects people to the work before they ever step into the room.
The truth is, the surveys themselves are barely glanced by me or my client. That isn't the point of them. They exist so that when the workshop arrives, it doesn't feel like the introduction to a book.
It feels like chapter two.
The Day Of: The Workshop
Then comes the fun part. Two hours on our feet, playing improv games and connecting them to real workplace challenges. And this matters, so I'll say it plainly: every Radical Agreement instructor that facilitates an L&D style workshop has spent at least a decade connecting the lessons of improv comedy to the workplace. That's a guarantee.
Improv is easy to have fun with and surprisingly hard to teach well. That's especially true in professional environments.
Right After: The Takeaway
When the workshop ends, every attendee gets a takeaway document to bring back to their desk, office, or kitchen table. It includes:
Pithy statements (easy to remember mantras like YES AND) that connect the lessons of the workshop to actual professional applications
QR codes linking to facilitator guides for several of the exercises we played, so people can revisit them whenever they like (or try them again with colleagues, friends, or peers they respect)
Two suggested paper & pen exercises to try away from the workshop, with space to write down your work
That last part is my favorite. These exercises can be run without a professional improv instructor and still have impact. Not nearly as much impact as they had in the workshop with a professional facilitator, but still some.
Two Weeks After: The Follow Up Survey
Finally, about two weeks after the event, attendees get a follow up survey. Same idea as the first one. It's a chance to revisit the questions and concepts, this time with the workshop behind them.
So instead of one two hour event, your team gets an experience with us two weeks before, the workshop itself, and another experience two weeks after. Four weeks of thinking about how they work together, instead of one afternoon.
A Quick Note On When This Doesn't Happen
Not every client chooses to share these materials, and that's okay. Sometimes a team just wants to laugh and blow off some steam. Every improv workshop delivers that! Other times, the client simply doesn't have the bandwidth to prepare and follow up.
But I can tell you from experience: the clients who follow these steps see the impact of the workshop last weeks, months, and sometimes years.
How You Know It Stuck: Your Team Starts Talking Like Improvisers
How do I know the impact lasts? Clients tell me their teams are still using the language.
Improv is full of pithy mottos and mantras, and they make wonderful shorthand at work. Clients who follow the full process often report that their people are still saying things like:
YES AND
REMEMBER, DON'T INVENT
BRING A BRICK, NOT A CATHEDRAL
TREAT YOUR TEAMMATES LIKE POETS AND GENIUSES
These little sayings carry a lot of meaning. Each one is a reminder of a lesson from the workshop. And between colleagues, they become a quick way to agree on how to tackle a challenge or a collaboration.
One person says "Yes and," and suddenly everybody in the meeting knows it's time to build on ideas instead of shooting them down.
If your team is still quoting a training months later, that training had meaningful impact.
Case Study: A Nonprofit That Came Back for More
Here's an example of the full process at work.
A nonprofit reached out to us because their team wasn't functioning well. There had been some changes in the organization, and trust was running low. Groups of professionals who had worked together successfully under different management (and a different operational design) weren't collaborating with each other.
There were smoldering disagreements. There were cliques.
And to be clear, these were all great professionals. Every one of them was a valuable member of the team. They just weren't working together at a high level.
So we ran the whole playbook. Two weeks before the workshop, everyone got the blog post and the survey. That way they'd already been introduced to the concepts in writing before they explored them up on their feet.
Then we led a two hour workshop in Washington, DC. Afterward, they received the takeaway and, two weeks later, the follow up survey.
It went so well that two months later the same work group asked for a second workshop. This time in Phoenix, Arizona. (We work anywhere in the continental United States, often on short notice.)
For the second workshop they had one very specific request. They didn't want us to rehash the same material. They still wanted to focus on collaboration, communication, and teamwork, but with new exercises and fresh ways of looking at the same concepts.
No problem. The craft of improv has no shortage of exercises. We built a new session around the same goals and sent an instructor with 25 years of experience running these workshops in corporate settings (who also happened to have some pretty substantial tv credits).
That workshop happened just a few weeks ago. The feedback has been fantastic. In fact, they told us they thought the second workshop was even better than the first!
And honestly, the fact that they booked again so quickly tells you everything about the value they found in the first one.
Case Study: A Team That Really Didn't Like Each Other
Remember the client from the gym analogy? The one whose team was in open disputes?
We didn't do a two hour workshop. Instead, we agreed on a series of four: one workshop for the same group every two months, with follow up materials delivered before and after every session. That way the lessons of improv were consistently revisited and reinforced.
The four sessions delivered strong results. Did they magically fix a very toxic team? No.
But they did something very useful. They helped the team realize the scope of the problem and gave them a framework for looking at their situation together.
Here's what was going on.
The team had been formed by merging two previous teams. So there was suspicion. There were tribes, an in group and an out group, inside the larger group.
Over the series, the team came to agree that their problem wasn't one or two difficult people. It wasn't the other half of the team, and it wasn't a bad call by leadership.
It was a communal problem.
And once they decided, "Hey, we're a group, and we have a problem we've got to fix," they started making meaningful progress toward forging a really strong team.
Lots and Lots of Lead Bullets
It wasn't overnight, though.
One of my favorite ideas comes from Ben Horowitz's book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things. To paraphrase, he writes that when it comes to management or operational problems, there often isn't a silver (or magic) bullet. Instead, you solve them with lots and lots of lead bullets.
Lots of hard work.
I think that's true of building a strong team too. You can't hear something or learn something and then wake up the next day with a great team. To build trust, you have to practice the behaviors that build trust.
Improv's Magic Bullet: Treat Your Teammates Like Poets and Geniuses
Here's the funny thing.
In improv, maybe there really is a magic bullet.
It's one of those pithy mottos I listed before: TREAT YOUR TEAMMATES LIKE POETS AND GENIUSES.
It means that when a teammate makes a decision you don't fully understand, or don't like, or think is a mistake, you don't point out that it's wrong (or explain to everyone else why it's wrong). Instead, you decide to support it. You add to it and demonstrate why it's right.
If it seemed wrong at first, that's only because it came from a poet or a genius whose thinking was beyond you.
Treat your teammates that way and you'll have a wonderfully strong team. People will trust you because they'll know you have their back, even when they're wrong.
Oof. Nothing builds trust like that.
But while that may be a magic bullet, it isn't something you can master in a day. You may understand the idea immediately. Try putting it into practice immediately, though.
It's very hard to do.
It's kind of like manners. Someone tells you, "Don't put your elbows on the table" or "Don't chew with your mouth open."
Easy to understand! These aren't complex ideas. Following them at your next meal after a lifetime of doing the opposite, is another story.
That's because your instincts pull you the other way. Instinctually, you want to point out what's wrong with your teammate's idea. But that destroys trust.
The next time that teammate has an idea, they'll be less willing to share it, because they figure that whenever they stick their neck out, you're going to try to chop it off.
It takes a long time to build a high functioning team. You can't flip a switch and have one the next day. But improv does provide a roadmap.
What HR and Training Leaders Can Do
If you take one thing from this post, let it be this: a strong team is a practice. To be strong together, you have to practice the behaviors that make a team strong together.
So if you're thinking about booking a training with The Radical Agreement Project (or with any provider of team building or soft skill development), here's my advice rehashed.
Before the Workshop
Make sure nobody is meeting these ideas for the first time in the room. Do something to help your team arrive somewhat prepared. Share a reading, send a few questions, or talk about the goals of the session in a team meeting.
Anything that gets people thinking the way they'll be thinking during the workshop ahead of time.
After the Workshop
Do something to revisit the ideas. Then do it again. Working well together shouldn't be something your team thinks about during one two hour block.
It should be something they think about again and again and again.
Run a Game Yourself
That doesn't mean you need to hire an expensive facilitator every time you want to work on functioning well as a team. It just means you need to do a little bit, often. And improv is great for that.
A little inside baseball: at The Radical Agreement Project, we charge based on how experienced the instructor is. If a client tells me, "We just want something light and fun, and we're deciding between bowling and you guys," I don't need to send someone with ten years of corporate experience. They aren't looking for an L&D style event, so I can send someone with a little less experience and charge less as a result.
Follow that logic all the way down and you arrive at someone with no experience running improv workshops at all. You!
Even with zero experience, you can run many of the games and exercises in the library on our website, and they will have an impact. Not as intense or substantial as a session with a pro, but some.
That's because improv values the team over the individual, and every improv game reinforces those values, whether it is obvious to those involved in the moment or not.
So spend some time with the library and find a game or two you feel comfortable leading. You don't even need to announce, "We're playing an improv game now!" A few good places to start:
One Word Story, played sitting around the conference table
Environment Charades, a nonverbal game that's surprisingly revealing about communication
One Line At A Time, a drawing exercise that makes collaboration visible
Without an experienced instructor, nobody may stop the game to say, "See that moment? That's a learning moment, and here's why communicating successfully felt like such a struggle." That's okay.
You might not have as much impact without someone isolating those moments, but the moments still happen. With enough practice, people figure it out on their own.
Lots of lead bullets.
So, Will Your Employees Actually Use New Skills?
Yes. If you give them the chance to practice.
A great workshop is a fantastic first trip to the gym. It's fun, it's energizing, and people leave feeling a greater sense of unity and momentum than when they walked in.
But the teams that really change are the ones that keep coming back to the ideas, before the workshop, after it, and in a hundred small moments in between.
I'd love to hear from you about your perspective! Think back to the last training your team attended. Is there one phrase, idea, or habit from it that people still use today? And if the answer is no, what do you think got in the way?
Email me at terry (at) radicalagreement (dot) com and let me know.
And if you'd like to bring an improv workshop to your team, check out RA's professional development improv workshop page here:
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