our approach
Our Leadership Simulator
Imagine Leadership Development Training that’s so powerful, a participant goes back to their workplace, gathers their direct reports together, and begins teaching the content themselves. (True story.) That's the kind of response we get to our work.
Learning about leadership is passive.
Having the opportunity to practice leadership skills being learned in class with our experienced facilitators and professional actors is active learning. We deliver carefully curated interpersonal skills content and then immediately provide the participant an opportunity to apply those skills in real scenarios from your workplace, using real language, and most importantly giving them the chance to experience honest, real reactions through our use of professional actors.
Learning to lead anywhere, but particularly in the workplace, is a full contact sport.
If you want your leaders to become comfortable dealing with defiant employees who refuses to work safely, or an underperforming employee who doesn’t realize what they’re capable of, have them spend hours in one of our courses coming into full contact with that employee, as portrayed by our professional actors.
Want your leaders to feel confident when an employee is going through a highly emotional situation at home or work, and is sobbing unconsolably? Have them spend time in one of our courses, in full contact with that employee.
Full contact with other human beings having these reactions is the only way to learn to be effective in these situations. There is no substitute.
We Don’t Do Role Plays
Traditional "role playing" is stilted, artificial, and false.
Our professional actors have spent years internalizing, learning, and practicing the craft of creating truthful situations in the room, giving participants a thoroughly real encounter with another human being. Our actors are not “playing the role” of the sobbing employee. They are the sobbing employee.
It is authentic. You feel it in the gut. You experience it in the gut. It changes participants in the gut.
Almost without exception, every participant who comes to our courses dreading doing role plays leaves highly appreciative that we don’t do role plays, and impressed by the difference having professional actors to engage with makes.
Here is why our work is decidedly not role plays.
We use professional actors, who are skilled in neither overacting nor underacting, but rather react in a truthful way to whatever they are receiving from the participant they are interacting with.
Our actors play the most difficult roles of the difficult employees and difficult situations the participants are able to practice. No more amateur hour as employees do their best to act in some artificial way based on 5 lines of text they just read from the “role play briefing sheet.” We know that is painful. In another life, some of us inflicted that on participants. We are sorry. We know better now.
These scenarios are realistic and are taken from your workplace. We incorporate scenarios that are discussed with us in preparation for the course. We guarantee comments like “That just happened to me last week” will be heard from your participants.
They are not scripted. Our actors are both skilled in traditional theater that employs scripts, which we use in dramatizations to teach content, but they are also maters of improvisational theater. We go wherever we need to go as an interaction unfolds.
Finally, because our actors are trained in both traditional and improvisational acting, we have the opportunity to create spontaneously just about any type of situation they may be encountering.
Frequently, the answer to the participant question of “What do you do when...” is answered by our actors/facilitators saying “Let’s create that and find out.”
Our Actor-Centered Experiential Approach
What makes our programming so impactful is the propriety way we use professional actors.
The use of actors in training, even in leadership training, is not particularly unusual. The way we use them is. Let’s talk about how that happens, why we are so different, and how it can transform the leadership effectiveness of your leaders. When it comes to developing leadership, we’re pretty chatty.
Reach out to us. We’ll prove it.
Our Senior Associates are not professional actors who know a little bit about business, or lifelong trainers that are dabbling at acting.
Our Senior Associates who you will always be working with have decades of experience in delivering interpersonal skills training and also have decades of experience acting professionally in traditional and improvisational acting. Our experience spans a broad range of organizations and industries, and we have a great deal of expertise working with technically minded, results driven people through our work for decades in the nuclear power industry.
People find our work engaging and fun, delivered with humor, humility, and our appreciation of what it’s like to be them. We also change hearts, minds, but most importantly behavior, which is a bottom-line deliverable for us.
We didn’t invent leadership development, we just made it worth paying for.