5 Improv Techniques to
Help You Become a Better Leader

The 5 Essential Improv Techniques for Leaders

1. It Begins with Listening

Rather than focusing on what they want to say, improvisers focus on listening attentively to their scene partner. For ‘scene partner’ read ‘colleague’.

The technique involves:

• Moving beyond passive hearing to active listening.
• Being willing to be changed by what you hear.
• Meeting others where they are to forge genuine connections.

Unfortunately, real, active listening is rare. So often we aren’t really listening to each other, we’re waiting to respond, for our turn to talk. Improvisers define listening as the willingness to be changed. Listening like this is the secret to brilliant communication. And good communication is at the heart of effective leadership and collaboration.

Ask yourself, do you allow other people’s words, ideas, and feelings to really land on you and change your response?

2. Adopt a ‘Yes, and’ Mindset

The improv philosophy of ‘Yes, and’ is all about accepting and building on the ideas of others. This contrasts with the common leadership practice of leading with ‘Yes, but’, which essentially blocks ideas.

When leaders default to ‘Yes, but’:

• Team members become reluctant to share ideas.
• Innovation stagnates as creative suggestions get prematurely judged.
• A culture of fear develops where speaking up seems risky.

At a time where new approaches are essential, is your leadership style making your company’s ability to react creatively to change more, or less likely?

3. Treat Everything as an Offer

The potential we find in change is based on how we look at it. You are treating everything as an offer when you decide to frame mistakes, problems, and curve balls as serendipitous opportunities rather than frustrating challenges.

Cookery provides a perfect metaphor:

• An average cook needs a finished recipe and complete ingredients to create a delicious meal.
• A good cook creates magic from whatever leftovers are in the fridge.
• The difference isn’t skill, it’s mindset.

If you can learn to treat everything as an offer, to see possibility in the constraints, you’ll be able to see the opportunities amid the carnage.

4. Give and Take Focus

In an improvised performance on stage, no one performer is pre-determined as the leader of the show. However, this doesn’t mean there is no leadership. Leadership is present in every moment, but it is distributed across the group, with different people stepping forward at different times depending on the demands of the moment.

Improvisers call this concept ‘follow the follower’ and it requires:

• Giving focus to others, not just taking it.
• Overcoming the fear that surrendering control makes you look weak.
• Unlocking the collective intelligence of your team.

The ability to surrender control of the process allows leaders to ensure the group is as responsive to change as possible.

5. Keep Making Choices

One reason leaders don’t like surrendering control is fear that people might mess things up. Yet, as Jeff Bezos at Amazon points out, there is a difference between reversible and irreversible decisions.

The improv approach to decision-making means:

• Continuing to make choices even with incomplete information.
• Recognising that even “bad” choices generate valuable feedback.
• Learning from feedback to adjust course when necessary.

Improvisers say that the only bad choice you can make is no choice, because even when we make a bad choice it means that something is happening. If we don’t make choices, however, we just move sideways or there’s no movement at all.