We all have been on a dysfunctional team. And, when we are, we dread driving to work or zooming in; we dread being part of the team meeting because everyone is talking over each other; we dread dealing with members of the team who are disengaged. There is always one person who thinks they are the smartest person in the room, and they continuously tell everyone. Team members are missing deadlines, making excuses, exhibiting negative body language, and are abundantly clear with their “I don’t care” attitude. No one is being held accountable, and everyone is doing what they think is right, despite what they have been asked or told to do. 

I’ve previously touched on using powerful improv exercises to build stronger teams, and I want to add on three more exercises you can use with your team: “Beach ball, bouncy ball, frog, and more,” “Emotions,” and “Yes And to solve a problem.”

Beach ball, Bouncy ball, Frog, and more

• 5 – 7 participants
• Items needed: Beach ball, Medium-sized ball that can be bounced (think kickball), and three other small items or balls that can be thrown (squishy ball, whiffle ball, toy frog, etc.). You will need one more item than you have participants.

The participants form a circle. The first step is introducing a beach ball to the team. The group’s instructions are to pass the beach ball to another person by tossing the beach ball over their head.

When they start to throw the beach ball, they announce “beach ball,” make eye contact with a participant and throw it to that person. When the person catches the beach ball, they reply, “Thank You.” Then they look for another teammate to pass the beach ball to by announcing “Beach ball,” making eye contact, and throwing the beach ball to the participant. When caught, the participant announces, “Thank you,” and the sequence starts over.

After about a minute, you stop the exercise and introduce into the exercise a bouncy ball. The participant passes the bouncy ball to another person by bouncing it on the floor. The same methodology used with the beach ball is to pass and receive the bouncy ball – announcing the bouncy ball, making eye contact, and passing. When receiving the bouncy ball, the participant replies, “Thank you,” and the sequence starts again.

Here is the challenge: the beach ball and bouncy ball are in the exercise simultaneously. After about a minute with both balls being passed, stop the activity and introduce the toy frog. Instruct the group that the frog prefers to be tossed underhanded using the same – announcing, eye contact, passing the object, and thank as before.

There are three objects in the exercise at the same time. Now watch the chaos begin. After about a minute or so – introduce another object passed underhanded like the frog and using the same rules.

Keep adding objects as you see fit depending on the size of the team. Once you’ve added all objects, let the chaos unfold a bit before calling the activity to an end and debriefing the team, and audience, on what happened.

Questions to ask:

• What did you witness? Looking for someone to say that one of the participants had three or more objects at a time while others had none.
• Has this ever happened to you, or have you done this to another teammate?
• How do you correct this behavior?

The purpose of the exercise is to demonstrate the need for eye contact when distributing or communicating with a teammate to ensure they understand. Also, when receiving information to thank the person delivering it to you. More importantly, we as leaders should see which teammates have much more on their plate and distribute the work more evenly amongst the team.

Emotions Exercise

• 3 participants

Emotional intelligence is one of the top 5 skills that leaders need to develop and continually develop. EI consists of self-awareness, social awareness, self-management, and relationship management. The emotions exercise touches on all these topics.

The exercise begins with two people having a conversation about anything they choose. After about 15-20 seconds, the moderator randomly picks a new emotion (happy, sad, angry, enthusiastic, depressed, despondent, etc.). Whatever emotion the moderator picks, the participants must take on that emotion’s body language and tone until a new emotion is introduced. The exercise lasts between 3 -5 minutes with new emotions added and the conversation must stay the same—but the mood and tone must switch to the emotion introduced.

The purpose of the exercise is to help increase your emotional intelligence. We all need to be more self-aware of our emotions and become more socially aware of others’ emotions. A leader’s responsibility is to assess the team’s emotional context and address those emotions that might become detrimental to the team’s success, all the while, managing their response to other’s emotions and maintaining the cohesiveness of the team.

‘Yes! And’ to solve a problem

• 5-7 participants

The philosophy of ‘Yes! And,’ is a wonderful exercise in helping the team solve problems quickly when they arise. The key here, as in all improv exercises, is to park your ego at the door, suspend your judgment, listen to understand, accept what a teammate says as a possibility, and add on to it. Accept the idea as if it is true and then what else can be true. Create a culture of phycological safety where the team is able to speak their mind and feel safe taking risks in front of each other.

Decide on a problem that needs to be resolved sooner rather than later. Have the team find a conference room, zoom room, or someplace where they can work and not be interrupted. Set a timer for 15 minutes. The leader will state the problem at hand and ask for ideas. Another teammate will be the scribe capturing all of this information. Better yet, use the artificial intelligence app, Otter, to capture the conversation. When an idea is introduced, agree with the idea – no matter how crazy it is and add on to it. In improv, we say bad ideas are bridges to good ideas. No ideas lead to nothing. Explore and add to everyone’s idea. After 15 minutes look at what you have come up with and decide what is worthy of exploring further.

The purpose of the exercise is to reduce the time it takes to solve a problem through divergent thinking. You are looking for quantity, not quality. Remember, you can’t create and criticize in the same space.

Remember the keys to building a successful team are: respect, trust, support, listen, be present, adapt, and always adhere to the ‘Yes! And’ principle.

Resources:

• YouTube: Improv Game: Emotions

Do you have value issues in your professional and personal lives? Do you derive your value from what you do? Do you say yes to everything?

Jeff Koziatek is a nationally recognized speaker, certified life coach, author, award-winning entertainer, and mindset catalyst who wants to help people address the above questions in their lives. After 20 years of work in the entertainment industry producing award-winning films, running an event management company, and acting in movies and television, Jeff started Core Authenticity to help people dream big and achieve those dreams. He believes in the inherent value of each person and he’s passionate about helping people find significance in who they are.

As Jeff worked through his own issues around value, he realized that he was not the only person in the industry who was struggling with issues around their own value. He figured he could either do something about it or stay in his lane of entertainment—and he decided to do both.

As a kid, he picked up two core messages: Find something you love and make that your job, and your value comes from what you do. The first one was very helpful. The second led to him becoming a serious workaholic, and saying “yes” to way too much.

After spending four years trying to find focus and being unable to say “no,” he was on a radio interview and, between takes, mentioned his focus problem. The interviewer said he could help him with his focus in an hour. It took two hours, actually, but at the end of that meeting, Jeff walked away with a very clear compass of who he was as a human being; he was starting to realize his intrinsic value.

From there, Jeff began speaking on how our intrinsic value affects our ability to lead others, to communicate, to use grit, and more. He liked helping people through speaking, but he wanted to do more. He ended up getting certified in life and leadership coaching to walk alongside people as their mindset coach to help equip them with the tools to find their next steps.

You can have clarity of action towards your next step with three keys: Understanding your compass, your mindset, and your team. Your compass is divided into four pieces:

1. Understanding your identity
2. Understanding what you value
3. Understanding what your purpose is
4. Understanding your worth

Once you’ve defined your compass, it will tell you what true north is in any situation. This helps relieve so much anxiety from any situation because you know what choices you need to make.

Click to Download the Full Transcript PDF

Resources:

• coreauthenticity.com
• Instagram: @jugglingjeff
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jeffkoziatek
• Read: “Blueprint For Value”

I’m beginning the process of writing my next book. Instead of locking myself in a room to write in private, I’ve decided to write it out loud, here on this podcast.

I want you to be an active participant in the process. By getting a sneak peek into the content of the book, you can send in comments, suggestions, and ideas to incorporate into it. (The two working titles so far are: “Improv for the C-Suite” and “Leadership in Hyperdrive: Powered by Improv.” Let me know which you like best.)

As part of preparing to write the book, I’ve been researching the topic of improvisational leadership over the past two years. In the book “Getting to Yes And” by Bob Kulhan, he discusses that effective leaders can answer four questions about themselves:

1. Why this?
2. Why now?
3. What do I have to do?
4. What’s in it for me?

Bob discusses these questions as if he was to bring the tenets of improvisation into his firm. So why should you consider bringing improv into your organization? Improv is where strategy and planning meet implementation, and it allows leaders to be present and in the moment.

Leaders need to be adaptable, collaborative, innovative, creative, and embrace risk. Embracing risk means not being punitive to those coming up with ideas, even if they fail. Failure can be thought of as an acronym: First Attempt In Learning. If leaders don’t make room for their team to fail, and learn from that failure, it will take them much longer to solve the problems you have.

Today’s leadership demands a more collaborative, less authoritative approach. You may have the authority and power, but that’s not true leadership. Simon Sinek says “Leadership is the positive effect you have on another person.” When you adopt that mindset, your influence will become contagious to all.

Resources:

• Read “Getting to Yes And”

At the age of 27, Rachel Richards quit her job and retired, living off of $15,000 a month in passive income from her 40 residential rental units. She’s the author of “Money Honey” and “Passive Income, Aggressive Retirement,” and she has an online course entitled “Get Your Financial Shit Together.” 

Rachel is no stranger to making her own way. She paid her way through college by selling Cutco Knives and graduated without debt. She loved helping people with money and she knew she was good at sales, so she decided to become a financial advisor. While she was good at the job, it wasn’t all she had hoped for, and she quickly looked for a way out. That’s when she stumbled into investment properties, wrote her book, and began making passive income.

One of the greatest ways to create financial independence is through investing. And the most important rule of investing is to start early. If you look at the history of the stock market, it is always trending upwards. It’s only when you zoom in on the days or weeks or months that you see the volatile dips of it. Still, the overall trend is a constant upward path. When the market goes down, the only way to prevent yourself from losing money is to hold on to your investment.

Another key to financial security is often considered a dirty word—budgeting. If the thought of budgeting turns you off, try and think of it as making a plan instead. A budget is a plan that points to where your money should be going instead of wondering where your money is going.

Whatever you do, the most important thing is that you start early. The principle of compounding interest is incredibly powerful, and small amounts put in over time will lead to big payoffs. Don’t let the regret of wishing you had started sooner stop you from starting now.

Click to Download the Full Transcript PDF

Resources:

• moneyhoneyrachel.com
• Instagram: @moneyhoneyrachel
• Read: “Money Honey”
• Read: “Passive Income, Aggressive Retirement”

We were all thrown into this virtual world kicking and screaming—virtual meetings, virtual presentations, and virtual happy hours suddenly becoming the norm. There are a few things to keep in mind when facilitating a virtual meeting or presentation, as well as things to consider when part of the audience.

As a presenter, nobody wants to look up at your nose, see you walking around the house, see your cat or dog on the camera, or see your silhouette because you’re sitting in front of a sunny window. Eye contact is critical when making a presentation, and virtually, this means looking at your camera, not the pictures on your screen.

As an audience member, keep your camera on if possible. Turning your camera off gives the presenter the impression you are disengaged and uninterested. A virtual meeting is a professional event, so keep in mind what others are seeing and show up as if it were in person: on time and properly dressed. Mute the audio when you’re not talking.

Virtual meetings can suck, but it’s your job as a presenter to make sure they suck less. Here are 8 tips you can use to not suck and engage your audience:

• Eye contact
• Stand up
• Purchase a good microphone (but not too expensive)
• Utilize breakout rooms
• Use polling question
• Use Conferences i/o
• Use multi-camera shots
• Simplify your slides and tell more stories

As a bonus, here are some tips for your internet speed and connection:

• Know your minimum internet speed, upload bandwidth, and network latency
• Internet speed should be 200mb/s, upload bandwidth should be 1.5mb/b, and network latency should be less than 100ms
• Improve your internet speed by shutting down background programs, freeing up hard drive space, and rebooting your router and modem.

If you follow these tips, you should be well on your way to giving a better and more engaging virtual presentation.

Resources:

• conferences.io