Leadership Presence Dramatic Techniques to Reach Out, Motivate, and Inspire

Prologue Executive presence is so important to our success as consultants. I believed if our consultants could speak with clarity and confidenceoif they could find their voiceothen they would show up as credible advisors, capable of assisting our clients with their most challenging problems. Your impact went much deeper than that. With your guidance, we worked on our connections to each other, on making vulnerability safe, and most of all, on being authentic in whatever roles we playedoas consultants and leaders. We moved from playing our roles to being those roles. Judi Rosen, then Managing Director, CSC Index Eastern Region WE FOUNDED THE ARIEL GROUP IN 1993, AND IF YOUiD ASKED US then what we were doing, weid have said we were teaching leaders to be better communicators. We thought the skills and techniques weid learned as professional actors and performers would be helpful.They were, and The Ariel Group prospered. But as we worked with more companies and more leaders, we began to realize that something beyond better communication was going on. The use of dramatic skills and techniques was leading to something richer in the lives of people we worked with. Two women attending one of our corporate programs for a giant financial services firm had been struggling for months to complete a budget. They couldnit resolve the issues that kept them apart. In our program they did a listening exercise together over lunch. That evening, fueled by their newfound understanding of each other, they put the budget together in less than two hours and sent it off to their boss in London, who happily approved it without change. Better listening skills? Certainly. But their newfound ability to collaborate went beyond listening. We worked with the executive team of a software company. They were preparing to present an important new strategy in a town meeting for all employees, and they wanted to do it in a way that broke the mold of previous presentations. Rather than the old PowerPoint slide show, they wanted to model a collaborative and cohesive spirit among the executive team, to communicate how the strategy needed to be implemented throughout the company. Not only was the presentation more powerful and creative but, as a result of our work, they told us afterward they had inever before been this cohesive, except during two criseso9/11 when we had a large contingent of people in New York and during a major workforce reduction.i Better presentation skills? Of course. But their teamwork inspired the organization too. We deliver our work as volunteers in a Boston-area program for prison inmates called Houses of Healing. One of the inmates in the program was a man whose street name was Nitro. When he was asked in an exercise to illustrate his life story, he drew a chain of railroad cars climbing a steep mountain. Each car was another event from his life. As he began to describe each car, he dissolved into tears. By the end of the program heid changed his street name from Nitro to Patience, as he understood, for the first time, that he had the power to create a life for himself beyond drugs and violence. Greater self-confidence? Yes. But personal transformation too. As we saw these moments of change, and countless others like them, we began to understand the power of the concepts we were bringing from the theater. It wasnit just communication. It was about authentic connections between people. The two women making a budget found a way to connect with each other. The executive team making the strategy presentation found ways to connect with company employees in a new way. Nitro found a way to connect with himself and in the process became Patience. Weive found these kinds of transformation everywhere as weive worked with a diversity of private and public organizations. From U.S. Customs officers to senior partners at a major accounting firm, from schoHalpern, Belle Linda is the author of 'Leadership Presence Dramatic Techniques to Reach Out, Motivate, and Inspire' with ISBN 9781592400171 and ISBN 1592400175.