Acting as organizational therapy

Turn tedious drama into playful drama to gain a new appreciation of your workplace

Ask anyone what they dislike about work, and the answer will often be “drama” in one form or another. This generally refers to the subtle but tiresome forms of drama that infect workplaces and negatively impact our feelings about work. Things like gossip, attention-seeking, secret alliances, untruthfulness, manufactured stress, manipulation and other behaviours can leave people wondering why they bother to work at all, and why people just don’t do the work at-hand without all this extra drama. Clearly, dangerous and destructive behaviours like bullying and creating hostile work environments can and should be dealt with swiftly through policy, but what about the more subtle, under-the-radar, everyday actions of people?  They can be tedious, and the result is often boredom, dissatisfaction, despair, a feeling of being trapped and “checking out” in all but body. Needless to say, productivity and morale often plummet.

What if we brought an actor’s approach to the everyday drama in our work lives? Actors practice drama as a craft, as something that can be learned and improved, and to some extent as a game or a sport. As I show in my book “Acting: A guided learning journey,” actors work on several levels to understand and create characters. These characters have overarching needs that remain fairly constant throughout the entire story arc of a piece of drama. These might include a need for power, a need for recognition, a need for safety and so forth. Characters also have other more specific objectives that cover individual “scenes” and interactions with other characters. The basic actor’s character calculus goes like this:

• Who am I?
• Where am I?
• What do I want?
• What or who is in my way?
• What am I going to do about it?

In short, the actor wants the character to “win the scene” and get what they want or need. The tools the actor uses to achieve this on behalf of the character are called “actions.” Actions can be thought of as “verbs” that support a psychological or emotional intention. To beg, to command, to flatter, to frighten, to cajole are all examples of actions. Actions are the stock-in-trade of the actor. The exact same lines can be delivered with different actions behind them, and the response they provoke will be different as well. This is why we can watch our favourite dramas played by different actors again and again, because each actor’s portrayal of a character will be unique, despite the constraints of speaking the same lines each performance. The famous acting instructor Stella Adler said: “In your choices lies your talent.” In other words, the actions an actor chooses for their character to play is the secret sauce of great drama.

What if we choose to approach our workplaces consciously as places of drama or theatre, and use the tools and crafts of the actor to play each scene in a way that supports not only our own objectives, but also the overarching needs of the organization and ultimately the customer? What if we take control of workplace drama and make it fun, make it a craft or a sport? Let’s explore some ways in which we can use the tools and craft of the professional actor to approach everyday workplace drama, and turn it in our favour, having productive fun in the process.

1. Character. Do the work of analyzing characters, not just your own, but the ones you regularly interact with. What is their overarching need in this story? What is their back story that has led them to this piece of drama? What is their “original wound” that has flavoured their experiences and needs? What does winning the scene look like for them?
2. Objectives. What are your objectives in a given scene, say a meeting? What is it your character needs as an outcome? What or who is in the way of achieving that outcome? What actions will you play in order to get what you want? What is your back up set of actions if you don’t get the response you want? Go into the scene as resourcefully as you can.
3. Toolkit. Actors develop their whole selves as instruments of communication. Psychological clarity, truthfulness, empathy, listening skills, observation, improvisation, body language and voice all form part of the actor’s toolkit. These skills can be developed through classes, reading, self-study and coaching. Actors aren’t fakes; they are among the most truthful, tuned-in people I have ever known.
4. Practice.  Take an acting class, improv class or practice with friends. Do scenes. Try playing the same character in new ways, using different actions, intonations and body language. Watch your favourite actors and study what they are doing. Bring a new character trait to work each week and test-drive it. See what works. Think about the other characters at work: have you been feeding them what they need too readily? Mix it up.
5. Empathy. Empathy is probably the actor’s greatest asset. It lets us portray characters that are very different from our true selves. Once we can see another’s world view and understand it without judging, then we can relate to them and find the common humanity. In the workplace, we can also presume best intentions in the other characters and recognize that their world view is simply different from ours.
6. Play. One of the neatest things about acting is that it is play, and hence fun. Even when you have been going head-to-head with another character in ways that make an audience flinch, when you hang up the character suits at the end of the show, the actors are not enemies in real life (except maybe by coincidence.) It’s a job, and it's a fun one.
7. Stagework. The arena of acting is the theatre stage or set. The actor gears up for a performance, performs, and then shuts it down.  Over the long run, the actor gets better and better at turning the character on and switching the character off. This is essential for long-term psychological health, and I would argue that this is the same for the workplace. Leave the drama on the stage or the set. Go home, rest and prepare for the next performance.

If we use the tools of an actor to approach the workplace, we can turn a psychologically and emotionally draining situation into a more fun one, one that we have more control over and that is less damaging to the core of our being. By being able to factor in drama as an essentially human part of work, we can learn to master it better as a craft and have it be more of a piece of theatre. Clearly, we should get out of situations that are damaging to us, and overtly harmful behaviours in a workplace need to be dealt with and removed, but for the everyday grind of people just being people - irritating as people tend to be - a little conscious theatricality may just give us a new lease on working and bring some fun back to our work. Try it out!


Robert David Duncan is an actor, director, coach, trainer and business thinker. He holds an MBA, a doctorate in business leadership and is a graduate of the prestigious Stella Adler Studio of Acting in New York. He has made over 30 films and has won several awards. He is also the author of several books on both business and creative topics, and teaches and coaches business leadership, acting , directing and filmmaking.  

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