Become a smarter team by sharing control.

Sharing control is one of the first skills we learn in school growing up. It also happens to be one of the most important skills for us to practice in the workplace as adults.

In 2010, a group of psychologists from Carnegie Mellon, Union College, and MIT published a paper in Science Magazine showing that there is a collective intelligence factor in teams. They found that when a team is working well together, they can accomplish much more as a unit than the sum of what they would each have accomplished working on their own. One of the factors they found that correlated to this collective intelligence was “the equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.” In other words, many of the most successful teams are ones where everyone’s voice is heard in roughly the same proportion over the course of the day.

What organizational researchers call “distribution of conversational turn taking,” improvisers call sharing control. And, while most teams do not practice this muscle, improvisers have been training to perfect the art of shared control since improv theater was invented. Below you’ll find four improviser’s guidelines for sharing control, paired with exercises to help you practice these skills on your team:

1. Notice your voice.

How much are you speaking? And how are you speaking? As improvisers, one of our first tasks is to notice our impact on a group. Frequently, we’ll talk loudly over our scene partners without realizing it, or we’ll never contribute a new idea even though we thought we were saying more. The first step to better sharing control with your team is noticing your default habits.

Practice with your team: zen counting

Have everyone close their eyes and try to say all the letters in the alphabet in order from A to Z. You cannot go in any specific patterns or communicate any order in which you’ll speak. If two people speak at the same time, start over at A.

What to notice: How many people are in your team, and how many letters are in the alphabet? While you are not required to all speak the same number of letters, it is worth noticing if you’re tendency is to speak more of less frequently than the other members of your team.

2. Speak up or listen.

Depending on what you learned by noticing your voice, you may have realized that you would benefit from either speaking up more or from listening more. An improviser’s task is to be able to do both of these things. Sometimes what the story needs is a hero who is in every scene, and you have to be prepared to play that character. And sometimes the story needs one improviser to stand in the corner and pretend to be a tree for a whole scene, and that role is equally important. On teams, our job is to be able to do what’s needed, which means we have to be able to speak up just as well as we have to be able to listen.

Practice with your team: empathy listening

Decide which goal you’d personally like to focus on: speaking up more or listening more. Pair up with a teammate who has the opposite goal. Whoever wants to practice speaking up, you’ll get one minute to tell your partner a story from your week. And the other partner’s goal is just to be a good listener (and be a silent good listener: the kind that doesn’t interrupt with questions or comments). After that minute is up, the listener will have one minute to — to the best of their ability — repeat the story back to the speaker. Talk in first person, using words like I and me when you’re retelling the story.

What to notice: Listeners, notice when you have the urge to jump in. What happens when you remain quiet? And speakers, notice what it feels like to just talk. What happens if you pretend to be confident, even if you’re not sure where your story is headed?

3. Give ideas room to grow.

Improvisers are trained in saying yes to ideas that get presented onstage. Agreeing with and building on the ideas of our fellow performers allows us to generate stories instead of shutting them down. At work, we often shut down ideas early (sometimes for valid reasons like safety or budget). But if we give ourselves a little time to flesh out those initial ideas, we often end up with ideas that are much more game changing.

Practice with your team: office party planning

With your team, imagine you’re planning an office holiday party. Go around in a circle taking turns suggesting ideas. Each new idea has to start with the words “yes” (you’re agreeing with the previous idea) “AND…” (you’re adding on the next piece of that idea).

E.g. “Let’s have balloons.” “Yes, AND they can be red balloons!” “Yes, AND the whole room can be red!” “Yes, AND we can put a big red carpet out front!” “Yes, AND we can act like paparazzi and take photos of all the guests as they arrive!”

What to notice: Are you really building on the ideas of your team, or just suggesting a different idea on top of theirs? How does it feel to pay complete attention to what your teammates are saying without worrying about assessing the ideas? What valuable information did the session produce?

4. Let go.

As improvisers, we cannot and should not control the story. The magic of improv comes from a group creating a story that no individual could have thought up on their own. And our audience loves the chaos that comes along with this process. But, in order to get to this place where the real surprises happen, we must be willing (and excited, even) to let go and not be in charge.

Practice with your team: word-at-a-time proverbs

Stand in a circle with your team. One person begins by saying a word that could be the first word of a never-told-before piece of wisdom. The next person in the circle immediately says the next obvious word. Keep going around and adding the next word that makes sense until you have something that feels like a complete piece of wisdom. When this happens, you’ll all put your hands together and whisper “yes yes yes yes yes.” Then start the next proverb.

What to notice: Did you ever have an idea of where the proverb might be headed then someone took it in a different direction? How did you react? Our goal is to just provide the next obvious word our brains fill in and let go of the outcome.

In conclusion…

Whether you and your team are setting out to improvise a Shakespearean drama, or create a new product, shared control is the key for your team to perform at its best.