Improv, Psychological Safety, Compliance & Speak Up Culture: Part 6 – Make Your Partner Look Good

Improvisation is a spontaneous, collaborative art form where performers take suggestions from the audience and create characters, dialogues, scenes and stories spontaneously, off the top of their heads, without a script.

Psychological safety can be defined as the belief that you won’t be punished for speaking up with ideas, questions, mistakes or concerns. Creating psychological safety in your organizations is arguably the most important challenge that an ethics & compliance program faces.

So what do these two things have to do with each other? Strange as it may sound, quite a bit. The philosophies and techniques behind creating an environment where comedic creativity can thrive and creating an environment where employees feel safe to speak up to challenge business decisions and report concerns are similar. There is a lot that ethics and compliance professionals can learn from this connection. You can get a few A-Has from the Ha-Has.

“MAKE YOUR PARTNER LOOK GOOD AND THEY’LL MAKE YOU LOOK GOOD”
Improv has often been described as the art of being “others-focused.” What this means is that when we dedicate ourselves to being helpful and supportive of our scene partners they are more likely to do that for us. It’s about orienting ourselves around what we can give to a situation versus what we can take. It’s also quite freeing. When you’re on stage trying hard to be funny, you more than likely won’t be. When you are on stage trying to tee up your partners for success, and they are doing the same for you, that’s when the magic happens. Teamwork makes the dream work. Together you are collaborating to create interesting, unexpected, authentic, memorable connections and that’s fun to be a part of. It’s another way to get “from me to we.”

So how do we apply this concept to E&C in our organizations? Listen to the podcast as we unpack some philosophies and techniques.

Engage & Involve Leaders
The most effective way to mitigate risk is to create influencers who can cascade information forward on your behalf. So we need to make programming that is simple, easy and rewarding for them to share. Provide short, entertaining videos for leaders to play during Zoom/Teams calls. Provide talking points and “meetings-in-a-box.” Make it fun. If what you give them doesn’t take a lot of time and has some entertainment value, they’ll gladly deploy without the eye-roll.

Integrate, Embed & Spread
We can force employees to take our training and we can plead for them to seek out our advice and support…or we can make it easy and show up where they are. Make learning resources easy to find and circulate reminders frequently. Embed short, entertaining videos in other department trainings and other department newsletters. Play commercials for compliance at sales meetings and town halls. If you give them something short and fun, others will carry your important messages forward, put those messages in more places and play them in higher rotation. 

If you’re not into listening and would prefer reading, you can download our Whitepaper: Improv, Compliance, Psychological Safety & Speak Up Culture