We had a great time with Cathy Salit today, CEO of Performance of a Lifetime.  A powerful company with a  funny name.  As you can see from the photos, she engaged a whole class of psychology students by asking them to perform (and groan and stretch).  Their teacher wrote:

Hi Cathy,

    My students and I enjoyed your Webinar.

​They groaned with you, and wrote what they learned afterwards.

Play and performance is so radical, when people get it, it’s life transforming.

Great job.

Rafael​

Cathy spoke about her book, Performance Breakthrough:  A Radical Approach to Success at Work.  Based in a field called Performative Psychology founded by Lois Holzman, Fred Newman and Ken & Mary Gergen from the Taos Institute.  As Dr. Holzman said:  ”We collectively create our lives through performance (simultaneously who we are and who we are becoming).”  Salit has coined this The Becoming Principle.

There are five key fundamental elements of performance she covered.

1)  Choose to Grow.

(This is where we groaned.)  You have to make a choice to grow, because growing is hard work.

2)  Build Ensembles Everywhere

Their work is also based on Lev Vygotsky who coined the phrase ‘zone of proximal development’.  Basically, how we allow children to perform a head taller than they are.  We grow in groups, not alone.  This has been a criticism of positive psychology, that we are only focusing research on the individual.

Her practice, “Say ‘we’ when you would normally say ‘I’.”

3) Listen!:  The Revolutionary Way to Have a Conversation

Apparently, most people only listen 20% of the time.  This is the fundamental point of improvisation (the methodology of POAL’s work).  While we didn’t have time to do the ‘yes, and’ exercise I recommend you looking it up.  If we all really listened, how amazing would our conversations be?  A great Ted talk in this regards is Ken Robinson’s.

The practice?  Perform being curious.  Even if you’re not.

4) Create with Crap

“Option A is not available.  So let’s just kick the shit out of Option B.”  Sheryl Sandberg

This is my favorite section and comes out of the listening for ‘offers’.  In improv, an ‘offer’ isn’t always something you want.  How do you create with something you don’t want?  Cathy gave a good example of empathy when you get the crying person in your office after a performance review.

The practice?  She encouraged participants to make a poem from their ‘crap’.  Send your “Create with Crap” poem to stories@performanceofalifetime.com.

5)  Improvise Your Life

1. Say “Yes, and” (and mean it!)

Yes means you accept what your partner gives you, ‘and’ means you add to it.

2. Make the other person look good

If you don’t do this in improv the scene dies.  Same is true for making your boss look good.

3. Celebrate mistakes and failures

We learn by failing.  As Beckett said, “Fail fast.  Fail better.”

4. Follow the follower

If you are following each other then you can really build rather than try to dominate a ‘scene’ (or a meeting).

5. Delight in curveballs

Take what you weren’t expecting and run with it.  I wasn’t expecting tech glitches in the webinar but we rolled with them!

Wrap up:

Performance is all around us.  We don’t wake up in the morning with a script.  So take a risk.  Even if it is a small one in your workplace.  And write us back to tell us what you decided to do!  See below for more ways to stay in touch with Cathy.

And you can follow @CathySalit on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.  

We’ll be posting some of her questions to webinar participants in another blog post.

They are unusual and everyone sees it.  They clearly care about the company and the people within. These “good guys” are good organizational citizens.  They are the people who do things beyond the formal duties of their role – like lending a helping hand to a co-worker, being an evangelist for their company, or organizing a team lunch. They are strong team players, keep the spirits of others high, maintain goodwill around them, and are actively involved in company activities… you get the idea.  And, as I am sure you are already grasping, they tend to be happier [on average] than their counterparts.

Why are they happier?

One reason these citizens extraordinaire might be happier than you?  It’s all in how they approach their work.  You see, according to Amy Wrzesniewski, a researcher at Yale University, how you view your work makes a big difference.  Follow along, because this is interesting… According to Wrzesniewski, you can have one of three orientations: job, career or calling.

If you have a job orientation, then your work is a means to an end.  You do what you must, but you have your sights on the weekend.  You might be a clock-watcher.  Your leisure time is more important than work.
If you have a career orientation, then you approach your work with an achievement mindset, looking for the next promotion and approaching your work as a career.

But, what about a calling orientation?  You fall in this bucket if you think your work is integral to your identity; you go above and beyond just because you want to do it right, and because it intrinsically matters to you.

In Happiness: Unlocking the Mysteries of Psychological Wealth, Deiner and Biswath-Diener summarized the characteristics of each orientation in this table below.  Most people can quickly read through this list and see where they fall in their current job.

What’s the practical application? Of course, if having a calling mindset makes you happier and more likely to be a good organizational citizen, then the benefits are obvious.  But there is more, because happy employees take fewer sick days, are more punctual, more creative, stronger interpersonally, more effective decision makers, and they change jobs less frequently.  The benefits are definitely a two-way street.

Let’s say you are onboard, and asking how you might be happier at work.  To up the odds, use your strengths.  People who use their strengths at work are happier. There are many studies to support this, but in the spirit of illustration, a study of 214 university students by Govindji and Linley in 2007 showed just that – people who used their strengths more reported higher levels of subjective well-being [i.e., happiness] and psychological well-being [i.e., fulfillment].

So, start by understanding what your Signature Strengths are. You can take a free test here. Once you know what your Signature Strengths are, you can let this information help you make better informed career choices, and start using your strengths right away in your life and work. This may be exactly where good organizational citizenship steps in – it might be that in order to use your Signature Strengths, you will be doing things that go beyond your job description.  It may require you to join a committee, or help out in a new way.

The steps to integrate your strengths are pretty basic:

1. Know your top 3-7 strengths
2. Think of ways you can use those in your current job
3. Try to do this as often as possible

In fact, the more new ways you use your strengths, the better. Seligman, Steen, Park and Peterson found that people who used their strengths in a new and different way every day reported higher levels of happiness and lower levels of depression, and it stuck over time. What’s not to like about that?

This blog was originally published on Delivering Happiness.

 It was dark in the theater. The crowd was hushed waiting for the big reveal. The musical was Sweeney Todd, and my college audience had heard from their friends about what happens when the first victim gets the ax (or in this case, the razor). The seat and foot on the trick chair drop, and the actor falls through the roof of the second floor set to the crash pad below.

I had the good fortune to play Mrs. Lovett, and I had also sourced the barber’s chair for this production. At the time, I was backstage waiting for an entrance. I heard the moment in the music, and then I heard screams. Just like we rehearsed.

But these weren’t the screams of an actor playing a character who was just killed. These were real screams. The chair had failed, and the actor was bloodied. It was chaos, there was fog on the stage so no one could really see what was going on, the orchestra didn’t know what had happened so they kept playing, and the actor who had bloodied shins and a possibly broken nose was trying to live by the “Show must go on” rule. He kept singing and moving to his next entrance.

The other actors, technicians, and musicians knew this was the one exception to the rule. The stage manager stopped the show and went into action. Everyone involved with the production was on high alert. It was a wonderful example of teamwork as a group strength, and also teamwork as an individual strength. Each person abandoned his or her ego for what the production needed at that moment. The tech people filled in for each other’s duties while the actor was taken to the hospital. The orchestra was waiting poised for their instructions. Even a doctor in the audience offered to come back stage to give medical help.

If you’ve ever been in an artistic production you know that there can be many egos involved. But you also know that the best experiences for both actor and audience occur when people set status aside and do what must be done for the good of the production.

What is the Character Strength called Teamwork?

In Character Strengths and Virtues, Peterson and Seligman define the character strength of teamwork (with related synonyms of citizenship, social responsibility, loyalty) as

• Working well as a member of a group or team; Being loyal to the group

• Doing one’s share

In the circumplex model of character strengths that Peterson describes in his primer, teamwork is a heart based strength (as opposed to head) focused on others (as opposed to self).

When using the word teamwork, people frequently fail to differentiate between concept of high performing teams and what it means to have the individual signature strength of teamwork. The Sweeney Todd example shows both, but sometimes it is difficult to even identify it as a strength.

The Shadow Side

I was coaching a new manager in a governmental organization, and we were at a bit of an impasse. She described a crushing workload and an unbelievable work ethic (not the common perception of government employees) that led her to working nights and weekends, often until early in the morning. She was balancing being a new manager, her previous work duties, and going back to graduate school. We spent a few sessions probing around values and discussing the benefit of self-care.

See your place in the big picture

The light bulb didn’t go off for her until we looked at her VIA strengths and realized that teamwork was a top strength. Doing her share was a top value. She put it above her own well-being.

What ended up working for her was exploring the concept of a shadow side of the strength. After she could see her strength clearly and the signs of overuse, she was able to adjust her behavior to avoid burnout. Then she could see that delegating work actually served her team.

How do you spot someone with a top strength of teamwork? Watch for someone with the ability to identify with team goals and sometimes put them ahead of personal gratification, just as my client did. It involves being able to see the big picture as well as one’s place in it.

Building Teamwork

Today I’d like to discuss one way to build teamwork as a character strength. Come back tomorrow or three more ways that build this strength in yourself and those you lead, thus enhancing the teams in which you participate.

Approach 1: “We” Before “Me”

Performance of a Lifetime is an organization in New York City that uses improv to teach skills of listening, teamwork, and collaboration. In his recent book To Sell is Human, Dan Pink describes some of their work. One exercise is called Predator/Protector. Each person picks two people in the room, one her protector, one her predator. Then all try to place their protectors between themselves and their predators. What results is usually a flurry of running around the room, people bumping into one another and furiously trying to save themselves from this imaginary threat.

Teamwork in the hive

Then the facilitator stops the group and asks the participants to start again and pay attention to how the group is doing. On a second try, all of a sudden, the movement slows down and finally comes to a stop when people take into account the rest of the group and ultimately achieve their goal.

If we are paying attention to how the group is doing, we are letting go of ego, disregarding status and building a better team. David Sloan Wilson has shown that oftentimes people put the ‘we’ before the ‘I’ even though it may be economically irrational to do so.

As NYU professor, Jonathan Haidt, and colleagues say, “We are hive creatures.” During your next team meeting take a director moment. Stop and view the meeting from the balcony and ask yourself, “How is the group doing?” You might ask the team directly to disregard rank or position and ask them to comment on what they see going on in the room.

Come back tomorrow for three more ways to build teamwork as a character strength in yourself and others.

And if you haven’t yet, you can find out what your character strengths for free here.

References:

Haidt, J., Seder, J. P., & Kesebir, S. (2008).  Hive psychology, happiness, and public policy.  Journal of Legal Studies, 37, S133-S156.

Peterson, C. & Seligman, M. (2004). Character strengths and virtues: A handbook and classification.Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Peterson, C., (2006). A Primer in Positive Psychology New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Pink, D. (2013).  To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others. Riverhead Trade.

Sober, E., & Wilson, D. S. (1998). Unto others: The evolution and psychology of unselfish behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

VIA Institute on Character.  Teamwork as a top character strength.

Wilson, D. S. (2015). Does Altruism Exist?: Culture, Genes, and the Welfare of Others (Foundational Questions in Science). Yale University Press. Publication date: January 13.