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| Students learning the nuances of soft skills through theatrics |
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| The ‘softer’ side of business – influencing, communication, team management, delegating, appraising, presenting, and motivating – is now recognised as key to making businesses more profitable and helping future leaders walk through the corporate corridors with greater confidence. |
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Consider this role–play situation given to a group of management students, during a workshop on ‘Dramatic Skills for Business,’ conducted by the ISB Theatre Club: “Enact a typical job interview scene of a group of film producers looking for an action hero.” When the interviewees broke out into an impromptu dance steps, other participants revelled in that easy and enjoyable moment.
Theatre has always been a key component of Leadership Development Programmes at top B-schools, globally. Theatre techniques help facilitate leadership enhancement and provide a simulated learning experience to the students. The Theatre workshop at the ISB too, aimed to develop certain key soft-skills, essential for leadership development.
“Our primary intention, through this workshop, was to expose the ISB audience to the power of theatre and its direct application to the real corporate world. This is ‘Corporate Theatre,’ as we call it,” said Achint Setia, President, Theatre Club.
The ‘softer’ side of business – influencing, communication, team management, delegating, appraising, presenting, and motivating – is now recognised as key to making businesses more profitable and helping future leaders walk through the corporate corridors with greater confidence. Increasingly, progressive companies are looking for multi-culturalism and diversity as key characteristic of senior managers. Managers who have a host of soft competencies – ability to communicate with clarity, listen and respond with empathy, flexible and adaptable to the changing needs of an organisation, collaborative with others, and those who can influence decisions through lateral and more creative thinking – are hot catches.
Theatre is a popular and time-
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tested approach to teach future and current managers the softer skills of business. Theatre works around inhibitions and ingrains the art of leading people, negotiating skills, communication styles, team-motivating skills, etc. Theatre also replenishes what a leader-in-making needs to add on to his persona. A leader needs, for sure, more inter-personal skills in his repertoire and more control over his action. Theatre can help interweave the required need for control, articulate, negotiate, overcome conflict and overall, bear the necessary charisma to be in authority.
At the interactive two-hour workshop, future leaders at the ISB were introduced to various nuances of standard theatrical techniques, such as voice modulation, facial expression, body language, role plays, etc. The facilitators discussed the link between theatre and the corporate world and displayed to the audience, the power of emoting.
The next step was audience involvement and it focussed on three specific skills – Effective Voice (including breath control, voice clarity, pronunciation and tone modulation), Facial Expressions (things such as taking command, looking confident and composed in non-comfortable situations) and last, Body Language (use of postures and gestures in sending the right signals).
Student participant, Abhishek Bhide, noted, “The workshop helped us in understanding the role of voice, expressions and body language in effective corporate communication.”
Enthusiasts at the Theatre Club want to take their histrionic itch a little ahead. “More such workshops, stage and radio plays, and then we also see the feasibility of integrating theatre into the management curriculum here,” discloses Setia.
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