The Power Of Presence
Knowledge Directions – Fall/Winter 2001
What Actors Can Teach Business Leaders
By Christopher von Baeyer
Article Excerpt:
...the skills and behaviors of the actor have direct and valuable application to the demands of interpersonal communication in organizations and businesses.
One of the nation’s largest diversified media and communications corporations recognizes that it must deal with internal competition among its own business lines as newspapers, radio, TV and new media compete for content. A rapidly growing financial services company faces a disturbing spike in attrition in the early days of 2000 as the dot.com revolution sweeps its global offices and senior partners are lured away to lucrative deals with Internet startups. A Big Five accounting firm identifies a fundamental gap in the communication skills of its North American partners and searches for a dynamic way to train them in techniques they need to improve and expand service offerings to major clients.
These diverse business challenges have important elements in common. Meeting them depends significantly on superior communication skills, on the power to communicate values and feelings as well as information, to build trust and inspire action, to maintain and foster threatened social capital. So all of these organizations turned to the theater for help. They asked the professional actor/coaches of The Ariel Group, a theater-based executive education and training company in Arlington, Massachusetts, to teach their executives how to communicate more fully and effectively.
Brian Bates, a psychologist at the University of Sussex, England, and author of The Way of the Actor suggests that “almost everything that actors do can be identified with things we do in less dramatic form, in everyday life. While we may not wish to acquire all the actor’s technical skills, I believe that there is a rich world of intuitive knowledge and human insights in actor performance, rehearsal, training, and life experience.”
This truth underlies the compelling proposition at the heart of Ariel’s approach: that the skills and behaviors of the actor have direct and valuable application to the demands of interpersonal communication in organizations and businesses.
In a world increasingly dominated by discussions of the latest technical and electronic advances in knowledge management, a theater perspective can help bring the dialogue back to the human dimension of knowledge flow within organizations. Particularly in times of great change, companies must respond appropriately, sensitively and creatively to the human dimension of their business challenges. On the most practical level, an intensive training in the basics of acting can provide leaders and managers with the tools they need to communicate effectively and powerfully with their clients and colleagues.
The Concept of Presence
At the core of the Ariel Group’s approach to training at BCG is the concept of presence. For the actor and the senior consultant, professional success depends fundamentally on the quality of one’s individual presence: the ability to connect dynamically and authentically with the thoughts and feelings of one’s audience.
Peter Brook, the great English stage director, defines presence this way:
"To me what matters is that one actor can stand motionless on the stage and rivet our attention while another does not interest us at all. What is the difference? Where chemically, physically, psychically does it lie? In this question we can find the starting point of our whole art."
Barbara Berke, the vice president and partner responsible for training at BCG, says that presence is a core competency in her organization and important for career advancement:
"Developing strategically sound insight for the client is just one of a successful consultant’s skills. They also must be able to engage the client in a substantive dialogue, first to determine the real issues at hand and second to effectively communicate the solution. We are big believers in self-discovered logic and how one draws knowledge out of people. To this end we are skill-training in the essential act of human connection."
Theater makes you go inside yourself and ask yourself what’s most important. Any firm that markets and sells itself by presenting itself—where the work product is fundamentally people—must develop professionals with an actor’s ability to communicate with the audience.
We aren’t presenting works of fiction, but we are using lessons learned from the theater to facilitate the transfer of insight and knowledge from BCG to the client company, communicating what’s most important. No matter how good the strategy, it will only have impact if the client understands and implements it. This two-way communication also builds trust, an invaluable asset to any consulting relationship.
One of the first lessons an actor learns is that the quality of his presence on the stage is something that he can profoundly influence, but can never fully control. I vividly remember how, in my early days of training as a professional actor, we were given the seemingly simple task of walking onto a large stage from the wings, turning to our peers in the audience, speaking our name, and exiting the stage. The moment we became aware that we were visible to the audience, we seemed to be overcome by forces outside our control. One young man began to sweat profusely, another broke into nervous giggles, while one young woman temporarily forgot her own name.
When my turn came, I found myself so tremendously self-conscious of my every move that I actually stopped breathing, stumbled and tripped off the stage. After years of study, I learned techniques to manage and control the seemingly invisible forces which paralyzed me in front of the crowd. Overcoming that fearful self-consciousness, and the effect it has on our ability to speak, to think and to move effectively, makes an important contribution to developing presence.
The quality of our presence can be improved in many situations, not just on stage or during formal presentations. Every moment of live human communication between two or more individuals, when studied closely, reveals a vast amount of information being conveyed on many levels. While we tend to focus on the verbal component of communication in our everyday business dealings, we are, in fact, inextricably involved in a continual “kinesthetic dance” of body language, vocal inflection, and emotional exchange. By understanding the subtleties of human communication, we create the opportunity for more effective exchange.
The Ariel Group offers a model that identifies four fundamental dimensions of presence necessary for effective business communication. By becoming aware of these basic principles and developing their skills in each of these areas, consultants at BCG gain a greater measure of control over how they interact with clients and colleagues.
The four dimensions of the model are easily remembered by the first four letters of the word presence:
Present: The ability to be centered and aware in each moment of communication.
Reaching Out: The ability to build and sustain an authentic relationship with one’s audience.
Expressive: The ability to communicate dynamically and congruently with voice, body, mind and emotion.
Self-Knowing: The ability to reflect upon and leverage one’s unique identity as a person and a professional.
A recent three-day training session at a hotel in London began with a discussion of this model and quickly evolved into a full-fledged “boot camp” in communication skills and emotional intelligence. The twelve participants rehearsed Shakespearean monologues, improvised short scenes based on spontaneous suggestions from the audience, learned theatrical warm-ups for their bodies and voices, and coached one another in final dramatic presentations. The exercises encouraged the members of the group, all officers and senior managers at BCG, to expand the limits of their comfort zones and explore new ways of communicating.
For a group of consultants who had built their professional identities on a strong foundation of rigorous analytical thinking skills, this type of training was at once exciting and unfamiliar.
Jaap de Jong, based in the Amsterdam office, says:
"For me it was a completely new experience in which I could see how my way of operating can be very much programmed into a certain way of working. Given where we are now in our careers it is clear that we are in need of a much broader variety of skills and types of behavior. This type of training unlocks and taps the other dimension, which is much more on the emotional side. I learn about the impact people can have with how they say things, the way they act, and the energy they can radiate when they inspire other people."