Clients

Jon Spayde for Utne Reader

Most actors who aren’t established stars show up at auditions, wait for callbacks (which may never come), work briefly on a play or film, and then go through the process all over again-while waiting tables or driving cabs.

Peter Gardiner-Harding has found an entirely different way to survive as an actor. From his base in Toronto, the 48-year-old actor-director approaches corporations and nonprofits with a win-win proposition: Hire him and his troupe www.playsthatwork.com to create plays that dramatize workplace issues, from boss-employee tensions to new ways to recharge workers’ energy.

The plays that he and his fellow actors create for in-house audiences are not only carefully researched in consultation with the people involved – they’re interactive, too. Among the many tools Gardiner-Harding uses is the Forum Theater approach developed by Brazilian director, Augusto Boal, in which audience members can suggest alternative directions for the action and propose solutions to the play’s problems. “I want an art form that people can embrace and let into themselves. I want to connect with them where they are,” says Gardiner-Harding.

Born in Montreal, he had an early bent for theater and music, but his parents’ death when he was 17 pushed him in an entirely different direction; with a younger sister to support, Gardiner-Harding took a business degree from the University of Toronto and became an accountant. He also put away his dreams of acting and singing.

Many years later, after encountering socially concerned plays, he began to wonder whether he could combine the business connections he’d made as an accountant with an acting career that emphasized helping people and a new business was born. In 2000, Gardiner-Harding let his accountant’s license lapse, had his dark hair streaked with bohemian blond highlights, and made a full-time commitment to his new life. He’s since moved with his wife, Irene, to British Columbia, commuting monthly to his Toronto business base.

His clients include major Canadian banks, universities, and medical facilities – among them a Toronto hospital at the center of the recent SARS epidemic. In each of the years since he launched the business, he’s made more money than in his best year as an accountant while bringing the healing power of theater to bear on real lives. Sure beats waiting tables.

Wallace Immen for the Globe and Mail

The book shelves groan with volumes of the latest fad theories. Plenty of coaches are eager to impart their advice. And there’s always a mentor to search out for guidance from the perch of experience.

So who does James Dale turn to for wisdom on how to advance his career successfully? Why, himself.

And what magic formulas has he come up with? None. For Mr. Dale, it’s the tried and true that count. He’s learned that the most effective strategies are the ones you already know.

“In fact, the secrets to career success aren’t secrets at all but, rather, ideas, values and strategies most of us know so well that we tend to ignore them,” says Mr. Dale, who credits applying the principles imparted by his parents, teachers and church leaders as major factors in his rise to chief executive officer of Detroit-based advertising agency W.B. Doner & Co. from 1991 to 1995.
His new book, The Obvious: All You Need to Know in Business. Period. is laced with advice like:
Simple is better. Don’t look for complications that will distract you; stay focused on the goal and throw out mental trash that gets in the way.

Mean what you say. Exaggeration and embellishment undermine your credibility. Honesty is the best policy. There’s no such thing as a good liar and the truth invariably emerges. So take responsibility and apologize rather than hiding behind excuses. If you don’t know, ask. Don’t be arrogant or afraid to admit that you don’t understand. It saves making a lot of uninformed mistakes. Yet, “we can tend to ignore such time-tested truths because they are obvious,” says Mr. Dale, now a partner in management consultancy Richlin/Dale LLC in Baltimore. “Human nature is to look for miracles and magic shortcuts.”

But in order to state and apply the obvious, you still have to find ways to tap your inner knowledge, career coaches say. So books and advisers can still be essential for shaping our thinking. The key is not to get sidetracked by following the latest fads.

You have to keep up with the current thinking, if only to remind yourself of what you already know, says Toronto-based career coach Nina Spencer, president of Nina Spencer & Associates, and the author of Getting Passion Out of Your Profession.

Self-help books and coaching can help you develop insight because they make you focus on what you are doing well and what you need to improve on, she says.

Paul Luke for the Business Reporter

Peter Gardiner-Harding awoke one morning at age 30 and found he had been transformed into a chartered accountant.

“But this really isn’t who I am,” he moaned as he headed off to work at a Toronto accounting firm. But Gardiner-Harding didn’t know who he really was. He only knew who he wasn’t.

He left accounting a few years later and enrolled in a master’s of divinity program at Trinity College in Toronto. He planned to become an Anglican priest but soon realized he wasn’t cut out for that either. Then it hit him: What he really wanted was to be an actor. After all, he’d done acting as a kid in Montreal despite passive discouragement from his parents. After all, he’d acted the part of accountant for five years – even rising to the role of manager of business planning at a national brokerage – when his true self was somewhere else.

Gardiner-Harding plunged into acting. He took lessons, rehearsed, auditioned. He set a goal of getting his first professional acting job in five years. Within six months, he landed a paying part in summer stock theatre in Bolton, Ont. This was it. This was what he always wanted to be.

Success magazine articleStill, he knew it meant he would likely be fated to eke out a bare living scurrying after parts in film, theatre or TV. Then it hit him again: He could apply his acting skills to dramatize issues in the business world. He could apply the empathy and inward probing he’d developed at divinity school to study deep-rooted workplace problems. He could identify solutions and deliver them to a job site through the medium of theatre. As a trained accountant, he knew how to convince bean-counters among prospective clients that his theatrical services were cost-effective.

Since 1989, Gardiner-Harding had owned and run Focus Management Group, a company that offered financial counselling, handled personal taxes and provided outplacement guidance. In 1999, he sold off the financial side of the business to concentrate on delivering workplace solutions through drama. For the last five years, Gardiner-Harding and a group of on-call actors he has trained for Focus Management have been presenting in-house theatre to a wide spectrum of organizations.

After interviewing employees and researching issues such as boss-worker skirmishes or difficult customers, he creates play, character studies or business simulations to crystallize a particular issue. Gardiner-Harding and his troupe then enlist their workplace audience’s help in resolving the inter-personal dilemmas they’ve just watched. He and Irene Gardiner-Harding, his business partner and wife, have lived in Victoria for the past two years.

Peter, 49, commutes to his business base in downtown Toronto once or twice monthly. He makes more money than he ever did as an accountant.

His clients – listed on his website –include organizations as diverse as Scotiabank, Alcan Inc. and the Vancouver Island Health Authority. He says his mission as a director-actor and business person is to create plays that reflect employees’ challenges and help them find greater harmony, productivity and integrity.