Respect in the workplace is an integral part of the delivery of services.  How colleagues treat each other is a major contributor to employee mind set and hence the choices that they make on the job.  

Our healthcare client operates in an environment of high pressure, short staffing situations, multiple professions and constant challenge to the sensitive nature of human relationships.

Our contribution is a 10-minute play which brings forward many of the negative behaviours that find their way into this often pressure-cooker situation.  During the play, participants face the negative behaviours that sometimes show up on the job and they are challenged to find constructive ways to deal with them.

Outcomes include:
• Acknowledging that situations like the ones in the play happen in the workplace,
• Admitting to themselves for some that they give as much as they get of this destructive behaviour,
• Understanding that a change begins with a change in mindset,
• Understanding that if there is going to be a change in these behaviours, it only takes one person to stop the chain reaction.  Defensiveness and aggression are not the only choices when someone dishes that to you,
• Understanding that patients and family members are stakeholders in the relationships that they have with their colleagues,
• Developing the empathy needed to engage staff in dialogue around the behaviours they demonstrate with clients, and
• Knowing that their job as co-worker is to seek to continue to dialogue.  Only through seeking to understand will a lasting resolution take place.

While this play was developed for one LHIN, it has been played with groups of healthcare workers at more than 5 other hospital groups over more than 15 years.  It still resonates with participants as a medium for naming problem behaviours and practicing ways of being and ways of healing them on the units.

Our client was made the legal regulator and credential granting authority for a large group of professional guilds.  Not everyone involved supported this move and our client inherited a number of people who not only felt disenfranchised from their futures, but abandoned by their professions.  This led to some very angry encounters between the regulator’s staff and many of its new members.

playsthatwork inc. was retained to support the customer-facing staff in developing an “empathetic mindset”. Our role was to provide opportunities to practise new coping skills in diffusing difficult conversations and engaging customers differently. Rather than giving participants words to say, learning was focused on ways to stand in truth with the rules and regulations in place, at the same time being present to the emotional issues and situations that members felt challenged by.

Outcomes include:
• Being conscious of and managing emotions, and the impact of body language as it relates to relationships and achieving desired results,
• Importance of using active listening skills to negotiate meaning and understanding the perspective of others before speaking or taking action,
• Exploring different interviewing and questioning techniques, determining how and when to use each type.

In developing an awareness of how to work through tough situations and leverage new skills, the customer-facing staff found themselves better aligned with the strategic goals of protecting the public interest, leading change, promoting the pride of profession and delivering organizational excellence.

In the pharmaceuticals industry, your customers are doctors who are highly skilled in areas of medicine that you may not be.  While customers in every context can pull their business, in situations like this, the customer can be particularly challenging since your reputation can be won or lost within a very small group of buyers.  

All people in power are first and foremost people, with needs and responsibilities that need to be uncovered and served.  Listening and speaking at the “we” level is critical if progress is going to be made.

Our client was contracted by their pharmaceutical client to help them strengthen their brand within the medical community.  Our role in the project was to become dermatologists, endocrinologists, rheumatologists and sometimes pharmaceutical sales reps convincingly enough, so that participants could learn the skills of becoming true partners in each area and differentiate themselves from their competitors.

Outcomes include:
• Confidence in being able to speak truth to power – being present to someone who can make or break you in a moment,
• Feeling and addressing fears as they show, providing participants with an awareness of themselves in tough situations and the skills to deal with them, and
• Assisting sales managers in their coaching conversations with the people who face the doctors every day.

A stronger brand that was more personal, relevant and human was achieved along with the awareness of all staff in how they contributed to it.

There’s an important rule that plays out in the commercial space: the closer you are to your customer’s business, the more the customer needs you to understand it and all the stakeholders involved.  It is no longer good enough to sell your product and disappear.

Whether you are selling products or services to these commercial businesses, helping their staff feel:
• The depth of your understanding of the business they do,
• The unique challenges that they face,
• The unique strengths that they have,
• The opportunities that they either know or don’t yet know about, and
• The threats that are present to them,
make the difference between winning and keeping the business or losing it.

A simulation in this context needs to embrace enough of the complexity of the business to feel realistic, but not so much that self-awareness and relational skills are eclipsed.  It must “nail” the emotional tone that is experienced by staff in the business.

Our client, a multi-line, financial services business, consulted us because they knew that their customer-facing staff were good at analysing business opportunities, but not so good at responding to the emotional cues that customers were sending.  Many of their staff weren’t picking up these emotional cues, much less responding to them.  Our client needed an experience that would open staff up to their customers in a new way . . . and open staff up to themselves in the process.

We were retained to partner in building a capstone experience to a 4-day program, where customer-facing staff learned to:
• Self-manage through the prospecting process,
• Understand the significance of being present to their customers,
• Seek the customers’ stories on a business level and a human level, as each customer is comfortable in sharing, and
• Present their customer and their financial services employer with a holistic solution, placing the supplier in the center.
The simulation stories allowed participants to try, learn, succeed & fail in due measure and try again.

Outcomes include:
• Gaining a level of confidence with the skills through trial-and-error leading to mastery,
• Appreciating that commercial customers, whether owner-operator or otherwise, come to their work with personal commitment that needs to be seen and acknowledged,
• Experiencing the personal values that can sometimes block staff from truly opening themselves to their customers, and
• Committing to tangible action, which was followed up and built upon in future coaching meetings with each participant’s coach.

The Directors College was founded in 2003 on the heels of a number of very troubling board governance failures in the western economy.  The market was scrambling to correct what it saw as governance disconnects at all levels after a number of companies were bankrupted by fraudulent accounting activity.

The Directors College was unique in that they designed a program that not only included cognitive learning, but behavioural learning too – in the form a 2½-day simulation where participants simulate governing a fictitious company.  The purpose of the simulation is to become aware of what it will take for participants to embody the code of ethics founded on the following precepts/principles:
1. Aggressive Discovery: Looking to the larger social and moral horizon, considering best and worst-case scenarios, surfacing ethical or stewardship questions that may be assumed or missed in the normal course of Board discussion or decision-making.
2. Clear Demarcations: Preparing and upholding the lines in the sand which will not be crossed, particularly moral standards such as “Do Not Harm, Do Not Deceive, Do Not Abuse Privilege, and/or Do Not Exploit Unfair Advantage.”
3. Honest Debate: Encountering the business reality with open eyes and mind, raising critical questions and respecting those posed by others so as to recognize the challenges and validity of alternative options or perspectives.
4. Careful Discernment: Fulfilling the fiduciary norms of care by applying the rational, emotional, relational and ethical aptitudes that constitute reasonableness and fairness.
5. Transparent Decisions: Practicing accountability to surpass disclosure laws and expectations, tracking the decision process to reflect the good governance dimensions in Board practices, culture and outcomes.
6. Due-Diligence: Satisfying ethical as well as legal norms for inquiries, verification, investigation, analysis and prudence.
7. Expansive Dialogue: Engaging experts and critics beyond the Board or company to add perspective, deepen understanding from diversity, and contribute to the wider social discourse concerning governance excellence but at all times in the context of my confidentiality obligations to the Board and the enterprise.

We have been retained since the very beginning of the program to facilitate the learning, train and support the 40+ faculty-simulators and guide the evolving design of the simulation as board governance issues change.

Over 1,000 of Canada’s top business leaders have attended this program and simulation.  Outcomes include:
• Individual and group awareness and skill around all 7 of the precepts listed above,
• Patience, tenacity, fairness, empathy, courage and
• Ongoing commitment of several of the graduates to maintaining the simulation as a vibrant and healthy mode of learning for future participants.

Often, customer-facing staff fall into the trap of thinking they know more about what the customer needs than the customer does.  It is at this point, when staff begin experiencing a “crisis of purpose” and results can start to decline.  Customers will tell focus groups, “This company just doesn’t get me!!”  Left unchecked, this is the outcome in both senses of that phrase; “The staff don’t understand me! And they don’t get my business!”

Some of the responsibility for this situation rests in other places. Two problem areas that often contribute to this outcome are:
1. The training that many companies offer their staff which focuses squarely on the form and function of their products, and
2. The company only measures sales.

Our client developed a strong customer experience model which has been widely embraced by customer-facing staff.  More specifically, the “discover” stage was determined to be where most staff needed work.  

We were retained to build a 1-day program that would help customer-facing staff:
• Listen even more effectively to customers,
• Ask more effective questions,
• Demonstrate that their objectives are the customers’ objectives, and
• Build stronger relationships with customers.
Skills were taught, demonstrated and then participants immersed themselves in simulations where they practiced the skills and shared feedback with each other and the simulators.

Outcomes include:
• Relief – in knowing that customers need customer-facing staff to be fully human and to engage with them on a level that is determined by the customer,
• Knowing that each customer has tangible and intangible needs that need to be met if a relationship is to blossom and sales are to be made,
• Satisfaction in the customer-facing staff increased, knowing that their work was being more appreciated by customers (as evidenced by increased NPS), and
• Anecdotal stories of more sales being “discovered” as staff dug more deeply into their customers’ stories.

All organizations are learning that they need to develop strong leaders if they want to achieve their strategic outcomes.  Increasingly in health care, the truth that leadership skills are at least as important as technical skills is taking hold.  How clients, their families, and staff engage in the process of healthcare determines all stakeholder outcomes.  Healthcare - in all its forms - is looking for support in developing the skills needed to excel.

Our client developed a certificate program focused on leadership challenges and skills, such as:
• Communication,
• Courage,
• Commitment,
• Coaching and Mentoring,
• Managing Conflict,
• Delegation,
• Decision Making,
• Keeping client/patients and families safe while providing excellent care, and
• Project leadership

Our contribution is the capstone event, where participants immerse themselves in a 15-minute play calling most of these skills into action.  The rest of the day is spent in simulation. The participants engage the characters from the play in leadership conversations as they work through what’s needed to resolve the presenting problems.

Outcomes include:
• Acknowledging that situations like the ones in the play “happen all the time” in the workplace,
• Admitting to themselves that they stand on the continuum of prejudice raised in the stories and that change begins when they can model emotional honesty,
• Developing the empathy needed to engage staff in dialogue around the behaviours they demonstrate with clients, and
• Knowing that their job as leader is to continue the dialogue.  It is never over and done with; it is always in the process of becoming.

Personal awareness and skill development is the sole focus of the day.

The top 200+ leaders in the organization attended a 3-week, executive education program on leadership at a premier US business school. 18 months later, the executive agreed that they were having trouble transferring the wisdom they learned into their daily practice of leadership.  Individually and collectively, they didn’t know what was standing in their way. What prevented them from using this wisdom?

We were retained to build and participate in a 2-day simulation-based program to help the executive practise the skills they were taught and explore the enablers and disablers present in using them. Areas included:
• Interviewing skills, including exploring the conscious and unconscious bias present when doing so,
• Coaching skills for performance,
• Coaching skills for development, and
• Coaching skills in a high performing team environment.

A short refresh followed by a live demonstration of some of the skills preceded intensive simulating, both scripted characters and “real life cases” (situations the executive are facing right now).

Outcomes include:
• Interviewing requires preparation and focus on what candidates have done and more importantly, how they achieved it,
• Coaching requires a sincere effort to understand the coachee’s point of view and to begin from an assumption of the coachee being capable,
• The same skills used in coaching individuals are present in leading groups.  Good leaders encourage the truth to be aired, not stifled in service of the agenda.

Following an initial scepticism, the executive so much valued the program that they decided it should be cascaded down to the Vice President level.