Episode 59: Say YES, and Upgrade Your Campus with Ryan Palmer, Principal at Kennedy & Company Education Strategies

Ryan Palmer, Principal at Kennedy & Company Education Strategies, has over 15 years of experience in academic medicine, including leadership positions at US and Caribbean medical schools. Ryan has appeared in numerous theater and screen production and holds an MFA in acting from the theater school at DePaul University. Upon transitioning to a career in higher education, he found that his training and work in theater have helped to positively inform his everyday work and education. Specifically, he found that his extensive training in improvisation could be applied to teams in the work environment to help enhance creativity, communication, and collegiality. He loves to share these techniques with professionals to help improve morale, increase teamwork, and infuse a sense of play in the workplace.

For Ryan, enhancing education has never been more crucial. "The great resignation" is a real thing, as workers are quitting en masse and moving on. There are a lot of other options for workers now, especially skilled workers in the higher education industry. The turnover has been enormous, with many existing educators lacking the manpower to sufficiently operate at the level they need to.

Now more than ever, every workplace needs to focus on its human capital; its workers. They need to find ways to keep people happy that aren't necessarily related to money, because people are quitting good jobs to go do different things. It's not just about people doing jobs they don't like, it's that people just don't feel connected, they feel burnt out. It's about giving people a sense of creativity and play and infusing that back into their day-to-day life.

People aren't necessarily quitting because they don't make enough money or don't like their job. Takes nurses as an example. Most like their job and are not unhappy with the money, but there's a burnout situation. One could argue that burnout is due to the overwhelming amount of work, which might be true, especially in the case of nurses, but a lot of times burnout is the result of the mundane nature of the work; the process of doing the same thing again and again. After some time, you're no longer excited about it or engaged with the work.

Improv Education

Ryan loves acting, even though he doesn't do it anymore. Instead, he found a way to reconnect to it by doing improvisation at his office. He took some basic rules of improv and applied them to his office space, but not in a “make people go up and do skits” sort of way. He wasn't a fan of traditional team-building stuff, frankly. A lot of people would be terrified being put on the spot, so he considered games instead, because everybody can play games. The sourest person in the room can play games, just as much as the most enthusiastic person. Ryan actually thought his idea would fail miserably, but he tried it and structured it in a way that people weren't going to feel threatened, they were just going to play games. As a result, the outcome was overwhelmingly positive. It was the most collegial he had ever seen that group of people and probably ever did again. He later ran into a former coworker who had high praise for the improv exercise.

Before the exercise starts, Ryan likes to start with "anti-objectives." For example, he explicitly points out that anything they do will not be meant to make the participants feel uncomfortable. They're not going to have to do things they don't feel comfortable doing. He's not trying to force an agenda onto them or try to make them actors. That disclaimer often helps before he provides a little background to it. This type of exercise works best in person, rather than remotely.

There is a unique opportunity for people, as a team, to use this style of improv to break people out of their shells, because that's something that people constantly battle, and this helps nudge people more into a leadership position. From a higher education perspective, there are many applications for using these exercises to build a better team. In many cases, people are inspired by the improv enough to apply some of the rules to their work afterward. The more they do it, the better they get as performers of sorts, so Ryan is convinced this strategy is effective.

How it Works

The improv only works if you do it without analyzing it too much. You just have to do it, and it either works or it doesn't. That's what the differentiator is between this and other team-building activities. Most team-building activities require little emotional investment. What happens is, if it becomes too intellectual, it gives people an opportunity to distance themselves emotionally. Ryan speaks from his own experience because he doesn't like most traditional team-building ideas. 

When you're doing these improv games, it's not just you doing them with everyone watching. They are objectively simple games to start off. For example, counting to 20 with a group. First, everyone closes their eyes, then they have to count to 20 with just one person saying each number,  without negotiating who's gonna say what. So "one, two..." and someone speaks over them, they have to start from the beginning. It’s about listening and getting into a certain awareness. After you get the hang of it, you're not thinking about it.

Ryan always puts himself in everyone's shoes and says, "How would I feel if I'd never done this before?" If people feel embarrassed, they're less likely to participate, so he tries to do it in a way that it ramps up. By the end, people are really having a good time and they want to keep going.

For him, it felt good to go back to his acting roots, but apply them in a way that was relevant to his career path. It’s hard to explain the feeling a teacher gets seeing students making connections with an unconventional exercise that works like magic.

Connect with Ryan Palmer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-palmer-70715315/

Learn more about Kennedy & Company Education Strategies at https://kennedyandcompany.com/

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