Flex time and project-based employment are two, often concurrent, phenomena that characterize organizations in the Networked World. For these practices to be productive, Entrances (and Exits) by all the players involved must be effective.
An Entrance occurs anytime you enter a meeting, step in front of a group to give a presentation or meet others for the first time. When you enter, your audience will be reading your body language. They will form instantaneous opinions about you and your team. A skilled improviser steps onstage decisively, energetically, without any hesitation or doubt, with an open mind about what is to come.
Entrances are not a purely physical action. As with all other aspects of improvisation, they are motivated by intention and an emotional point of view. What are you thinking when you step onstage? How are you feeling? What’s your idea for the scene? What is at stake? When you’ve got something provocative or useful in mind to motivate your entrance, the audience will pick up on that and will be naturally intrigued by what’s going to happen next. When you enter strongly, your audience is with you from the get-go.
Timing and good energy are also essential to effective entrances. Energetic, well-timed entrances can be made in ways that are consistent with one’s personal style. No one should expect a boisterous entrance out of a bookish character. The style of entrance is not the issue. Style is a personal matter. The issue is whether you step into to your scenes assertively and contribute strongly when you do.
Here are some examples of poor entrances that nearly everyone has experienced and performed themselves.
Dude, Where’s My Dongle? We’ve all been there. Some little missing piece of technology, like a dongle or an adapter hangs up the start of a presentation. We have picture but no sound. Sound but no picture. No picture, no sound, no clue. A know-it-all tells you to try pressing Control-Alt-Shift-Escape-F11, to no effect.
“We’ll be just a minute, we have to send for an AV person.”
“Does anybody want anything to drink while we’re waiting?”
“Try Control-Alt-Shift-Escape F12.”
“I tried that. It doesn’t work.”
“Try shadow puppets.”
“Try this.” (You quit fiddling with projector and buy some time by making a bad shadow puppet of Abraham Lincoln. One person laughs a little out of politeness. Your boss glares at you. You’re toast.)
When the props for your presentation are not tested and ready, you’re setting yourself up for a bad entrance. Your scene will suffer because of it.
Casualty. It’s one thing to work in a relaxed atmosphere – most people perform better, long-term, in that kind of environment. When the casual approach turns into sloppiness, however, performance suffers. Casual entrances include: missed deadlines; lethargic, low-energy behaviors at the beginnings of scenes; people straggling in after meetings have begun; people entering while talking on the phone; or blurring of the line between professionalism and sociability in the office. Meetings that don’t start on time, capricious cancellations and habitually extended deadlines are also signs of over-casualness. Waiting in the wings and not entering when you’re expected to, or entering with un-focused energy, will undercut the potential of any performance.
Star Turn. People who consider themselves ‘star performers’ will sometimes indicate their status by keeping the rest of the team waiting before finally making a dramatic entrance, at which point the scene can commence. This attention-getting stunt is, generally speaking, a poor entrance. A variation of this game called The Last Word gets played by managers who do not participate in the dialogue during a scene, but instead, lurk in the wings and attempt to indicate status by waiting to have the last — thus definitive — word on every idea expressed in that scene.
There are scenes in which a Star Turn entrance can be appropriate. When one of your group is an acknowledged leader in your industry recently featured on the cover of Fortune, it can be very effective for this person to make a splashy entrance when the stage is set. It builds audience anticipation, making the start of a scene momentous and high-energy. Most often, though, improvisers take turns being the star and do it onstage during a performance, as the circumstances of their scenes unfold. First and foremost, we are a team. One of the ways we show it is by supporting one another with timely entrances.
Tags: Casual Friday, Dongle, Energy, Entrance, Flex Time, Focus, Missed Deadlines, Project-Based Employment, Star Turn, Tardiness