WET Design and the Improv Approach to Listening - NYTimes.com
Mark Fuller, CEO of WET Design, sounds like a leader who has fun leading his company toward excellence: How’s that for a novel concept, fun? It shouldn’t be… if managing and leading your team isn’t enjoyable for you, you really should do something else.
Snippets of his interview with Adam Bryant:
I really love coming to work to develop the workplace and the team. I think it’s either a virtuous or a vicious spiral, and it’s exposed when you go to hire somebody.
To get really good talent, you need to be doing interesting stuff. Take a great kid out of college or somebody from another company — they’re not going to come if there’s not something really interesting to work on. I suppose you could throw gobs of money at them or something, but that’s not the idea. So you need to build the company so you have great talent, and great projects, and a great environment. You get those three, and then they just feed off of each other.
And this sounds like a philosophy similar to the one we have for the Daily Five Minutes:
Q. Why improv?
A. Improv, if properly taught, is really about listening to the other person, because there’s no script. It’s about responding. I was noticing that we didn’t have a lot of good communication among our people.
And about ideas, and expecting mistakes:
We also encourage people to put their ideas on our walls… The point is to get people to put their stuff out where other people can see it. We don’t want a culture of, “That’s my idea. I don’t want anybody to see it. Maybe they’ll find a flaw in it.”
…So one of the things I will do is to start some meetings by saying, “Let me tell you where I just screwed up.” That sets the tone of, we’ve got to put our mistakes out there. They don’t call it “learn by trial and success.” You learn by trial and error.
