Why Role Play Is Good For Business & Teams — Day 24 of 365 Leadership Blogging

Role play what is it?

We’ve all done it when we were kids. I wanted to be an astronaut and go into space and Vanessa wanted to be Wonder Woman and save the world. Out of our giant imaginations came creativity, storytelling and best of all, role-playing.

Team building is essential and one surefire way to fire up your team’s creative thinking is role play. There are many ways to deliver this but the most common is to have two teams each with an objective to achieve, going head to head to work through a challenging scenario.

Help individuals to perform better

The real benefit of role play is for the individual. With a fresh perspective of their capabilities, increased confidence and raised awareness of other people, they will perform better in their roles and responsibilities. If done right, role play could turn your team into heroes.

The benefits to teams

Builds confidence
Having your team role play allows you to expose them to a number of situations to see how they handle and perform. Due to the safe environment created by role play, this helps teams learn and build confidence in facing scenarios for the first time. This leads to the team feeling better prepared in their day to day roles and thus more individual confidence and team confidence.

Develops listening skills
To be effective at role play you have to adopt good listening skills, the two are synonymous. Not only do you have to listen to instructions from whoever is leading the roleplay, but you also have to listen to your team members and in the instance of a team face off, listen and pay attention to body language and nonverbal clues. These soft skills are better developed over time however role-playing is a great place to start rather than trying them on in real situations.

Creative problem solving 
How many times have you heard the phase when something goes obscurely wrong “you couldn’t make it up”. Working in controlled environments might sound great but something will always go wrong that is beyond our remit of control. Rather than focus on the problem, role-playing is a chance to give your team the experience to handle a difficult situation and challenge their creative problem solving skills.

When and how to introduce role play

This can either of two ways. You mention it to your team and they love the idea. Some of them have even role played before at a previous workplace or role play in their leisure. Or the barriers go up and fear and panic kick in with every objection under the sun as to why they will not take part. Whatever your predicted response it’s always a good idea to bring in an independent voice who can lead the team through the process. A facilitator who is independent of the team helps to keep a level playing field and ensures leaders get as stuck in as the other team members.

What you can do next

Role play can be a great addition to team planning days or goal setting sessions. They can equally be useful on away days for teams, managers or executives. The next step you can take is to do some research yourself on the benefits, how role play in the workplace works and come up with some ideas yourself on what you want to achieve for you and your team. It could be to role-play negotiations with difficult clients, put your sales team to task in selling to high net worth individuals or dealing with challenging people in the workplace. Coming up with scenarios that suit your team or business objectives makes sense. The alternative is to allow a facilitator to plan the role play sessions for you or with you. This way allows for more objectivity.