Let's Be Honest to all: Business Is Theatre

One day years ago I was at work. I was on the loading dock at the back of our company’s building, having a chat with the loading dock guys. It was all guys in that department at the time, and I stopped by the loading dock in our Shipping and Receiving area to talk about the calendars on the walls.
Back then, vendors and freight companies would send their clients calendars, and on every month there was a picture of a Hotsy Totsy girl in a skimpy outfit. Sometimes the model was sitting on or holding a piece of factory or loading-dock equipment.




















“Guys,” I said, “I love the artwork on the walls in this department, but the calendars have to go. There’s a thing called Hostile Work environment that says that we can’t have stuff on the walls that could be offensive or inappropriate.
“Not everybody wants to walk by Miss February a hundred times a day and look at that g-string bikini she’s wearing.”
“What the heck, Liz?” asked the guys. “We have to look at our calendars all the time – the least you can do is let us look at a picture we  like.”
“Nice try,” I said, “but the calendar has to go.” Just then I heard my name over the company PA system. “Liz Ryan to the front office,” said our receptionist, Donna. That was very  unusual. I had a cell phone. Who was looking for me, and what was their urgency?
I left the dock and headed back down the long hallway to my office in the front of the building. I stopped in my office to throw on a blazer and some red lipstick, then I sprinted around the corner to Donna desk in the lobby. “What is the story?” I asked her. “Casey wants you for something,” she said. Casey was our CEO. His office was at the end of the hall on the next floor, one floor above the lobby. I dashed up the stairs.
In Casey’s office was a prim-looking older lady from a state pension board. She was on a visit to our company to make sure her pension fund’s dollars invested in us were in safe hands. Casey looked relieved to see me. “I hope you can answer a few questions about our employee stock option plan for us,” he said. We stepped into his office.

I know how to play that role in my sleep. I answered the pension lady’s questions carefully and with grace. I brought her tea. I let her know how wonderful it was to meet her and how important her role in safeguarding her pension fund members’ investments were. It is true. The lady had a big job on her shoulders. At the same time she wanted to be made much of, and I know how to do that. I’m the youngest of five daughters from an Irish Catholic family. I was raised wearing a hat to Mass every Sunday. Do you think I don’t know how to treat people nicely?

The lady left happy and well-informed about employee stock options. “You saved me,” said my CEO.
“That was impromptu,” I said. “I was on the loading dock talking about girly calendars.”
“Good switch-up,” he said.
“If I have to do that again, you have to get me an Actors’ Equity card,” I said. Business is theater. We should tell the truth about that.
Sometimes the roles we play at work help us out. The part of the super-polite, attentive younger lady was a familiar script to me. The role of the hey-guys-what’s-up sisterly calendar-snatcher was familiar too. I have three brothers in addition to all those sisters. I know how to talk to guys.
We all find roles to play at work, and they can make our work easier in lots of situations.
They can hurt us, too, especially when we fall into roles we didn’t choose and stay in them because we’re afraid to step out of them. We stay in our familiar roles far past the point where they serve us.
Sometimes we’re afraid to bring ourselves to work. We fear what would happen if we did. We say “I can’t be myself at work,” and we blame other people for keeping us in a role. But how would they know we were playing a part, if we never came out from behind the mask?

I used to notice the behavior of young people like me in meetings before the big guys, the executives, walked in. The twenty-somethings were comfortable and goofing around right up until the C-level people walked in and sat down. Then they snapped to attention — me, too.

We can say words we don’t believe when we’re in character, because the script takes over and we speak the character’s words. I used to lie in bed at night and wonder “Did I say that asinine thing? Oh God, what kind of dweeb have I become?”

I remembered when I was cool and I didn’t say dweeby things because they were written into the script I believed I had to follow.
I noticed that when my mojo was up, I felt more free being myself at work. When I was discouraged and tired, I let my suit and my business card do the job for me. I didn’t speak up about things I should have been yelling and screaming about. That’s when I would lie in bed at night and think “Why did I say that idiotic thing?” or “Why didn’t I say anything when my gut was screaming at me?”
It is easy to fall into the script at work. The business structure itself encourages us to do that. The hierarchy, the rules, and the fear of displeasing someone higher up the chain all act as dampers on our humanity and integrity, too often. Out the window with our human honesty and street-level good sense go creativity and passion, the two things the business world needs most.
When we launched the Human Workplace movement to humanize work in 2012 we knew that Business Theatre would play a major part.
Until we can talk about the masks we wear and the scripts we follow at work, often unaware of the separation between who we are at home and who we are on the job, we won’t climb out of the hole we’ve built.
We won’t make our organizations any more vibrant and alive than they are now until we can tell the truth about the theatrical aspect of work. We won’t become more productive or more innovative by tightening the screws one more time on our employees or creating new, fake yardsticks to hit and measuring the tar out of every activity we can.
We won’t get anywhere until we learn to talk about fear and trust.
We have to learn to talk openly about the times when it’s hard to say the things our bodies wants us to say. We have to talk about the excessively – sometimes obsessively – left-brained and data-driven persona we take on at work, and its harm to our right-brained, earthy human side.
Every good thing humans have ever accomplished came from the power a team of passionate people can harness and feed on. Nothing creative or exciting ever came from a spreadsheet, a policy manual or a starched shirt.
It is time to bring the human side of business to the forefront, and challenge ourselves and one another to step out of the artificial and diminished versions of ourselves who so often inhabit our jobs.
I almost forgot! When I went back to the loading dock after the pension fund lady left us, the guys had covered every month’s Hotsy Totsy girl with my theatrical head shots, of which somebody had gotten hold and made multiple copies. My eight by ten black and white face stared out from every month in every calendar. “Cute,” I said.

Let’s be human at work, tell jokes and be vulnerable and stop worrying about where we stand and who’s pleased or displeased with us or whether we’ve stepped on an invisible land mine that might not detonate for months. Work is a human activity, like making a ham sandwich or changing a baby’s diaper.

There is nothing elevated about the suits and the forecasts and the earnings per share, not unless we elevate those things with the human passion that can lift any activity to the altitude where great things are possible.