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Team Role Play
Team role playing is an excellent exercise for…
- Testing and prototyping new service ideas.
- Devising innovative sales techniques.
- Developing innovative customer service techniques.
- Problem solving - particularly with respect to internal communications,
service delivery and human resources.
How it works
Role playing is when a group of people act out roles for a particular
scenario. For instance, you might train sales people by having two people
act out a sale-scenario. One acts as the sales person. The other acts
as the customer. This allows trainee sales people to practice their sales
techniques. A trainer and/or other trainees may watch the role play and
critique it afterwards.
Team role-playing is similar, except that two or more teams actively
participate. For instance, a group of 10 people and one trainer are divided
into two teams of five each. One person in each group acts out the relevant
role in the scenario. The other four act as coaches providing advice to
their actor. The trainer does not take part in either group. Rather she
oversees the exercise. To make team role playing more effective, a secret
conflict is introduced from the beginning. Only the trainer is aware of
the conflict. Upon completion of the role playing, the trainer leads a
discussion on the role-play.
Example: a software company learns that customers are unhappy
with customer support and this is causing a loss of customers. In order
to improve customer support, the company decides to use team role playing.
A trainer brings together a group of 12 software developers and customer
support representatives.
The trainer introduces the problem and encourages an open discussion
in order to put all the relevant issues on the table and get participants
thinking about the problem in depth prior to the team role playing.
While discussion is still relatively lively, the trainer interrupts,
divides the participants into two groups. Participants should be randomly
assigned to groups, such as by having each person pulling a paper, indicating
group membership, out of a hat. It is important that the participants
do not divide themselves into groups. Getting people who do not normally
work together to do so creates new synergies which should promote greater
creative thinking.
Group A (playing the role of a customer support person) receives a card
which states:
"This customer is very influential. To lose them would be highly
damaging to the company. You must do anything within reason to retain
them"
Group B (playing the role of the customer) receives a card stating:
"You have seriously overspent your software budget and while you
are not unhappy with the product, you must convince the customer support
person to take back the product and refund your money. Since you cannot
admit the actual situation (as it would clearly not be legitimate for
a refund), you must find problems with the software sufficient to legitimise
the return and refund."
The groups meet separately for five to ten minutes to discuss strategy
and who will be the actor. Then the two actors go to the centre of the
room to perform the role play. At any time during the role play, the actors
can look to their teams for advice. Likewise teams can offer unsolicited
advice. Normally the teams are physically separated from their actors.
However, each team can call one "time out" to have a private
discussion of strategy.
In a lively role-play, a team member may very well offer advice to the
actor of the other team. There is nothing wrong with this and the trainer
should not prohibit it, although the teams themselves may do so.
Eventually, a solution of some sort will be found. If the conflict is
not apparent to both sides and there is still sufficient enthusiasm in
the teams, the trainer may ask the teams to find another solution.
Once it is clear no more solutions are to be found, the groups are brought
together and discuss the role play, their strategies, their solution,
relevance to real world situations, and alternative solutions.
Optionally, each team can draft a short "lessons learned" paper
about the role play. The papers can be combined an copies distributed
to all role play participants and any other staff who might learn from
the role play.
In a situation similar to the example, there would probably be several
team role playing sessions with different people and different conflicts.
In addition, some conflicts would be specific to the company's product
or procedures.
Hire Jeffrey to design and facilitate Team Role play and
individual Role Play workshops with you and your team. Contact
Jeffrey to discuss your needs or get a quote.
© 2001 Jeffrey Baumgartner
http://www.jpb.com/creative/
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