I have a confession: I have steamrolled. I am sorry, and I truly repent.
In improvisation, “steamrolling” is not co-building the scene with your partner. Instead, you run over their ideas and insist on yours. If you’re an advanced steamroller, you might even listen to your partner’s ideas and incorporate them into yours while you keep on steamrolling.
It’s obvious why you wouldn’t want to steamroll. So why do people do it?
The steamrolling parallel in organizations I want to look at today takes a few forms: not delegating, micromanaging, taking on too much work.
It comes, paradoxically, from being skilled at your job (or at least thinking you’re skilled at your job). For example: a highly-skilled, amazing programmer who’s promoted to a leadership role and doesn’t trust that her team will deliver on the same level she delivers. Instead of hearing the team’s ideas for a new app’s architecture, she dictates it based on her experience. And maybe it’s a great architecture — she’s an awesome programmer — but it has a negative impact on the team.
If those people you don’t trust to execute as well as you do never get a chance to try — and fail — they’ll never learn to execute as well as you do.
(That said, I don’t want my surgeon making mistakes and growing while cutting out my appendix. Some fields tolerate learning pains more than others, and that’s why in improv and theatre there’s practice and rehearsal. And in surgery, there’s years of medical school and residency.)
I’ve learned to adjust my goal in improv from “be really funny” to “support my partners,” and to see everyone having a good time as the ultimate aim. I’ve tried to do this in a recent run of shows performing with an audience member with absolutely no previous improv experience, and while I think I could have done even more to support them, it was really fun for them and me.
A wise director once told me, when I was directing a show with some extremely funny people in it, that if I gave them their jokes to say the show would only ever be as funny as I am. But if I let them come up with their own lines, from their own weird minds, we could have a show that was funnier than the sum of its parts.
Your personal performance has a ceiling that’s lower than your team’s. Maybe today you can outperform your whole team, but if you enable, trust, and support them, soon they’ll be superstars too.
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