MagicOfTeamwork

In the early years it always felt risky using audience members as part of the show. After all, they might heckle me, they might not follow directions properly, they might screw something up and ruin the trick, or turn out to be hams trying to attract all the attention to themselves.

               So I hid behind my memorized script and
               tried to control my volunteers into saying
               and doing exactly what I had planned.

When you're in front of an entire audience you want to look good--that's why I had everything scripted ahead of time. But human beings have a way of doing and saying unpredictable things! My volunteers had not had a chance to read the script before coming on stage. There was always the potential for a spontaneous interruption that might make me look bad to the audience; and yet, what I didn't realize was that these same
volunteers held the potential to skyrocket my show into major success!

The more I worked with people on stage, the more comfortable I became with establishing rapport and dealing with sponanteity. I began to loosen up and actually allow my volunteers to contribute to the performance.

Then a few years ago I began to realize that what I had discovered on stage had applications to the workplace. I remembered Shakespeare's words:

All the world's a stage.

And I added my own afterthought:

Even the workplace!

Let's look, for example, at delegation and feedback. I realized that the discomfort I had felt working with volunteers on stage was not unlike the difficulty managers sometimes experience in delegating tasks and listening to feedback from employees and staff. After all, managers want to look good to their own audience of supervisors and bosses; delegation and feedback are easily squelched in the effort to squeeze staff into a tight script that eliminates creativity in the workplace. And yet, in the fast world of modern business, the ability to delegate tasks and accept feedback from the frontline employees is critical!

So is acknowledgement. I really did not appreciate early on in my career how important the contribution of an audience to the success of a show really is. Nor, as a matter of fact, do most audiences realize their own importance. And that means that audiences generally do not consciously acknowledge and accept their own responsibility as an audience.

It is even truer in the workplace that the contributions
everyone makes--and I mean everyone, from the boardroom to the mailroom--are important and need to be
ACKNOWLEDGED!

I also realized that my emphasis on myself as star and center of attention meant that I did not see myself and the audience as a TEAM.

In today's world your business cannot afford to expend serious effort dealing with egos that want to be "stars" within the company . . .

. . . those who, for the sake of pulling attention to themselves will unconstructively criticize others, who want to do it all themselves and have everyone else around them appl and who see themselves in competition with the rest of the staff.

As Lance H.K. Secretan has written:

A team of champions cannot become a championship team.
(Reclaiming Higher Groud; Building Organizations that Inspire Excellence)

Team building is essential for today's businesses, which must be fast, efficient, and able to make adjustments and changes in a swiftly changing environment.

Finally, I realized that my whole magic show could be used as a metaphor about the importance of teamwork, obstacles to teamwork, and the path to effective team building. So I put together a show called . . . .

The star of this special show is not the magician, but the audience. Instead of preaching to the people about the need to team build, this show creates team building right on-stage, using lots of audience participation in order to give people the actual experience of working together in a fun, memorable way.

The audience's interactive teamwork
with the magician creates a dynamic, humorous
show, and an enjoyable time for all.

All of the themes mentioned in this text find their place in the show: participation, contribution, acknowledgment, delegation, feedback, and more.

Remember, this is not just another motivational speech.
From start to finish this is a show! But a show with a conscious purpose: Everyone contributes to making it a memorable experience.

Don't lose any more time wasting the tremendous human potential that can lift your company to Higher Ground! Empower your staff!

When people enjoy working with each other, they care about your company and work for its success.

is not a seminar, training sesson, or
motivational speech. Nor is it merely a show. It's something unique.

Let me tell you how I came by the whole idea of The Magic of Teamwork. Before I started speaking professionally, I performed magic purely as entertainment (I still do that, too). Early on in my magical career, I thought it was all about me. I wanted to be a magic "star!" And what was the purpose of an audience? Well, to watch me, of course! And applaud. So all my efforts on stage went into making myself look good, and all my promotional efforts went into building my own image.

Slowly I began to realize that my show's highlights happened when I used audience volunteers �� they were actually contributing to the show's success! So I began to perform more and more routines using audience volunteers.