lights, camera, awkward role play

A good faith, reasonable, modern thing you might do as a leader of people is avoid making those people feel awkward. 

I call it good faith and modern and all because we’ve evolved away, healthily, from workplace cultures where a boss dominates and demeans their people and can just generally get away with being a bully. I do not recommend returning to that set of practices, even as a joke.

There are many cases, though, where awkwardness is a good sign. It’s the signature of the growth edge - the vaunted “zone of proximal development”. If you protect your people from all awkwardness, you cheat them of growth. 

One way you can almost certainly make people feel awkward is to have them role play a conversation where they are using a skill you want them to be practicing even when you aren’t there watching. You can have them improvise parts of the conversation; you can script the whole thing. Either way, it will probably feel awkward for them as they play pretend.

That awkwardness can show you that yes, indeed, you’ve found something your people aren’t confident pros at, yet. That’s useful for you. The awkwardness can also velcro the conversation and the skill it’s designed to train into their memory. It gives something practical and technical an emotional salience it cannot have if they saw a diagram of it or read a blog post about it. They have lived the thing, even just for a minute, even in the fakest of fake circumstances.

That’s useful for them.

-Eric