We recently connected with Mary Lemmer and have shared our conversation below.

Mary, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

When I was a teenager I started a business – a gelato business (that is still operating today, Iorio Gelato). Along with this business I had school, college applications, multiple sports, and life to manage, and this juggling continued into college when I, not only went to school, I got involved in leadership capacities in student organizations, conducted independent research, worked multiple jobs, and actually attended classes and studied a lot. Basically my life at this time could be summed up as “a lot going on.” When I graduated college I continued to build my gelato business, while also working at a venture capital firm and teaching fitness classes.

What made me great at my job also contributed to my struggles, in that I was constantly strategizing, thinking ahead, predicting, anticipating, planning, and rarely fully just enjoying the present moment.

Here’s the thing though – nothing went as planned.

Gelato cases broke, gelato melted, venture partners pulled me into and out of meetings. My perfectly color coded calendar and day’s plans never quite happened as I predicted. And that was really hard for me. I experienced tremendous anxiety and really struggled with the lack of control and when things wouldn’t go as I anticipated. And when too much crashed all at once, I’d crash too.

One day, after one too many panic attacks, I decided to take a real vacation, for a week, and committed to choosing to do something that would be fun for me after my return. I found an improv class in Ann Arbor, Michigan and signed up for 8 weeks of getting comfortable with uncertainty. After my first class, I was in love. It was the first time in my adult life I remember truly fully relaxing. I felt my body’s tension subside. My shoulders shifted away from my ears and closer to where they are most relaxed. I was hooked. It felt so good to not have plans. To not know what was coming next. To not know what I was going to say. To just be, and react, and create something wonderful with other people. And to feel safe with uncertainty. To feel safe and truly supported by wonderful people.

From there I went to the Mecca of improv, The Second City in Chicago. I participated in a weekend improv workshop, where my improv enthusiasm continued.

After I left The Second City class I was definitely on an improv high. I wanted more of it and I found it very difficult to keep practicing improv outside of class. I started incorporating improv philosophy and games into my life and work. Yes, I became the family member who would force the family to play One Word Story and Zip Zap Zop at the dinner table. (Pro tip if you want to avoid topics like religion and politics with your family, play improv games).

I also found improv incredibly useful in my work life. Not only did I become more comfortable when I was pulled into meetings and work projects that I hadn’t planned for, I also found improv helpful in other aspects. At the time I was working for a venture capital investment firm, focused on investing in early-stage technology companies, like Facebook, Google, and SnapChat (except we didn’t invest in any of those companies). Mostly my job consisted of crushing entrepreneurs’ dreams telling them we weren’t going to invest in their company. To do that I met with a lot of entrepreneurs. I heard a lot of business pitches, and I saw the same patterns. The entrepreneurs that didn’t raise money shared qualities, just as the ones who did shared qualities. Countless times entrepreneurs would come to share their story and would get completely thrown off if the meeting didn’t go as planned. Entrepreneurs struggled to tell their stories in ways that appealed to investors. Even if they had great and promising businesses, if the story stunk they were not leaving with a check (point of clarification, in reality no entrepreneur ever actually leaves with a real check. Only in the movies).

Entrepreneurs who are great fundraisers are great storytellers and improv is golden for training storytelling skills and communication.

This was the lightbulb moment for me.

I could use improv to help entrepreneurs improve their story and their pitch, so they could raise money, build team camaraderie and improve communication.

It sure beat boring office hours.

So over the course of 6 years I developed Improv 4 Entrepreneurs workshops to help do just that — help entrepreneurs and business people with pitching, public speaking, storytelling, all while having fun! Along the way I had the opportunity to help hundreds of entrepreneurs and business people with organizations including TechStars, 500 Startups, R/GA, and countless others.

For years I continued working in venture capital and also as an operator in fast growing startups and I continued to get requests to facilitate the Improv 4 Entrepreneurs sessions. There was one particular session I did where I brought my mom to watch. We drove to Pittsburgh and she got to see me work my magic! On the drive home I had a phone interview with a tech company, as I was casually considering taking a full time job at a startup somewhere. After I hung up the phone my mom looked at me and said something along the lines of “do you see what’s going on here? This morning you led an Improv 4 Entrepreneurs session for over 30 CEOs and the impact was incredible! You helped them so much in just a couple of hours, and you were calm as a cucumber and glowing with confidence, poise, and joy. And here you are sweating with anxiety after a 30 minute phone call where someone is asking you about yourself.” That’s when it became really clear to me – the thing I loved doing, that I was great at, was so unique and impactful, helped people significantly, and something I got paid to do – this is what I should be doing. From that day forward I invested more time and energy into this work – improving lives, leaders, and impact using improv and improv inspired techniques.

As I continued bringing improv principles and practices offstage I found more and more applications to use improv to help leaders and teams. I worked with teams to improve sales, team connection, executive leadership skills, customer service, and more. I also found over time that improvising significantly impacted my and others’ health and wellbeing. And I started measuring these impacts to demonstrate the effectiveness and value of what we are doing. It makes a real tangible and sustainable impact!

So here I am today – over a decade into helping people and groups improve their lives, leadership, teams, wellbeing and impact, using improv inspired techniques supported by research.

I am grateful to have studied improv with some of the most talented people (and probably some future SNL cast members) at The Second City in Chicago and classes and workshops with The Second City Hollywood, Groundlings, Vancouver Improv Festival, People’s Improv Theatre in NYC, EndGames Improv, and Bay Area Theatresports, among others. They may go on to grace the screens of NBC. You’ll find me supporting people reaching their offstage dreams – like improved relationships, stronger teams, improved health and wellbeing, greater sales, improved employee retention, more productive teams, more confidence in their lives and work, better ability to solve problems under stress and make decisions with limited information, less anxiety and stress when things don’t go as planned, more creativity and creative problem solving, and more improvements (or as I like to call them, improv’ments :) Oh, and you might also find me gracing the screens of NBC, because I dream big!

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?

For brevity’s sake, I’ll focus on sharing about myself in the context of the work I do with my company Improve.

For companies, I help teams increase efficiency and productivity, improve retention, boost creativity and innovation, and maximize impact. And I do this in a way that works AND is fun!

This is achieved by improving team effectiveness, health and wellbeing, employee engagement, supporting psychological safety, and improving leadership skills like communication, self-awareness, and leadership presence.

For individuals, I share improv inspired techniques to reduce anxiety, experience more joy, build resilience and adaptability to better be able to handle all the uncertainties and life, and to feel more connected.

What sets me apart from others is the approach I take to solving these problems and making the impact we make. All of the work we do and the impact we make is done using a unique and fun methodology combining improv inspired techniques with research. It’s like eating candy packed with vitamins…it’s fun AND it works!

For leaders and individuals I believe everyone already has the ability to be what they aspire to be – more confident, a more charismatic leader, more compassionate, more creative, a better communicator, etc etc – and all I do is provide a way to unearth what is already within themselves. The improv inspired techniques we use at Improve are designed to support people exploring different parts and layers of themselves, often the ones unexplored or unexpressed, so that people have access to these different characteristics in their lives. It’s like having a toolbox in life. Oftentimes we rely on a few tools that we know well and are confident using, and we also have some tools that are dusty and haven’t been used in awhile. Sometimes we don’t even know we have those dusty tools because they’re so buried. When we improvise at Improve we find the dusty tools, dust them off and practice using them, so that we are more familiar with them and can use them more in life. With more tools available to us we become more resilient and adaptable and able to grow and flow in life.

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

The Corporate Mystic, by Gay Hendricks and Kate Ludeman. I read this book when working with Zingerman’s founder Ari Weinzweig as part of a leadership program I participated in while I was working at Zingerman’s during college. What stood out to me then and I still remember now in that book was a section about control. The book describes that there are things we can control and there are things we cannot control. Focus on what you can control. I remember the example the book shares about weight loss. We cannot control the number on a scale, but we can control what we eat, when we eat, and our activity levels. So rather than get stressed about a number on a scale, we can take action on the things we can control. In life, when we let something we cannot control stress us out, it doesn’t help us improve. What helps us improve is focusing on what we can control to take action. This reduces stress and improves goal achievement.

This perspective on control really inspired my thinking and then once I started improvising I had a way to really practice that mindset. I could practice letting go of what I couldn’t control and finding what I could and finding joy and peace in whatever that ended up being. Improv takes the beliefs and mindset and makes them actionable, which is key to bringing the beliefs into action.

Improv is also about control and practicing improv helps us improve our relationship with control, finding the ability to focus on what we can and let go of what we cannot. The work I do with Improve involves using improv as a way to physically practice this relationship with control, empowering people to control what they can and let go of what they can’t. And that is freedom.

Any advice for managing a team?

Foster an environment that is psychological safe.

When your team feels safe everything else comes naturally – communication is better, trust is stronger, and people are more excited about working on your team. When I talk about feeling safe I’m not just talking about physical safety in their workspace (and if you’re throwing staplers at people, well, stop). I’m talking about psychological safety, which according to Wikipedia and several other definitions online, “is the ability to share one’s thoughts and feelings without risk of damaging one’s reputation or standing.” In other words, team members need to feel able to share ideas, ask questions, and be themselves without fear of punishment or ridicule.

Here are three things you can do to contribute to fostering a psychologically safe team environment:

1. Practice a “yes, and” mindset. “Yes, and” is a fundamental principle of improv. It means acknowledging what has been said or established (saying “yes”) and then contributing to it (saying “and”). Consider this example of a “yes, and” mindset in a team – someone shares an idea for how to solve a problem. When someone else acknowledges that idea (says “yes”) and then contributes the idea, perhaps by sharing more as to how that idea would work, that supports the person that shared the idea in the first place and encourages the entire team to share their ideas. Even if the idea isn’t going to work in the long run, the acknowledgement of the idea being shared (saying “yes”) and responding to it is key here. Because the alternative quick and sharp “no” shuts down the conversation and discourages team members from sharing.

2. Share “Just by looking at me”. There’s an improv exercise we do called “Just by looking at me” where people share “Just by looking at me” and then share something about themselves that you wouldn’t know just by looking at them. This is a great way to get to know team members beyond surface level. Plus, it allows the team to share what they want to share and what they think is important for the team to know about themselves that they wouldn’t otherwise know. I love this exercise for fostering trust and team connection because it’s so simple and yet so powerful in getting to know one another, building empathy and compassion for each other, and learning things about each other that can make working together so much better.

3. At the end of meetings ask “is there anything anyone wanted to say that they didn’t get to say?” Because, why not? This encourages that psychological safety, reinforcing that it’s okay to share and you’re there to support them. Plus, it provides an opportunity for voices that weren’t able to get a word in because, well, there can be those other people that just dominate a meeting. Just remember the “yes, and” mindset in this conversation :)

And remember, psychological safety and maintaining high morale isn’t something you can just do once and never again. It takes consistency and consistently investing in your team. That’s why at Improve we work with teams over time to support your team’s growth, efficiency, and connection. We do the work figuring out what to do, so that you don’t have to. We make it easy to improve.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.marylemmer.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/maryimproves
• Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/melemmer
• Youtube: www.youtube.com/c/marylemmer
• Other: www.chooseimprove.com www.instagram.com/chooseimprove