I've spent 35 years leading people who didn't have to be there.
Volunteers. Cast members. Committee members. People with no contract, no pay, and nothing at all stopping them from walking out the door on a cold Tuesday night in Tamworth. They came anyway. They learned their lines, they turned up early, they stayed late, and they gave me everything they had.
I also lead a team at Woolworths, one of the largest employers in the country. I've developed teams, mentored leaders and run workplace learning for years.
So I've had both experiences. Leading people who are paid to be there, and leading people who aren't. And the second group taught me almost everything I know about the first.
Because when nobody has to follow you, you find out very quickly what actually works. It isn't authority. It isn't a performance review. It's whether people feel like they belong in the room, and whether they trust that having a go won't cost them anything.
For four years I taught around forty Woolworths team members to dance in the Sydney Mardi Gras parade.
Not dancers. Not performers. People who work in stores. They put their hands up for it, and then turned up to the first rehearsal and realised what they'd actually signed up for. Oxford Street. Hundreds of thousands of people on the street. A television audience on top of that.
They did it. Four years running.
None of it was really about dance. It was about building a room where it was safe to be bad at something in front of your colleagues, and where nobody was ever left standing on their own.
That's why I do this. Not because I love theatre, although I do. Because I've watched what happens to a person when a room makes it safe enough for them to try.
Now I take that into workplaces. Conference rooms, staff rooms, team days. Same principle, different room.