Workplace Drama Structure Similar to Hollywood Drama Screenplay

  • 1 min read

WorkplaceDramaVisualA good friend of mine and former college roommate studied film and screen writing. He’s had a number of his screen plays picked up on option by hollywood producers over the years.

So, when I began investigating drama in the workplace I reached out to him to learn about how dramatic movies are structured. He shared with me the basic three act structure writers follow in developing a screen play for a dramatic movie.

It’s a simple structure:

  • Act 1 – Setup: Characters are introduced and the plot develops
  • Act 2 – Confrontation: Rising action occurs as the stakes get higher and stress builds
  • Act 3 – Resolution: Crisis peaks, action comes down and comes to a resolution

Workplace drama is similar.

As I see it, it also has three acts. Unfortunately in most organizational scenarios Act 3 doesn’t lead to resolution.

  • Act 1 – The Setup: Drama is introduced, usually by an individual or two, remains somewhat limited at the beginning
  • Act 2 – Drama & Conflicts Grow: Drama accelerates and becomes more common place. Ineffective conflict grows and becomes increasingly distractive to the work environment. The time leaders need to invest in playing referee expands as they try to deal with the symptoms, putting out fires. It’s often like playing Whac-A-Mole.
  • Act 3 – Toxic Workplace Develops: Unlike theatre and movies, workplace drama has no time limit and often is perpetually tolerated as leaders try to put out the fires dealing with symptoms. Left unaddressed the drama leads to a toxic work environment.

Workplace drama requires a fourth act in order to move towards resolution. Few organizations get to this level.

Pat Lencioni, author of “The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team” talks about his work in creating high-performing teams in the workplace with a term I’d like to borrow for this workplace drama process as well. Lencioni calls it “heavy lifting.”

“Heavy lifting” means participants in the process need to approach the situation with humility and vulnerability to work through the real issues and causes of the drama in the workplace. Some organizational leaders will need to look inside themselves to see how they may be contributing to it. It’s a scary place for leaders to step into.

Yet, the alternative is costing organizations billions. Gallup estimates workplace issues and lack of employee engagement costs between $450-$500 billion a year in lost productivity.

Even the small percentage of that figure that would be allocated to traditional small business is real money that would make a difference in most bottom lines, don’t you think?

Picture of Skip Weisman

Skip Weisman

Skip Weisman, The Leadership & Workplace Communication Expert, has worked with business leaders and their teams to transform both individual and organizational performance in industries from banks to plumbers since 2001. Skip’s experience helping his clients has shown that the biggest problems in workplaces today can be directly traced to interpersonal communication between people in the work environment. Having spent 20 years in professional baseball management, his first career in which he served as CEO for five different franchises, has given Skip tremendous insights and skills for build high-performing teams.  To help small business leaders create a championship culture with employees performance at the highest levels, Skip recently published this white paper report The Missing Ingredient Necessary to Improve Employee Performance. Download a free copy of this report at The Missing Ingredient Necessary to Improve Employee Performance. During a 20-year career in professional baseball management, Skip served as CEO for five different franchises. That experience gave Skip tremendous insight and skill for building high-performing teams in the workplace and championship cultures.

TRENDING AROUND THE WEB

Many adult children remember watching a father work sixty-hour weeks for decades so the family could have what he never did, then watched him die in his sixties without ever prioritizing his own happiness, and now see that same pattern quietly repeating in their own lives, under a different name.

Many adult children remember watching a father work sixty-hour weeks for decades so the family could have what he never did, then watched him die in his sixties without ever prioritizing his own happiness, and now see that same pattern quietly repeating in their own lives, under a different name.

Global English Editing
Eye tracking research on how people actually read web pages found that most visitors scan in a rough F shaped pattern down the left side of the screen, which is why professional editors front load the real information instead of slowly building up to it

Eye tracking research on how people actually read web pages found that most visitors scan in a rough F shaped pattern down the left side of the screen, which is why professional editors front load the real information instead of slowly building up to it

The Blog Herald
Harvard researchers had 166 undergraduates rate their own pets on qualities like thoughtful, considerate and sympathetic, and the students who felt most chronically disconnected from other people scored their pets meaningfully higher on exactly those three traits, and no others.

Harvard researchers had 166 undergraduates rate their own pets on qualities like thoughtful, considerate and sympathetic, and the students who felt most chronically disconnected from other people scored their pets meaningfully higher on exactly those three traits, and no others.

Global English Editing
A large-scale field study using real-world healthcare data found no measurable evidence that medical professionals make worse decisions as their workday wears on, directly contradicting one of the most frequently repeated claims in modern popular psychology writing

A large-scale field study using real-world healthcare data found no measurable evidence that medical professionals make worse decisions as their workday wears on, directly contradicting one of the most frequently repeated claims in modern popular psychology writing

The Blog Herald
University of Arizona researchers wired 79 people with a recorder sampling conversations every 12.5 minutes for four days and found the happiest had twice as many substantive conversations and a third as much small talk as the unhappiest, suggesting the discomfort was never a social deficit.

University of Arizona researchers wired 79 people with a recorder sampling conversations every 12.5 minutes for four days and found the happiest had twice as many substantive conversations and a third as much small talk as the unhappiest, suggesting the discomfort was never a social deficit.

Global English Editing
A landmark study found that Catholic nuns who wrote sparse, simple autobiographies in their early twenties, when they entered the convent in the 1930s, were far more likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease roughly six decades later, with about 80 percent of the low-complexity writers eventually developing the disease compared to only 10 percent of those whose youthful essays were dense with ideas

A landmark study found that Catholic nuns who wrote sparse, simple autobiographies in their early twenties, when they entered the convent in the 1930s, were far more likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease roughly six decades later, with about 80 percent of the low-complexity writers eventually developing the disease compared to only 10 percent of those whose youthful essays were dense with ideas

Global English Editing
Load more
CATEGORIES
Explore