Playful Leadership: Helping Others Be Their Best

Portia Tung joins Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership to explore play as a serious gift in leadership and transformation. Portia is an Executive and Personal Coach, an Executive Agile Coach, a play researcher, and a keynote speaker. We talk about how play creates safety, connection, creativity, and better work.Portia shares a simple and powerful “ping pong” one-to-one exercise that helps people truly meet each other, even when they think they already know. We also discuss why work and play are not opposites, how to introduce play in serious environments without triggering resistance, and what Portia calls the 5 Rs of playful leaders: resourceful, respectful, responsible, resilient, and real.We also go into leadership as personal leadership, one person at a time. Portia shares her working assumptions about leadership, her discomfort with leadership-as-ego, and her checklist for choosing the work that gives her energy and helps make the world better.In this episode we cover:the “ping pong” one-to-one exercise and how it builds trustplay as safe, fair, and “being a good sport”why work and play complement each otherintroducing play without calling it “a game” (simulation, XP Game, etc.)the Deming Red Bead Experiment and the power of risky playthe 5 Rs of playful leadersbringing your whole self to workleadership beyond title and egoPortia’s checklist for choosing engagementsFind the transcript and more in the companion blog post.