Playful leadership and performance issues

 Just a quick, half formed idea…

How do we deal with performance issues with staff if we’re trying to be a playful leader or manager? Can we be playful?

This could be seen as boundary setting, defining the edges of the magic circle, the constraints, the rules that everyone agrees to, that then allows play to happen elsewhere.

It doesn’t have to be unplayful to tell people they aren’t performing how we’d like, it can be this that ALLOWS play to continue rather than being stopped by the person who doesn’t do what the team wants or expects?  As long as they operate within a playful environment to ‘improve’, then it fits the overal playful approach perhaps?

It might even be that pointing out the rules, the expectations of other players, help people to realise that they’d be better off playing elsewhere, and that should be seen as fine too? We shouldn’t have to desire playing with the same group of people all the time, and as long as people are supported, it’s fine for some to want to go and work elsewhere with a new bunch of players, as long as it’s a positive choice, not a negative one?

EDITED from here on...

I'm aware this is very vague, so I've added a quick video below that might confuse things even more, but probably suggests where I'm going with any playful leadership model. 

1) An environment / community / workplace where we're doing very obviously playful things and you can see play happening.

2) A set of behaviours that we should be avoiding as they are antithetical to play

3) What I was trying to say above, which is a set of behaviours and tools that don't look like play, but are required in our toolkit to support the play in happening.

Which I (probably quite confusingly) show in the video below using paper, a sharpies, some playpeople, all together showing the boat of play (1) being hammered by bad weather (2) and supported by a body of water / behaviours (3).