Recommendations for creating a creative atmosphere. How to create a creative studio atmosphere at home. Artifex: What is the meaning of the “Atmosphere of Creativity”

The Gap of Meaning as a Creative Force Trauma writing has been the subject of careful study by psychologists and philologists since the 1970s. Its constant signs are considered to be “repression” of the trauma itself, which is not mentioned in the text (or difficulty in talking about it), and

When working with the method of effective analysis, it is especially important that students understand the fruitfulness of this method and create the necessary creative atmosphere for rehearsals. Sketch rehearsals may initially cause either embarrassment or exaggerated swagger in some comrades, and an ironic attitude rather than creative comradely interest in the observing comrades. A poorly timed remark from the side, a chuckle, or whispering can knock the rehearsers out of the desired creative state for a long time and cause irreparable harm. The performer of an etude may lose faith in what he is doing, and having lost faith, he will inevitably follow the line of the image, along the line of the tune.

The deep interest of each of the participants in the exercise or sketch being performed - this is the creative atmosphere without which the path to art is impossible.

The entire complex creative process of creating an image by an actor is not only a rehearsal with a director and comrades. This process does not fit only within the framework of rehearsals. The actor preparing the role must be completely captivated by it throughout the entire work on the play.

Stanislavsky often used an expression that was extremely close in analogy to “being pregnant with a role.” An actor, like a mother carrying a child, carries an image within herself. Throughout the entire process of working on the role, he does not part with thoughts about it. He is at home, on the subway, on the street, and in any free time, looking for answers to the many questions posed to him by the playwright.

Each of us knows how often a favorite tune of a song haunts us relentlessly, sometimes it is impossible to get rid of it, and we sing it endlessly. It should be the same with a role. She must be relentlessly with the actor - he must be obsessed with her. And what enormous creative happiness an actor experiences when the still unclear features of a beloved hero, whom he must create, emerge in his consciousness, when he is suddenly illuminated by a vision of new character traits, when the entire structure of thoughts and actions of the image he creates is revealed to him.

And when the actor came to the rehearsal and brought the result of this great internal work, the director and comrades need to treat the birth of this new person with special care and sensitivity. And this is only possible when there is a truly creative atmosphere at the rehearsal.

How many young actors can boast of such obsession with a role, such titanic work as the famous masters of our stage did when they created the roles that brought them recognition and fame?

And with what awe and admiration I think about those masters who, having already created unforgettable images in performances, continue to live in thoughts about them. I cannot resist citing one of the examples that is especially dear to me.

Many years ago I happened to be in Yalta, where O. L. Knipper-Chekhova was vacationing. I visited her. She lay in bed, haggard, pale, still recovering from a serious illness. I didn’t have time to enter when she told me: “You know, I was forbidden to read, so I lie there and keep thinking about Masha.”

I didn’t even immediately understand which Masha she was talking about. It turned out that she was talking about one of her brilliant roles, about Masha from “Three Sisters” by A.P. Chekhov. She told me about her as an infinitely close person, revealing her inner world with amazing depth and subtlety. She mentally lived through entire scenes, occasionally uttering individual lines. I left shocked by this creative memory of a great artist, shocked that Olga Leonardovna retained such a living, direct connection with the role she created.

Do I need to add anything to what has been said? If a created role leaves such a deep imprint in memory, then how one must love and cherish the role that is still being nurtured!

I cannot separate the love for the role, the creative obsession during the birth of the image from the creative atmosphere that surrounded the actor both in the process of creating and in the process of embodying the role. But if so far I have talked about the rehearsal atmosphere, then it is no less important to talk about the backstage atmosphere during the performance.

How familiar I am with the extraordinary excitement and excitement that accompanies every performance, and how, unfortunately, I am familiar with how many negative, directly contraindicated phenomena sometimes accompany a performance. We must strive to create a creative atmosphere, we must brush aside what hinders us in the creative process of creating a performance and bringing it to life.

Creative atmosphere is one of the powerful factors in our art, and we must remember that it is extremely difficult to create a working atmosphere. This cannot be done by one leader - only a team can create it. Unfortunately, anyone can destroy it. It is enough for one skeptical person to laugh at his seriously working comrades, and this microbe of disbelief begins to corrode a healthy organism.

Many examples can be cited from the practice of the work of various theaters and, first of all, the theater, where the spirit of high demands on the entire creative atmosphere surrounding the actor reigned, the theater, where the system of psychotechnics of the actor’s creativity was first formulated, the theater created by our teachers K. S. Stanislavsky and Vl . I. Nemirovich-Danchenko.

Everyone knows how, through enormous energy and demands on themselves, on the actors, on all the technical departments, Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko created that amazing atmosphere at the Art Theater, which has become the subject of study by theaters all over the world.

I would like to talk about the backstage atmosphere during the play “The Cherry Orchard”, in which I played Charlotte for many years.

Despite the fact that the play begins with a big scene between Lopakhin, Dunyasha, and then Epikhodov, everyone involved in the “arrival” - that is, Ranevskaya, Gaev, Anya, Pishchik, Varya, Charlotte (and during my first performances these were O. L. Knipper-Chekhova, V. I. Kachalov, L. M. Koreneva) - sat on a bench before the curtain opened, waiting for their exit. After the words of Lopakhin - Leonidov: “It seems they are coming...” - the same prop man always walked from the opposite side of the stage, holding in his hands leather collars trimmed with bells, and rhythmically shook them, intensifying the sound of the bells, approaching us. As soon as the bells rang, everyone involved in the “arrival” went deep into the scene so that they could come out talking, bringing with them the excitement of the arrival.

Using the example of this scene, which the viewer perceived aurally, I learned for the rest of my life with what subtle means Stanislavsky ensured that the audience believed in the truth of what was happening. For the “old people” who played “The Cherry Orchard” for many, many years, this behind-the-scenes scene apparently became part of their flesh and blood. And each time she played with them in exactly the same way as if she were walking with the curtain open. Knppper-Chekhova, already behind the scenes, was in that amazingly elated state in which almost simultaneous laughter, tears, and the words seemed completely natural: “Children’s room, our children’s room...”

With extraordinary ease, achieved, of course, with enormous difficulty, all participants in the scene, after the very first sounds of the bells, joined in this amazing feeling of people who had arrived at their homeland, who had not slept at night, people who were chilly from the morning dampness of the spring air, excited by the joy of returning, and acute bitterness of loss, and a feeling of an absurdly shaped life.

I was also struck by the atmosphere that reigned on the “bench” even before the start of the “behind-the-scenes visit.” Knipper, Kachalov, Tarkhanov, Koreneva came, sat down, greeted each other, sometimes even exchanged phrases that had nothing to do with the performance, but at the same time they were no longer Knipper, not Kachalov, not Tarkhanov and Koreneva, but Ranevskaya, Gaev, Firs, Varya.

This ability to exist in the grain of an image was the enormous strength of the Art Theater. Unfortunately, our youth do not believe that the grain of the image - the subtlest restructuring of the entire nervous system - is not given so easily and simply and that it is impossible, chatting behind the scenes about God knows what, to immediately master the entire complex of the person being portrayed.

I remember another moment of waiting for the exit. The second act begins with the scene of Dunyasha, Yashka Epphodov and Charlotte, then Charlotte leaves, but she has one more passage, so, having left the stage, I sat down on the “bench” again. A few minutes after Charlotte, Moskvin-Epikhodov left the stage. “I know what to do with my revolver,” he said in a tragic warning manner, and we heard how every time the audience greeted this phrase with homeric laughter. Then Moskvin walked along the bridge backstage, past us and further along the stage, to his restroom, with the same dejected, offended face. This slightly exaggerated seriousness was one of the aspects of Moskvin’s enormous comic talent. The prop man approached him, Moskvin gave him the guitar, but his face did not change. And every time I thought: when will he “erase” this amazing expression from his face? At what point do Epikhodov’s tragically stupid eyes, trying to comprehend an impossible task, become familiar Moscow eyes? And what makes Moskvin, after his scene, already behind the scenes, still be Epikhodov? Later I realized that this is art, when an artist, infected with the thoughts and feelings of the hero, is not so easy to shake off all this.

But such art does not come immediately. It requires enormous effort.

“The work of the theater! - wrote Vl. I. Nemirovich-Danchenko.- This is what we, people of the theater, love more than anything in the world. The work is persistent, persistent, multifaceted, filling all the backstage from top to bottom, from the grate above the stage to the hatch under the stage: the actor’s work on the role; what does it mean? This means - over yourself, over your data, nerves, memory, over your habits...”

It seems to me that these words have great meaning.

Dedicated to builders of special climatic zones...

The sight of a preoccupied manager coming to work evokes nothing but nausea among employees.

It sucks if in the morning you have nothing to talk about with your employees except about work or you are trying to figure out topics for such a conversation.

Is it possible to walk like a wheel in front of employees? Tell jokes?

You can't motivate people without communicating with them CONSTANTLY.

“Why should I love my employees? That's why I have a family."

For seven years I managed a St. Petersburg company "House-Laverne". This is one of the leaders in the retail trade of goods for renovation and interior decoration. The company's stores operate in the premium price segment, presenting their customers with wallpaper and decorative fabrics, sanitary ware and bathroom furniture, ceramic tiles and mosaics, floor coverings and lamps.

In seven years I managed to do a lot, but I consider my most important achievement to be that I managed to create something in the company that is most invisible, something that managers, as a rule, do not pay attention to at all, but without which the effect of the most extreme managerial “ toys” is significantly lower than planned. I'm talking about ATMOSPHERE. About that very atmosphere, the presence of which makes a person go to work with a smile and work without losing a good mood.

The presence of such an atmosphere several years after the start of my vigorous activity was noted by all the people who came to our office. Our colleagues even called it (the office) a sanatorium, although we worked no less than them. So what is a positive atmosphere, why create it and what to do for it - I tried to write about this here.

So you go to work. What's your mood? If you enjoy your job, your mood is usually high. And the closer you get to your place of work, the better your mood. Moreover, this does not depend on how you left the house. Perhaps something there (at home) upset you or caused your irritation, but the closer you are to your place of work, the better your mood. This is the case, of course, if you like your job (if you don’t like it, quit, because there is nothing more regrettable and dangerous for the business than a manager, especially a top manager, who does not like his job).

So, you like your job, and you're happy to go to... Well, I don't know what you're going to, let's call it the weird word "office." You open the door, walk in and... see your employees who arrived at work before you. Your mood improves even more because you see faces you like: the faces of people who work shoulder to shoulder with you every day (even if they are not your direct subordinates), the faces of people, most (if not all) of whom you personally were hired. Dear faces.

...how don’t you know?

Do you know that this girl was going to the theater yesterday, and the guy went to meet his mother?

You ask: how could you know this, because these are not your direct subordinates...You left work so late yesterday...You had such a difficult day yesterday that you simply had neither the opportunity nor the time to get information about the plans of your employees, who (you emphasize again) and are not your direct subordinates.

Sucks...

It really sucks if in the morning you have nothing to talk about with your employees except about work or you are trying to figure out topics for such a conversation. It really sucks if you don't know the interests of your fellow workers. Oh, you know what hobby your financial director has! You know that the logistics director is great at bowling, and the commercial director collects stamps! Well, my friend, if you didn’t know it...

I insist that a top manager MUST know the interests of his employees. Preferably everyone, and not just those closest to you. How are you going to create an ATMOSPHERE in the office without such knowledge? I address only those who intend to create it. Is it possible to walk like a wheel in front of employees? Tell jokes? Even if you really walk and poison, this is not enough to create an ATMOSPHERE.

More than 40 people worked at the Dom-Laverna central office. I responsibly declare that I knew about everyone’s attachments. Naturally, about those attachments that people thought it necessary to tell me about. But no one demands total delving into the heads of employees. If a person shares information with you about his hobby, that’s already good. But not enough for complete happiness. It is necessary to remember this information and carefully use it to create a feeling of comfort at work for each individual person. After all, if you know that the management is not indifferent to you, if you know that the management is not indifferent to your interests, you will want to work more in this particular company with this particular manager.

It’s even better if you share the interests of your employees (groups of employees) or, moreover, share your interests with them, not only by talking about them, but also by inviting them to participate.

For example, I am very interested in ceramics. Not collecting, but making. With my own hands. I love coming to Oranienbaum to the House of Anjou to my good friends Karlykhanov and sculpting something out of clay together with the same “ceramic artists” like myself. It seemed to me that such a pastime might be interesting for my employees, and I invited them to go together one weekend. The result exceeded all expectations. People really liked both the process and the result. And it didn’t hurt to look at each other in an informal creative atmosphere. In such unusual circumstances, you always notice something new in your comrades, something very good, which you did not see and, perhaps, could not see in a routine work environment. And they notice something new in you...

I am proud that on the desks of some employees of the House of Laverne there are still products made with their own hands in the wonderful House of Anjou.

Another example. Despite my not at all volleyball height, I really love playing volleyball. And I managed to infect almost half of the office with this game. Moreover, everything was professional, with a coach, in an adult way. After a couple of years of general lessons, of course, the majority stopped going: the gap in the playing class began to form too large. But the fact remains: both during the total passion for volleyball and after it, all the people participating in this process felt unity not only because they are employees of the same company.

When you understand what a thrill it is to create an ATMOSPHERE in your home office, when you yourself begin to get a thrill simply from the very fact of being in such an atmosphere, you will definitely want to expand your “zone of influence.” After all, for many of you, your business does not end only with the central office. There are also remote units. In my case, these are stores dear to my heart. Stores that still employ wonderful people, the most wonderful of whom are the directors. These are 100% “my people”. Each of these charming women (and Dom-Laverne stores are now run exclusively by women) brilliantly knows how to create a wonderful climate in their store. And I am proud that I myself played a significant role in creating this climate, especially in the early days (2002-2004). I went to stores as if I were on the front line. After all, this is where the mystery of turning our goods into customers’ money takes place. It is there that our product becomes the property of the buyer, and the buyer’s money goes to the company’s cash desk. This is the quintessence of the work of the entire company. Of course, I do not belittle both the role of preliminary preparation (search for a product, its selection, negotiations with the manufacturer, etc., etc.), and subsequent activities in delivering the product to the buyer and installing it (if necessary). I in no way belittle the role of the so-called “service departments” that are not involved in either the product distribution process or the sales process (for example, accounting or financial and analytical departments). But it is in the stores that the main event takes place: the exchange of goods for money.

Therefore, a large amount of time myself and my more advanced colleagues in the field of personnel management, Nina Kiryukhantseva And Oksana Servatovich, paid attention to creating ATMOSPHERE in stores. Our efforts were rewarded handsomely.

We really, together with the directors, managed to create TEAMS. Teams of like-minded people aimed at achieving a COMMON result, which is extremely difficult in a trading system where, in fact, each seller works for himself.

I know a large number of stores in various retail industries where salespeople treat each other solely as competitors. I know of networks where top management specifically, purposefully pursues a policy of “divide and conquer” in relation to the sales staff. Where competition between sellers is cultivated and enforced, if you like. In D-L stores there was and is an element of competition between sales managers. Anything else is impossible in such a sales system, when the manager “manages” the client’s order from the moment he gets acquainted with him until the moment the goods are actually transferred. They are together: the buyer and the sales manager go through long and sometimes painful stages:

1. the actual selection of a product or group of products, often selecting them from catalogues, which imposes increased responsibility on the seller, since in this case the buyer does not see the actual product, but only its image;

2. ordering the selected product at the manufacturer’s factory or supplier’s warehouse (of course, specialists from the commercial department who are in contact with manufacturers and suppliers take an active part in this process, but the sales manager and only he is responsible for the result to the buyer);

3. delivery of goods to the company’s warehouse, checking its quality and completeness;

4. delivery of goods to the store for transfer to the buyer or directly to the latter’s address.

All this time, it is the sales manager who is responsible for ensuring that the buyer is satisfied with the quality of the selected product, the delivery time, and the communication process itself. Since the sales manager for the buyer is the extraordinary and authorized representative of the entire Dom-Laverna company. He is the face of the company. By him, by his professionalism, accuracy, clarity, responsibility, goodwill, the buyer will judge the company as a whole. That is why I think it is absolutely fair that the sellers at Dom-Laverna are called MANAGERS. But it is absolutely clear that such an “individual” sales system itself gives rise to a number of conflicts. Someone “got” a rich buyer, one complex order of which allows the manager to fulfill the monthly plan. For some, such a buyer simply cannot meet, and he is forced to process hundreds of orders in order to fulfill this notorious plan. Someone is “lucky”, and an expensive product ordered by the buyer is in the supplier’s warehouse in St. Petersburg or can even be sold at the exhibition. And someone will wait for the product of “their” customer for three months, sometimes receiving conflicting information from different authorities regarding the status quo of this product, while remaining obliged to keep the buyer informed of where and in what condition his item is. There are still plenty of reasons for conflicts and envy, which ultimately can lead (and in most retail structures I know leads) to, to put it mildly, an unfriendly relationship between sellers.

This ill will was avoided. On the contrary, we managed to create teams of professionals aimed both at fulfilling their own plans and (and this is above all!) and at fulfilling the plan of the entire store. What did it cost?

Dear...

I think Nina Kiryukhantseva and Oksana Servatovich will someday write their books about how we did it. I don’t know of any company that would mess around like this (sorry for this word, but it very accurately reflects the process) with staff. In which such a number of trainings would be conducted both for ordinary sales managers and for middle management (trade floor administrators, merchandise experts). And, in my opinion, Nina and Oksana never parted with the store directors at all.

Perhaps many of you reading this article will say that it’s all about the motivation system for store employees. Like, it all depends on the weighting coefficients: if you set them up, the seller will focus on the implementation of the individual plan; if you set it up differently, they will bend over backwards to ensure that the entire store fulfills the plan (helping those lagging behind, for example). In fact, the motivation system is truly extremely important. But I warn you against overestimating its significance. Essentially, all of these retail weightings boil down to one simple truth: the better EACH salesperson performs, the better results the store achieves. Everything is simple and there is nothing special to fence around the garden. The subject of my pride is the creation of TEAMS in each store. Teams led by directors and consisting of all team members. Each trading floor had both star managers and trainees. But they were all part of the TEAM. The stars became mentors to the trainees and were sincerely happy (it's true!) when the trainees turned into even brighter stars than their teachers. Moreover, we managed to build a system in which the stars demanded (!) that an intern be “attached” to them. It was possible to build a coherent system for transferring the experience of successful sales. We took full advantage of the fact that the stores were not isolated retail outlets. We had a SYSTEM of stores, so the transfer of best practices, seminars, and training were carried out at the system level. That is, the positive experience gained, say, in a store on Veterans Avenue, almost immediately became the property of employees of all other stores.

In addition to the variable part of the salary, which depended on the implementation of the plan, all managers had salaries. Salaries, in turn, depended on the category. The highest salaries were for sales managers of the 1st category, the lowest for managers of the 3rd category (not counting trainees, of course). The manager received the 3rd category if he successfully completed the probationary period and passed the appropriate tests on knowledge of products, the ability to communicate with visitors, and demonstrated sales skills. To obtain the 2nd category, it was necessary to carry out an individual plan for at least 6 months plus perform several more feats. The first category was awarded to those who were not just real sales stars, but also trained trainees into successful managers.

Categories were assigned by the certification commission during an interview with the applicant. I know that a similar rating system exists in many networks. I know that general directors of networks are often mandatory members of such commissions. I also know that not all top officials of companies and not always take part in the work of such commissions.

In seven years of working at Dom-Laverna, I have not missed a single one.

Firstly, the work (and not just the presence) of the general director on the certification commission emphasizes the importance of the event. Importance for everyone: both for applicants and for other members of the commission. Our mandatory members of the commission, along with the general one, were: the director of the “certified” store, the director of another store, a representative of the personnel service and the head of the product line that the certified one represented (sales managers were divided by product lines, because it is impossible to know the entire assortment by heart “House-Laverna” and be able to equally successfully sell wallpaper, plumbing fixtures, lamps, floors, and tiles).

Secondly, I was interested in assessing whether the level of this or that sales manager had really increased or whether it only seemed to him (I could assess this because I knew almost all of my salespeople personally).

Thirdly, I was interested to see how a person behaves during certification, that is, in a stressful situation, because he must work in a similar mode every day (imagine choosing a product with a buyer for several hours, and sometimes several days - this crazy stress!).

Fourthly, everything was interesting to me! I loved my job and my employees. And I didn’t think that by certifying “ordinary sellers” I was wasting my precious time, which I could spend more profitably, dealing with issues of intergalactic importance. I believed and still believe that the most important issues for a top manager are issues related to motivating people. And you can’t motivate people without constantly communicating with them.

So, there were often certifications in which sales superstars did not receive the first category only because they did not care about the team. Less frequently, however, events occurred when a sales manager of the first category lost his star category and returned to the second because he began to focus only on himself, only on his own sales, without giving a damn about helping the team or educating newcomers. And this is not socialism, not the imposition of equality. This is support for team spirit, the cultivation of which we paid great attention to. That is why it was possible to create an atmosphere in the stores in which people worked smiling.

I do not overestimate my personal participation in creating such an atmosphere and in working with store staff in general, but once Ekaterina Stankevich, who at that time worked as the director of two Dom-Laverna stores on Nevsky Prospekt, jokingly called her team “Fan- Tsivina club. And this assessment is worth a lot.

I know that many managers are somewhat wary of friendships between employees. I have never been against such friendship. If someone thinks that friendship creates the preconditions for possible abuses (collusions, etc.), then I affirm that it is exactly the opposite. I’m not saying this out of nowhere. I began my career at Uniland, a well-known talent forge, as vice president of loss prevention. Therefore, I know first-hand what fraud is and what paths lead to it. So friendship (friendship) is the longest path to fraud. Especially the friendship of employees working in the same TEAM. I suppose it's not hard to guess why. And if it’s difficult, ask me, I’ll explain in a personal meeting.

Conclusion: we create a warm, bright, friendly atmosphere not only because we ourselves find it more comfortable to work in such a unique microclimate. And let's create it:

As a guarantee of business security (the atmosphere of cooperation creates obstacles to fraud);

As a guarantee of high efficiency of employee actions;

As a guarantee of creativity. Such an atmosphere encourages courage in decision making. Without courage, creativity is unthinkable. And without everyone’s creative approach, it is extremely difficult to achieve a high overall result.

The main internal “driver” of a leader who creates a friendly microclimate in his team, however, is always not common sense and sober calculation, but love for people. In conversations about work with my wife, I very often called my younger workmates “my children.” Not in the sense that he equated their mental abilities with those of children, but in the sense that he treated them as his children. And according to my wife, it’s even better than with my own child.

I know one manager who says: “Why should I love my employees? That's why I have a family." I know how his employees treat this man. I wouldn't like to be treated like that. Love people. Don’t close yourself off in your top management group. Be interested in the lives of those around you and then

1. You will discover a lot of interesting, sometimes unexpected things,
2. You yourself will become more interesting to others.

So, ATMOSPHERE is created by a leader if and only if he:

• He himself is in a good mood, and willingly shares it with others;
• Knows about the interests of a large number (ideally all) of ordinary employees;
• He himself “lives an interesting life”, has one or more hobbies;
• Shares his interests with employees (not only with his closest subordinates, but with the maximum number of ordinary employees);
• Involves them in his hobbies, and allows himself to be involved in their hobbies;
• He actively takes part in organizing and holding corporate events, from a banal trip out of town to New Year's parties;
• Something else? Add yours.

At the conclusion of this article, I must warn atmosphere builders: attention! Do not overdo it! A sense of proportion must be observed in everything. You create the climate in the team, and you must precisely regulate it. Everything I said above does not negate subordination, discipline, exactingness and firmness. Don't forget that shareholders pay you money not for creating a friendly atmosphere at work, but for achieving specific results. The atmosphere is not a goal, but another means to achieve such results.

Good relationships with employees should not be allowed to turn into familiarity and familiarity. Under no circumstances should you curry favor with your subordinates, seeking their favor. This is even more dangerous than constantly yelling at them.