It’s Tuesday morning in Manhattan, and a creative agency team is standing in a circle doing something that looks absolutely ridiculous. They are making animal sounds, building invisible objects together, and laughing harder than they have in months. By Thursday, that same team will navigate a brutal client pivot with a flexibility that surprises even them. This is the improv advantage, and it is quietly revolutionizing how New York works.
Erin Diehl gets it. As the founder of improve it!, a woman-owned professional development company, she has spent over a decade helping more than 56,000 professionals discover something counterintuitive: play is the fastest path to becoming the kind of professional New York City demands you be. Her corporate improv training has become the go-to for organizations tired of professional development workshops that feel like slow deaths by PowerPoint.
New York State of Mind: Why Improv Is a Survival Skill, Not a Stage Act
Living in a city as fast-paced as New York requires you to think on your feet and connect with humans under pressure. New Yorkers have been doing improv their whole lives without calling it that. Diehl just figured out how to teach the rest of the world what we already know instinctively: adaptability is not a nice-to-have, it is everything. It has and always will be survival of the fittest.
Her journey started in Chicago, training at the legendary Second City, iO Theater, and The Annoyance Theatre after a career in recruiting left her feeling disconnected from herself. What she discovered on those stages changed her completely. Improv was less about being funny and more about being present. It allowed Diehl to lose the mask she wore at work and remember who she was underneath all of the corporate armor. With this in mind, she launched improve it! in June 2014, won the Chicago RedEye Big Idea Award within months, and has been nominated for the Chicago Innovation Award every year since 2015. Now a Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Business Program graduate, she leads a team of seventeen improvisers from theaters across Chicago, Charlotte, Los Angeles, and right here in New York City.
Your Brain on Play: The Science Behind the Best Corporate Team Building Improv Workshops
Play is neurological. When adults engage in purposeful play, we reconnect with our inner child, that version of ourselves that existed before we learned to second-guess our instincts and filter our creativity. Research published in Cerebrum shows that play develops the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for decision-making, self-control, and social connection. In other words, goofing around together literally rewires your team to work better together.
This is why improve it!’s approach works where traditional effective communication training falls flat. Lectures speak to the head, but transformation requires engaging the heart, too. People learn best when both are activated, and nothing activates both quite like play. Diehl uses improv to teach the power skills that organizations desperately need but cannot seem to develop through conventional methods. The power skills that set organizations apart are: team trust that actually holds under pressure, presence that transforms how employees show up in meetings, and creative responsiveness that turns unexpected challenges into opportunities.
From Dumbo Startups to Midtown Boardrooms: How to Improve Workplace Culture With Improv
What does a confidence building workshop through improv actually look like in practice? It starts with listening. Before any session, Diehl’s team digs into what is actually happening inside an organization. They send pre-questionnaires, have real conversations, and design customized experiences that address specific challenges rather than generic competencies. A Brooklyn tech startup scaling too fast for its culture needs something different than a Tribeca agency navigating creative tensions or a Midtown hospitality group rebuilding after pandemic chaos.
The workshops themselves create something rare in professional settings: genuine psychological safety. Participants practice saying “yes, and” instead of immediately finding reasons why something will not work. They learn to listen to understand rather than listening to formulate their response. Most importantly, they experience what it feels like to fail without consequences, which fundamentally changes how they take risks back at their desks. The magic continues through three-week e-learning courses reinforcing these principles with just five minutes of daily practice. Because lasting change does not happen in a single afternoon, no matter how transformative.
LinkedIn, Warby Parker, and Obama Foundation: NYC’s Elite Trust Erin Diehl
The client list tells you everything you need to know. United Airlines, PepsiCo, Deloitte, Motorola, Walgreens, LinkedIn, Uber Freight, Adobe, Warby Parker, Caterpillar, Amazon, and The Obama Foundation have all invested in improve it!’s improv workshops for business. Many of these organizations have deep New York roots, from Warby Parker’s headquarters to LinkedIn’s sprawling Manhattan presence.
Why do the world’s most sophisticated organizations keep betting on play? Because they understand what Harvard’s Pedagogy of Play research confirms: playful learning environments foster development that traditional training cannot touch. In a city where talent wars are brutal and culture is everything, helping people find their highest selves at work is strategic. Play and improv are the catalysts to that transformation, stripping away the barriers that keep brilliant people from accessing who they really are.
More Than Workshops: Erin Diehl’s Mission to Make Work Human Again
Diehl’s influence stretches far beyond corporate training. She hosts The Workday Playdate Podcast, a Top 1% global show exploring how play and connection fuel professional growth. Her book I See You explores radical empathy and the transformative power of making others feel genuinely valued. Her mantra, “get comfortable with the uncomfortable,” has become a rallying cry for professionals tired of performing confidence they do not feel.
For New Yorkers, this hits differently. We work in a city that celebrates hustle but rarely makes space for vulnerability. We are conditioned to project certainty even when we are figuring it out as we go. What Diehl offers is permission to drop that exhausting performance and discover something liberating: authenticity is actually faster. When people feel safe enough to remove their masks and lose their judgment, they stop wasting energy on self-protection and start channeling it into the work that matters.
Your Team Deserves Better Than Trust Falls: The improve it! Invitation
New York has always been a city that reinvents itself. We pivot when we have to, adapt because we must, and find ways to thrive in conditions that would crush anywhere else. improve it! channels that same spirit, helping teams across the city become more resilient, more connected, and more confident in the face of whatever chaos tomorrow brings.
Whether you are leading a scrappy startup in Bushwick, a legacy institution on Park Avenue, or anything in between, the invitation is the same. Forget the stale seminars and forgettable retreats. Give your people something that actually works: permission to play, to fail meaningfully, and to show up as who they really are. Because in this city, we do not just survive the pressure. We improvise our way through it. And now there is a company that can teach your team exactly how.
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