When dealing with tough personalities, best practices for collaboration are remarkably similar in both business and improv. What is the best approach for working with unreliable clients, critical colleagues or scene partners who just won't listen?

"Stop questioning what's wrong with the other person and focus on what you are doing," said Will Hines, Academic Supervisor at UCBTNY, in a recent blog post. "You have to worry about your side of the street."

In a video for Harvard Business Review, Nina Godiwalla shared similar advice based on her experience training executive leaders: "Shift your attention to your own feelings and thoughts." This empowers you to change your reaction, which is the aspect of the relationship you control.

Once you take ownership over the situation, you can begin to build common ground. Improv offers a low-risk environment to practice this business skill. In each improv scene, performers build a world from scratch by virtue of accepting each other's ideas. "The performers must connect," says Will Hines. "Or else the scene does not exist."

Does that mean you must connect with a coworker who just openly criticized you? In a sense, yes.

"When we feel attacked, we often counter-attack," says Godiwalla. "But this only escalates a disagreement." Fight this urge, opting instead to respond with a non-judgmental comment. "If you respond with an observation, you actually disarm the other person," she says. "They can only back off."

In other words, accept the criticism. You don't have to share their point of view, but the simplest path forward is not to try to change their mind; it is to make a statement you can both agree on.

"Agreement before all else," says Will Hines. "In fairness [performers] should meet halfway, but if you find yourself in a scene with people who won't budge, then for the sake of the scene you go all the way to them."