At first glance, improv seems an unlikely model for leadership. Popular culture like Whose Line Is It Anyway? portrays it as chaotic, unserious, and dependent on natural charisma. But in practice, improv is governed by a small set of disciplined rules that enable groups to operate effectively without scripts, hierarchy, or certainty.
These rules challenge an assumption many of us carry: That we need to have the best idea and defend it. Improv teaches us that the biggest ideas often start small and are built collaboratively and incrementally.
Jacob Goldstein, founder and executive director of The Leadership Laboratory, is a leadership educator with a background in the arts who has spent years translating these rules into a practical leadership framework for organizations. Here are four improv principles that translate to better leadership behaviors that can be designed, practiced, and reinforced.
For Goldstein, at the core of improv is the principle of “Yes, and…” which means I accept what someone has offered, and I build on it.
This offers a positive approach to the often-deflating workplace responses of “No, we can’t do that.” Or “Yes, but we don’t have the budget.”
"Yes, and” creates space for divergent thinking that encourages openness without sacrificing rigor. “Yes, and…” is not about consensus or unconditional agreement. It’s about sequencing ideation before evaluation.
Goldstein translates this into a three-phase meeting model for brainstorms:
Dream It: A divergent phase where all ideas are surfaced without judgment.
Decide It: A convergent phase where ideas are evaluated against strategic criteria.
Do It: The execution phase, focused on implementation and accountability.
By honoring each phase before jumping to the next one, leaders prevent premature criticism, clarify expectations, and lower defensiveness. It gives teams a shared operating system, so they know whether a meeting is meant for exploration or decision-making.
One of the simplest trust‑building moves a leader can make, Goldstein notes, is signaling psychological safety by setting the purpose of a conversation explicitly: “We are not making any decisions today.” Improv exercises put this safety into practice according to the International Journal of Management Education, allowing participants to experience it firsthand.
HOW TO ACTIVATE: Make the meeting mode explicit. In the calendar invite, name whether the group is expanding options (Dream It) or making a call (Decide It). When people know the rules, they spend less energy defending their ideas and more energy contributing.
Goldstein distinguishes between two types of trust:
Cognitive trust: I trust your expertise and competence.
Relational trust: I trust you to support me because of our shared history.
While cognitive trust may get someone hired, relational trust determines whether teams function effectively under pressure.
Improv’s mantra “Leap, and the safety net will appear,” explains how the practice accelerates relational trust by creating repeated, low-stakes opportunities for people to help each other succeed without knowing what’s coming next. When a team member shares an unpolished idea, admits uncertainty, or asks for support, and their colleagues reliably help them succeed, trust becomes a lived experience.
HOW TO ACTIVATE: Create visible rituals of support. At the end of a meeting, invite team members to name who and what set them up to succeed. This is particularly important when outcomes are uncertain or imperfect because it reframes what success means.
Leaders often approach challenges through a “Problem/Solution” lens—What is the problem? What is the proposed solution?
Goldstein argues this approach may inadvertently foster defensiveness and erode trust before the conversation even begins.
Instead, he advocates for a design-thinking perspective that shifts emphasis from “Problem/Solution” to “Current State/Future State”:
Current State: What is true right now?
Future State: What do we want to be true?
This repositioning eliminates blame and invites teams to focus on future possibilities rather than perceived shortcomings. By adopting this approach, organizations can reduce defensiveness, enhance engagement, and support principles rooted in positive psychology and design thinking.
HOW TO ACTIVATE: Replace problem language with shared reality. Open instead with, “This is what we’re trying to make true. How can we move toward that?”
One of the surprising lessons from improv: the most memorable line is almost never the most important contribution.
Goldstein uses an exercise called Professor Know‑it‑All where each person answers a question one word at a time. The game draws attention to how the little words, like ‘the,’ ‘in,’ or ‘of,’ are essential to setting up the next person for success. Without them, there are no complete sentences.
Teams perform better when leaders stop pressuring themselves (and others) to deliver brilliance and instead reward supportive, connective contributions such as synthesizing concepts, asking questions, or building on half-formed ideas. In organizations, this rebalances power, reduces unnecessary competition, and reinforces relational trust.
HOW TO ACTIVATE: Redefine what counts as leadership contribution. At the end of a milestone, ask team members to name contributions that weren’t the “big idea” or core deliverable, but made the project possible.
Goldstein often asks at the start of every engagement: “As a result of this experience, what do you want people to do differently?”
Improv offers a way to accelerate strategic thinking: When teams have shared rules for how ideas enter the room, how risks are supported, how conflict is framed, and how contribution is defined, trust stops being fragile and true innovation begins.
This is the ripple effect of improv. Improv builds trust, trust enables contribution, contribution fuels innovation, innovation drives performance, and performance drives your competitive advantage.
Travis, D. J., Shaffer, E., & Ohm, J. (2022). 5 strategies to promote inclusion: A manager’s playbook. Catalyst.
Perrmann-Graham, J., Liu, J., Cangioni, C., & Spataro, S. E. (2022). Fostering psychological safety: Using improvisation as a team building tool in management education. The International Journal of Management Education, 20(2), Article 100617.
Goldstein, J. (2024, February). How to Use Improv for Team Building. The Leadership Laboratory.
Goldstein, J. (2023, May 10). Know Your Zone: Pushing Yourself and Your Team to Step Beyond The Comfort Zone. The Leadership Laboratory.