Learn to Lean In and Lead 

#1 Create the Water Your People Can Thrive in: Redefining Leadership Through Empathy
Interview with Dr. Vlad Glăveanu

Empathy turns difference into an asset; leaders who lean in know that creativity is not a strategic extra, but the shared system that decides whether organizations stall or continuously learn, adapt, and lead.

In a recent interview with Dr. Vlad Glăveanu, I found myself reflecting on the common threads that shape how creativity emerges, grows, and ultimately matters particularly for leaders in the business community. In Vlad’s case, those threads trace back to early experiences of collective crafting: making art together in community settings such as summer camps. These were not just pleasant memories; they were formative practices that cultivated something essential for leadership today.

Those early collective experiences achieved several things at once. They nurtured the ability to recognize one another for what each person does and contributes. They created space for acknowledging what matters to others, not just what matters to us. And importantly, they embedded the idea that creativity is not a rare spark reserved for a few, but a habit, something practiced, shared, and reinforced through everyday interactions.

Dr. Glăveanu often describes creativity as the generation of meaningful novelty, and this is where a powerful metaphor helps. Meaningful novelty is kaleidoscopic. When you look through a kaleidoscope, a small shift produces a completely new pattern. The pieces are the same, but their relationships change, revealing fresh meaning. Creativity works the same way in organizations: new value emerges not from isolated brilliance, but from reconfiguring existing perspectives, skills, and relationships.

Historically, creativity did not live behind museum walls. Before it was curated, classified, and commodified, it emerged in our communities—in our crafts, our shared rituals, and our ways of being. Arts were collectively creative, woven into daily life and sustained traditions. This perspective reminds us that creativity is fundamentally social and cultural.

Rather than thinking of creativity as an onion with layers to peel back—process here, product there—Glăveanu invites us to imagine cutting through the onion. When we do, we experience all layers at once. We are in creativity all the time, consciously or not. As David Foster Wallace famously suggested, we are fish swimming in water; culture is the water, and creativity is inseparable from it. We cannot opt out of being social beings, just as we cannot isolate creativity into neat compartments. Process, product, interaction, and meaning are all intertwined, and all carry an aesthetic dimension.

This metaphor has an important implication for leaders. We are all swimming in the same water. Pollute it—through fear, excessive competition, or exclusion—and it becomes toxic for everyone.

So how do we become more creative, collectively? One answer lies in generative not-knowing: the willingness to commit to continuing, exploring, and finding out rather than rushing to premature certainty. This mindset keeps organizations adaptive rather than brittle. But curiosity alone is not enough. Creativity also requires agency. We must see ourselves not as passive occupants of the system, but as actors within it—capable of shaping our shared environment.

That, in turn, demands space for playfulness. Play is not frivolous; it is how new connections surface. For playfulness to emerge, leaders must actively create psychological safety—the assurance that ideas can be voiced, tested, and even fail without punishment. This is the groundwork for what could be called a new form of collective creativity.

At its core, creativity is about difference. It lives in the gaps between self and other, between me and you. In those gaps, understanding is never complete, but it can be approximated—through play, intellectual humility, and clear ground rules that protect safety and respect. When we neglect creativity, the risk is not neutrality; it is increased competitiveness that marginalizes unheard voices and narrows our collective potential.

To learn to lean in and lead, then, is to recognize that creativity is not an add-on to strategy. It is the water we all swim in. How we care for it determines whether our organizations merely survive, or truly learn, adapt, and lead together.