The inner work behind better leadership — Lederne

Why Lederne asked us in

Lederne exists to help leaders across Denmark lead better. That external promise rests on something internal: a team that practises, with each other, the conditions it advocates for everyone else — psychological safety and emotional intelligence. The most credible leadership organisations do the inner work first.

So the brief was to build those conditions inside Lederne's own team, using the 5 Guiding Principles of Applied Improv as the vehicle. The aim was not a polished performance of safety for members to admire. It was a team that practises it for one another.

The themes that shaped the work:

• Inside-out credibility. A team that helps others lead is most convincing when it has done the work itself.
• Quiet silos. Like most organisations, Lederne wanted people reaching across team lines more readily than they tend to.
• Substance over surface. This is a group that knows leadership content well, so the session had to give them something they could feel, not another model to nod at.

What we delivered

An experiential session grounded in the 5 Guiding Principles of IMPROV, delivered in Danish, followed by a 30-day reinforcement sprint for those who opted in — a short prompt each Monday, a reflection each Friday, for four weeks. The session was hands-on throughout: people practise the behaviours, notice what happens in themselves, and commit to one specific change to carry back to their work. The sprint exists to turn that intention into habit in the weeks that follow.

What the participants told us

The numbers are warm and consistent. People rated the value of continuing this kind of work at 6.5/7, their likelihood of reaching across to a colleague in another team at 6.3/7, and their confidence to apply what they'd experienced at 6.0/7. Nine of the ten would recommend it, and nine of the ten opted into the sprint.

One gap is worth noticing. The cross-team outreach score (6.3) sat higher than the general confidence score (6.0). That is unusual, and telling: people left the day more willing to reach across departmental lines than they felt able to apply the methodology in the abstract. Where silos are a quiet feature of how an organisation works, that is the needle moving in the right direction.

Which principles resonated most. Asked which of the five spoke to them most, the room pointed clearly at one.

Principle named as most resonant	Times named
Yes, And	3 (and a 4th within "all five together")
Embrace Failure	2
All five, named as a set	2
Do Not Judge Yourself	1
Do Not Judge Others	1
Make Each Other Look Good	1

Yes, And was both the most-named principle and the most-named commitment. In every team where it lands first, the message underneath is the same: people are tired of meetings where ideas get killed before they're explored. It's also concrete enough to put into a meeting practice straight away.

What people noticed about themselves is where the real change starts. The patterns were honest and specific: the distinction between reacting to the task and reacting to the relationship; the habit of raising three objections before a colleague has finished talking; how the response to a question is where psychological safety either deepens or contracts; and reflection experienced as a useful tool rather than a luxury squeezed out of the calendar.

In their own words

Trust myself. The difference between the task and the relationship. — Anonymous respondent, on what they noticed about themselves

I could benefit from being more curious about other people's ideas, and noticing whether someone is in the middle of three no's. — Anonymous respondent

I need to think more about how one responds to a colleague's question. — Anonymous respondent

Think about meeting questions and dialogues more with a "yes, and". — Anonymous respondent, on what they'll do differently

(The session was delivered in Danish; quotes are translated and lightly tidied.)

What they committed to doing differently

Each respondent named one specific behaviour to change back at work. Half pointed in the same direction.

• Ask more questions, and be more open and direct in meetings.
• Be more of a listener.
• Ask one more question before giving my own opinion.
• Bring "yes, and" into how I plan meetings and interactions.

Half of all the commitments came down to one muscle: listening, and asking one more question before reaching for an opinion. It's the most concrete theme in the survey, and the one the 30-day sprint is built around.

Bring this to your organisation

Any organisation that asks its people to collaborate well — and especially any that helps others lead — faces a recognisable version of Lederne's question: how to build psychological safety and emotional intelligence on the inside, where it's felt rather than performed. Our approach transfers directly: an experiential session built on the 5 Guiding Principles, a follow-up sprint that turns intention into habit, and a way of working that moves the quiet silos a little closer together.

Source: anonymous post-session survey, 21 May 2026. 10 of 16 participants responded — a healthy sample for a single cohort, and worth reading as the ten voices we heard rather than the whole group.