Students on the Creative Industries Management programme had the opportunity to take part in a series of engaging workshops on the topic of leadership.
Leaders are not born – they are made. Students engage in creative and artistic learning approaches to develop capacities they can use in turbulent situations.
In the B.A. Creative Industries Management, we continuously offer creative leadership development activities, building on an understanding that leadership is not only a science, but also an art. Recently, a range of workshops were offered by Ralf Wetzel from Brussels ("Leadership in crisis situations: powered by applied improvisation"), Jana Dörfelt from Berlin ("Draw your line. Visual embodied leadership"), Alex Samuels from Palermo ("Contemporary Music Journalism"), and Bert van Beek from Nimwegen (not on picture) ("Creative Writing. Bodies of Text: Fabulation, Feedback & the Politics of Imagination").
All offerings share an experiential approach to learning, treating management and leadership not as abstract knowledge but as embodied and relational practice. Across projects, students work with uncertainty, emergence, and real-world complexity rather than predefined solutions or rigid methods.
The focus is on the process, with assessment grounded in participation and reflexivity. The aim is to develop managers in the creative and cultural industries who will direct, co-create and facilitate work with many others and in many ways.
Dörfelt says: “It is more and more accepted that leadership has little to do with personality features nor with formal position power. It is a relational practice between people, comprising cognitive and noncognitive (aesthetic) layers of communication.” Her workshop discovered the power of the aesthetic component of leadership through the artistic practice of drawing, sketching and visual storytelling.
Wetzel works with improvisational theatre, emphasizing that “leaders need to find the right message, and bring it to the outside world”. The improv theatre framework provides techniques and practices on how to stay grounded in turbulent situations, to build individual emotional safety for any leader themselves, to build emotional safety for any partners who is jointly going through this situation and to create a strong and resilient connection to any stakeholders which have a stake in the situation (customers, suppliers, mass media, protest movements, the general public and nature).
Students were able to experience concepts revolving around leadership such presence, resilience, and engaging with others, directly through practical exercises. One student summarized: “One concrete insight I took away is that, especially in crisis situations, it is important not to become rigid, overthink everything, or search obsessively for the one ‘correct’ strategy. Instead, effective leadership is about being present in the moment, working constructively with the resources available, and fostering a positive, supportive atmosphere – without assigning blame.” Practices like these are needed in the Creative Industries and beyond in all industries that go through changes and try to maintain momentum.
Prof. Dr. Ralf Wetzel, Jana Dörfelt, Alexander J. Samuels, Prof. Dr. Brigitte Biehl
