Topic guide · 17 conversations
Creative leadership is a human job.
Conversations about empathy, culture, curiosity, delegation, burnout, reinvention, and making brave work without treating people as fuel.
Creative leadership starts after the brainstorm. It is how you make room for a good idea, choose under pressure, and keep ego from ruining the work.
The people here talk about empathy, curiosity, culture, delegation, burnout, and reinvention. They get into the practices that help teams produce brave work without treating people as fuel.
Soft skills are not soft when the work depends on trust. Listening, clarity, and knowing when to get out of the way are operating skills.
The conversations
Ranked by relevance
Adrienne Cooper: Building Cultures Where People and Ideas Thrive
Founder, GLADsome Work Inc.
Adrienne Cooper’s path from TV news producer to Allstate leader to founder of her own consultancy, GLADsome Work Inc., is not a straight line. That’s exactly what makes her thinking on culture, leadership, and organizational design worth paying attention to.
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Nancy Lyons: Work Like a Boss
CEO & Co-founder, Clockwork · Author
Clockwork CEO Nancy Lyons, known for bold leadership and a no-BS approach, on transforming workplace culture from the inside.
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Traci Barrett: Navigating the Journey
Founding Member, HGTV · Author · Executive Coach
Traci Schubert Barrett, founding member of HGTV and best-selling author of What If There’s More?, explores the messy, beautiful truth behind leadership, burnout, and redefining success.
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Christina Melito: Designing for Tension
Creative Director, Fifteen4
What does it really mean to lead creative work in a world being reshaped by AI, complexity, and constant change? An honest, funny, and deeply insightful conversation about what creative leadership actually requires today.
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Jaime Hunt: Empathy Is Not a Soft Skill
Founder, Solve Higher Ed Marketing · Author
Jaime Hunt has spent a career arguing that empathy belongs at the center of marketing strategy, not on a poster in the break room. As the founder of Solve Higher Ed Marketing and an author in the field, Jaime makes the case that understanding your audience deeply is the hardest, most rigorous work a marketer can do.
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Brain Tumors, Bigness, and Believing in Everything with Jen Dary
Founder, Plucky · Leadership Coach · Author
When leadership coach Jen Dary discovered she had a massive brain tumor in 2016, she was an eight-month-old baby’s mom, running her coaching business Plucky, and just trying to survive the chaos of early motherhood. What she didn’t expect was that surviving brain surgery would crack open an entirely different kind of survival guide.
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Carl Smith: Burnout, AI, and Bullsh*t
Community Builder · Founder, Bureau of Digital
Bureau of Digital founder Carl Smith on the evolution of agency life, the promise and peril of AI, and why trust and human connection still run the industry.
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Carol Keese: A CMO Says Marketing Isn’t the Fix
VP for University Communications & CMO, University of Oregon
Higher ed websites all sound the same, look the same, and Carol Keese has a lot to say about that. As VP for University Communications and CMO at the University of Oregon, she argues that when an institution has a substance problem, more marketing isn’t the fix.
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Volt Santos Miran: Why Higher Ed Websites Still Look the Same
EVP, Brand & Web Strategy, Carnegie
Why do higher ed websites still look the same and wrestle with problems that were already familiar when the web was young? Volt Santos Miran joins Tracey to talk about copycat design, underfunded web teams, shared governance, and why the institution should never be the hero of the story.
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Dave Look: Chromatic
CEO, Chromatic
Where it all started: Chromatic CEO Dave Look on Drupal development and why developing diverse skills, from Krav Maga to lockpicking, makes better leaders.
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Designing Resilience with Sabrina Depestre
Senior Director of Enrollment Marketing, MICA
Tracey sits down with Sabrina Depestre to explore how creativity, leadership, and resilience actually develop in the real world, from shaping fan experiences at the Miami Heat to modernizing marketing inside higher education.
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Diane Querey: 20 Years of Digital Transformation at WWF
VP Digital Platforms, World Wildlife Fund
Diane Querey has led digital at World Wildlife Fund through two decades of platform shifts, including the WWF Together app that won an Apple Design Award in 2013 and the Apps for Earth campaign with Apple that raised $8 million.
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Pete Mackey: Listening Is Where Strategy Starts
Strategist · Poet · Founder, Mackey Strategies
Strategist, poet, and Mackey Strategies founder Pete Mackey on why reflecting a brand, not inventing one, is the real work.
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Richard Banfield: The Art of Being Human
Artist · Author · Former Agency CEO
Artist, author, and former agency CEO Richard Banfield on creativity, identity, grief, and personal reinvention.
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Second Harvest: The Power of Connection
Founders, Second Harvest
What happens when the map of your life dissolves beneath your feet? From personal loss to career upheaval to the quiet ache of disconnection so many feel today, the trio travels through the terrain that leads people to seek change, and why traditional self-help rarely offers real transformation.
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Miles Kemp: CEO at Variate
CEO, Variate
From an architecture background to leading digital transformation for brands like Marriott, Carnival, and Macy’s: Miles Kemp on designing at enterprise scale.
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Brigid Lawler: Rethinking Enrollment in an Age of Disruption
Enrollment Strategist · Higher Education Consultant
Enrollment strategist Brigid Lawler joins to ask a heretical question: why the traditional admissions funnel might need to be flipped entirely.
Episode detailsFrom Tracey
Related writing
The Shakespeare of alt tags
Diane Querey has run digital at WWF for twenty years. Her line on where AI belongs is the clearest I have heard.
Studio note · 4 min readWhy it’s called Escape Velocity
The name comes from astrophysics: the speed an object must reach to break free from a planet’s gravitational pull. Here’s why that’s the right metaphor for creative work.
Essay · 8 min readDesigners (should) run the world
A short re-visit of the closing session from the 2017 UCDA Design Conference, nine years later.
Essay · 5 min readThe portfolio career, defended
Sabrina Depestre made a point on episode 25 that deserves its own piece. Side projects are not a distraction. They are the engine.
Essay · 7 min readWhen the map of your life dissolves
Richard Banfield and Devon McDonald on what actually happens in the middle, and why most self-help cannot help.
Direct answers
A few useful definitions
What is creative leadership?
Creative leadership is the practice of creating the conditions in which people and ideas can do strong work. It combines clear decisions with curiosity, trust, useful constraints, honest feedback, and enough room for an idea to change.
Why does empathy matter in leadership?
Empathy gives a leader better information. It helps teams understand audiences, surface disagreement, recognize pressure, and make decisions that people can actually carry out. That makes it an operating skill, not a decorative value.