Yes And - Leadership

Summary

Your team is smart. Experienced. Capable.

And they still won't make a decision without you.

That's not a hiring problem. It's a culture problem — and it almost always starts at the top.

In this episode, Jeff Pelliccio and Erin MacKenzie sit down with Gina Trimarco, keynote speaker, leadership trainer, and creator of the trademarked Improvised Intelligence framework. The topic: why decision paralysis is almost always a leadership issue, and what it actually takes to build a culture where people decide, learn, and decide again.

Gina owns Carolina Improv Company in South Carolina and trained at Second City in Chicago. She's spent nearly 20 years watching smart, capable people freeze. Not because they don't know what to do, but because the culture made it unsafe to act.

She walks Jeff and Erin through her Improvised Intelligence framework, the connection between improv performance and emotional intelligence, and why the same discipline that makes a great scene partner makes a great leader. The conversation moves from the root causes of team paralysis through the mechanics of psychological safety done right, and into how her book The New Choice Effect reframes the way leaders approach big decisions.

The takeaway isn't a framework to memorize. It's permission, for your team and for yourself, to move without waiting for perfect.

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Key Takeaways

• Start with self-awareness: Before you can fix your team's decision-making culture, you have to understand your own. Log what gives you doubt. Track how you actually make decisions. Look for the patterns before you look at the people.
• Psychological safety is working when: people voice opinions without fear, knowing their perspective will be considered even if it isn't used. If your team is silent, that's data about the environment.
• Safety and accountability aren't opposites: A culture where it's safe to fail isn't one where anything goes. The best leaders create space for imperfect decisions while holding people to the values that define how they show up.
• The higher you go, the more your EQ can slip: Leaders in the ivory tower lose the pulse. Going to the collective isn't weakness. It's the fastest way to make better decisions with better information.
• Improvised Intelligence is a trainable discipline: The same skills that make a great improv performer, presence, social awareness, the instinct to make your partner look good, are the skills that make a great leader. And they can be practiced.
• Every choice is a door, not a verdict: Leaders who treat decisions as permanent stop moving. The New Choice Effect reframes big decisions as the first step in a series, not the cornerstone of everything.
• Give people permission: Whether it's your team, yourself, or the person next to you, people need explicit permission to explore, decide, and fall safely. Without it, they'll wait. Every time.

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