It’s official. The mayor of the United States’s largest city took an improv class.

This got me thinking about improv and leadership. What is it about improvisation that might build leadership skills?

Fortunately for me, I was lucky enough to have had the same incredible improv teacher as New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, so I went right to the source. I reached out to Rick Andrews at the Magnet Theater to see what leadership skills he thinks improv helps deepen.

Rick Andrews pointed first to improv’s reputation to help people build their active listening skills. He explains, “In making an idea together, you are trying to build a shared reality. We are both building a non-existent thing.” Because improvisers are creating something out of nothing, they are forced to listen to each other, to pay attention, in a deeper way than in their ordinary lives.

People can make assumptions and skim over details in their day-to-day lives, but while improvising, they have to catch every word and even catch details that go beyond their partner’s words. Andrews states that improvisers have to........

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