When Andreea Vanacker went into brain surgery, she had already prepared her family and business partners for the worst.
“I was literally preparing my death before that operation,” she says.
The diagnosis blindsided her in 2020, mere months after her new start-up was in the market expansion stage. A brain tumour — with no family history, no health risk factors, and no warning signs until it was already dangerously advanced — had forced her to confront her own mortality. She spent the days before surgery making plans for her business partners, wanting to leave no loose ends if things didn’t go her way.
Nine hours under the knife later, Vanacker came out with her life, and a radically clearer sense of her purpose and what leadership should look like in a world that constantly threatens it.
“I started really taking a step back and thinking, what is truly important in life?” she says. “If I have been given a second chance at life, what does this mean, and how can I truly make the best out of the situation?”
Today, Vanacker is an entrepreneur, four-time author, keynote speaker, and self-described “joy catalyst,” who has made it her mission to teach business leaders why joy, resilience, and purpose are not luxuries, but strategies to thrive. It is a message she will bring to Calgary on June 3 as keynote speaker at ScaleUP Week 2025.
Leaders need more than grit to survive uncertainty
Before building a career around helping other organizations thrive, Vanacker spent more than 15 years leading international teams and businesses, managing full profit and loss statements, and driving growth for companies across multiple sectors, including publicly traded organizations.
“I truly understand the complexities of driving revenue growth, managing operational optimization while maximizing profits,” she says.
But, after years in the corporate world, she felt pulled toward something bigger.
“There was really a desire to share all the research I was doing with a broader audience and impact leaders at all levels across different industries.”
Vanacker has spent years studying the neuroscience of leadership and resilience. Her ScaleUP keynote, The Future-Fit Leader: The Neuroscience of Thriving in Uncertainty, will make the case that leading through uncertainty is not about toughness alone — rather, it’s about rewiring how leaders operate.
And she plans to give attendees practical tools they can use immediately.
“My intention is really to share with them tips that they can literally implement as they leave the conference, for themselves, and for their teams,” she says.
One key takeaway: leaders who lean into positive emotions like joy are not just creating a harmonious culture — they are building high-performance organizations. Research shows that positive emotions optimize creativity and productivity, and help teams stay in “a state of flow and synchrony,” Vanacker explains.
On the flip side of that coin, fear-driven environments trigger short-term thinking, lower cognitive performance, and destroy creativity.
And decades of science backs this up.
Vanacker points to Gallup research showing that there’s low employee engagement globally — a glaring sign that businesses are leaving potential on the table.
According to Gallup’s 2025 State of the Global Workplace report, global employee engagement fell from 23% to 21% in 2024, a rare decline that has happened only twice in the past 12 years. The report estimates this drop has cost the global economy about $438 billion in lost productivity.
And it is not just frontline workers who are checking out. Manager engagement also dropped, slipping from 30% to 27% — meaning even the people in charge are struggling to stay connected.
“Emotions are contagious,” she says. “If you have a positive, effective tone within a team, you’re actually going to see greater collaboration and greater productivity ata team level. But if you have more anxiety, more frustration, with no harmony among the team members, the productivity is going to go down tremendously.”
Building future-fit teams starts with leaders
The change has to start at the top. Leaders need to be honest about how they are showing up, and not just what they are delivering.
“A leader has to become more self aware of how they show up, their state of being,” Vanacker says.
She points out that behaviours like micro-management, rigidity and transactional management can quietly kill creativity and trust. Instead, leaders need to model vulnerability, empathy and well-being while staying connected to purpose, and deliberately cultivating environments where people feel cared for — not just measured.
It sounds simple. But it’s a blind spot for many companies.
“When people don’t feel cared for, don’t feel listened to, and just feel like a number, then it doesn’t become very rewarding or fulfilling,” Vanacker says.
She warns leaders that ignoring emotional wellbeing has business consequences. In negative environments, teams will resist taking risks, avoid challenging the status quo, and lose the creative energy needed to adapt and grow.
“The reality is that when we experience stress, anxiety and frustration for prolonged periods of time, research indicates that it deteriorates our cellular health, which ultimately can lead to disease,” she adds. And leaders who model burnout as strength (like boasting about sleepless nights, the constant hustle, or the dreaded “rise and grind”) are setting a dangerous tone.
Thriving through uncertainty is possible, but it takes conscious leadership
Vanacker sees a worrying trend: some companies are doubling down on fear and control, pushing for compliance at the very time when innovation and trust are most needed.
“Some leaders are just naturally deviating back to this fear-centric mentality,” she says. “It is just killing the opportunity for individuals that are on the ground to be able to contribute in a constructive way.”
Instead, Vanacker wants leaders to remember that uncertainty is not going away — but the way they respond to it can change everything.
Her advice is straightforward. She suggests investing in your people’s well-being, fueling positive emotions like joy, and reconnecting your organization to a clear sense of purpose.
“Joy is a powerful tool that all leaders can use to actually increase trust, increase creativity and increase productivity in challenging times,” Vanacker says.
At ScaleUP Week, she will help leaders learn how to put that into action — not just for their organizations, but for themselves.
More information about ScaleUP Week 2025, including how to attend or participate, is available at scaleupweek.ca.
Digital Journal is the official media partner of ScaleUP Week 2025.
