Friday Leadership Report | Alan Kearns, Founder & Managing Partner, CareerJoy
Happy Friday.
Last weekend at the cottage, we noticed something strange out on the bay. A whole gathering of loons. We are not loon experts, but we know our lake. Two loons live in our bay, and they are territorial by nature. Seeing a crowd of them together was something we had never witnessed before, so naturally, we looked it up.
If you spend any time on Big Rideau this time of year, this is a good question to ask, because loon behaviour changes noticeably in late summer. Chicks raised through July and August are becoming independent, foraging on their own, which makes family groups overlap in ways that look like a sudden population boom. Adults are also molting, shedding flight feathers and becoming temporarily grounded, so they gather on large, food rich lakes where it is safer to feed while they cannot fly. And with breeding season winding down, birds that spent June defending their patch of water become far more tolerant of company. The territorial yodel gives way to softer tremolos and contact calls. The choir changes because the purpose changes.
On a lake the size of Big Rideau, five to fifteen loons together in late August is not unusual. Occasionally, especially as migration nears, you will see twenty or more in one spot. It is a quiet, slightly bittersweet marker of the season. The adults lose their sharp black and white breeding plumage, turn a duller grey, and begin the journey toward the Atlantic coast or the Great Lakes. If you have been hearing loons calling at dusk lately, that is the sound of families regrouping before the trip south.
I could not stop thinking about what that gathering means, because our team is doing something similar this September. We are moving to a hybrid model, in the office together every Tuesday and Thursday. And the loons, it turns out, are a pretty good metaphor for why that matters.
Canada’s remote work numbers have been telling a consistent story for four straight years. Statistics Canada reports that only 17.4% of employed Canadians were working mostly from home by mid-2025, down from the pandemic peak, while 77.6% were working entirely outside the home. The drift back to shared space has not been dramatic, but it has been steady, and it has not reversed.
What has changed is not just where people work, but how deliberately companies are designing the days people spend together. Robert Half Canada’s most recent workplace research found that a large share of employers now offer hybrid arrangements to employees at every level, not just senior staff, and that most workers are spending fewer than five full days a week in the office. In other words, the fight over full-time in-office versus full-time remote has mostly settled into something more interesting: leaders choosing which days matter enough to gather for, and building those days on purpose rather than defaulting to habit or policy.
That is exactly what our loons were doing. They were not gathering because a memo told them to. They gathered because late summer made proximity useful again. Food was concentrated. Safety in numbers mattered more than territory. The value of being together, for a season, outweighed the value of staying apart.
Our Work. Made Better. Report continues to surface the same pattern across Canadian organizations. The leaders whose teams stay engaged in a hybrid model are rarely the ones enforcing the most in-office days. They are the ones who make shared days feel meaningfully different from remote days, building real conversation, problem-solving, and relationship-building into the calendar instead of leaving them to chance.
That distinction is central to what we call [LQ] at CareerJoy. Leadership Intelligence is not about how many hours a leader spends in a boardroom; it is the ability to recognize what a moment requires—connection, focus, recognition, or space- and respond with intention instead of habit.
A loon does not gather out of routine; it gathers because the season calls for it. The best leaders I know do the same.
They do not fill office days with status updates that could have been emails. They use time together for the work that truly requires a room.
If your team is moving to a Tuesday-and-Thursday office model this fall, or something similar, it can be tempting to treat in-office days as the same online routine in a different location: the same meetings, the same screens, just without bedrooms and kitchen tables in the background. That wastes the opportunity and is one of the quickest ways to make people resent coming in.
Instead, try this: protect at least one block on each in-office day for agenda-free conversation, a walk, a coffee, or a genuine check-in on how someone is doing. Save decisions that benefit from real-time debate, especially those that get flattened into Slack threads, for the room.
And pay attention to who goes quiet online but comes alive in person. That person is showing you how they do their best thinking, and a purely online-centric culture can quietly cost you their best ideas.
Gallup’s global research on engagement has long shown that people who feel genuinely connected to their colleagues are dramatically less likely to disengage from their work. A hybrid model does not build that connection automatically. It only creates the conditions for it. What leaders do inside those conditions is the whole game.
Here is where this hits closest to home for me. A meaningful share of the people I coach are between roles, and the isolation of that stretch is real. Statistics Canada’s most recent data shows more than one in ten Canadians report feeling lonely often or always, and separate research on remote work found that roughly three in ten people with remote work experience have felt disconnected during it.
Job searching, for most people, is an even more remote experience than remote work itself. No team, no Tuesday and Thursday in the office, no one to grab a coffee with between calls.
If you are in transition right now, borrow the loons’ behaviour with intention. Gathering is not weakness; it is strategy. Find the bay that works for you, a peer group, a networking breakfast, or an old colleague you have been meaning to call, and show up the way those birds gather around good water.
Not to perform confidence, but because being near other people can change what you notice, who you meet, and how quickly you move forward. Careers, like lakes, are more generous to those who make themselves visible.
If you are the leader on the other side of that transition, a September gathering is not only about your team’s output. It also sends a signal to everyone watching from the shore: a new hire, an anxious employee, or someone in career transition wondering whether any workplace still values people over headcount. It shows that connection is something your organization still takes seriously.
Our bay only fills with loons for a few weeks a year. It is worth noticing when it happens, and it is worth asking why.
The same is true of your office on a Tuesday morning this fall. Notice who shows up, why they showed up, and what you are doing with the time once they are there. That is the whole difference between a hybrid policy and a human-first culture.
Along the road with you,
Alan
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