Friday Leadership Report | Alan Kearns, Founder & Managing Partner, CareerJoy
Happy Friday,
I fly a lot. I was fortunate to grow up in a home where travel was part of life, and I can still remember my first flight on a United Airlines 747, headed to Hawaii as a kid, pressing my face to the window and thinking the plane looked bigger than our street.
That memory has never left me. I have logged a lot of miles since, for both pleasure and business, and somewhere along the way I became a genuinely calm traveller. I am grateful for that. Flying rattles a lot of people, and I understand why. But for me it has always felt like a pocket of stillness between two versions of a busy life.
These days I mostly fly WestJet. Part of that is personal. My son Aidan is a first officer with WestJet, based in Vancouver, and our family gets a travel benefit because of it, which I do not take for granted. But truthfully, even before that, I had already found myself drawn to WestJet’s culture. There is a warmth to the service that feels less scripted and more human than what I have experienced elsewhere.
A big part of what makes any flight memorable is not the aircraft. It is the seat you land in, the people you happen to sit beside, and the way the crew treats you. On a recent flight to Vancouver, one crew member gave me a small, quiet lesson in leadership that I have been thinking about ever since.
I like to chat with crew members when I fly. On this trip, I noticed a newer flight attendant, in his first week on the job, doing what most of us do when we are new anywhere. He was pleasant, capable, and still finding his footing. He asked a steady stream of questions throughout the flight to a more senior colleague, and that senior colleague is where the real story begins.
This man had a quiet, joyful calm about him. It showed up with passengers and with his own crew. Every time the new hire asked a question, he answered with patience and warmth, never rushed, never short. There was no performance in it. It was simply how he operated, flight after flight, question after question. What struck me most was not any single interaction. It was the consistency of it.
As we began our descent, I asked to speak with him directly. I told him what I had noticed, that his professionalism stood out, and that it was obvious he genuinely enjoyed his role. His name is Nigel Jacobsen. He has been in the industry for decades, including time on the Concorde. He shared that he could have retired years ago. He chooses not to. It showed in everything he did that day.
The flight attendant role is harder than most passengers give it credit for. It blends hospitality with safety, and it requires standing for hours, managing turbulence, and absorbing rudeness from passengers in a way pilots rarely have to. Nigel had clearly decided, somewhere along the way, that none of that would change how he showed up. We got to talking, and it turned out he was based in Vancouver too, and had flown many times with my son. When I spoke with Aidan afterward, he confirmed what I had already sensed. Nige, as the crew calls him, is a consummate professional, well liked by everyone he works with. I will admit the proud father moment was real.
Great brands are not built by mission statements.
They are built by people doing small things and big things the same way, every single time, regardless of who is watching. Airlines have planes, but like every organization, they are fundamentally human first experiences. They are shaped by people like Nigel, patiently mentoring someone in their first week, and by people like Aidan, quietly earning a reputation for skill and character among colleagues who fly with him again and again.
This is where I think a lot of Canadian leadership development sometimes gets it backward.
We chase charisma, big gestures, and grand strategic vision, when the actual differentiator inside most organizations is far less glamorous. It is whether someone can be trusted to show up the same way tomorrow as they did today. ADP Canada’s Workplace Trends report for 2026 names keeping work human-centric as one of the defining priorities for employers this year, even as technology and AI reshape nearly every function inside an organization. That is not a coincidence. The more automated and accelerated work becomes, the more consistency, patience, and genuine care stand out as the things that cannot be replicated.
Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends research backs this up from another angle. Nearly two-thirds of organizations surveyed believe their culture needs to change significantly because of AI. Leaders everywhere are wrestling with how to hold onto the human edge while everything around them speeds up. Nigel never read that report. He did not need to. He was living the answer at thirty-five thousand feet, one patient answer to a first-week question at a time.
In our own 2025 Work. Made Better. Report research, we see this pattern again and again across Canadian workplaces. When people describe the job or the organization that changed how they felt about their career, they rarely point to a policy or a perk. They point to a person. A manager who noticed them. A colleague who mentored them without being asked.
Someone who was consistent when consistency was not required of them.
That is the uncomfortable truth for a lot of Canadian organizations right now. You can build an excellent onboarding program, a competitive total rewards package, and a well designed engagement survey, and still lose people because the daily human experience did not match the brand promise. Culture is not what is written on the wall in the lobby. It is what happens between a new hire and a mentor on a Tuesday afternoon flight to Vancouver, with nobody from head office watching.
A few things stood out to me from that flight that I think apply directly to leadership, wherever you sit in an organization.
First, model the behaviour you want repeated, not the behaviour you want performed. Nigel was not putting on a show for me. He was simply doing what he always does. Leaders who are consistent in private, with no audience, are the ones whose teams actually absorb the standard.
Second, treat mentorship as part of the job, not an interruption to it. That senior flight attendant answered every question from his newer colleague as though it were the most important part of his shift, because in a real sense, it was. The people who will carry your culture forward five years from now are the ones being mentored today.
Third, remember that frontline roles carry weight that leadership often underestimates. The people closest to your customers are absorbing the hardest parts of the job, often with the least recognition. Noticing them, by name, matters more than most leaders realize.
Fourth, understand that longevity paired with genuine enjoyment is a leadership signal worth studying. Nigel could have retired years ago. He stayed because he still finds meaning in the work. Ask yourself who on your team fits that description, and ask what your organization is doing to make sure they stay.
Nigel’s story is a living example of what we measure inside [LQ] Leadership Intelligence.
Technical competence gets someone hired. Consistency, patience, and genuine care for the people around them are what make someone the person a new hire remembers for the rest of their career. That is the human layer of leadership that [LQ] is built to surface and strengthen in the leaders we coach.
Great organizations are not built by a single dramatic moment. They are built the way Nigel built his reputation, one patient answer, one calm presence, one small consistent choice at a time. If you lead people, in the air or on the ground, that is the standard worth aiming for.
Along the road with you,
Alan
Get a first look at the 2026 Work. Made Better. Report, exploring how leadership and workplace culture shape how people show up, support one another, and feel about the work they do.
Great leadership isn’t always about the big moment. It’s about how you show up day after day. CareerJoy’s leadership solutions help leaders strengthen the human side of leadership and build the kind of consistency people remember.
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