Friday Leadership Report | Alan Kearns, Founder & Managing Partner, CareerJoy
Happy Friday,
One of my earliest food memories is a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Fries, that impossibly creamy coleslaw, and macaroni salad on the side. It wasn’t a weekly thing. It was what two working parents did to buy themselves an evening off and give all of us a treat.
I loved the chicken. To be frank, once or twice a year I still partake in KFC.
There was something about that batter, rich and unmistakable, that made an ordinary Tuesday feel like an occasion.
I read recently that the item expected to fetch the highest price at an upcoming auction of Colonel Sanders memorabilia is his 1964 day planner, which contains the precise measurements of eleven herbs and spices in his own handwriting. Nobody will confirm it’s the real formula. Nobody will let a camera near it before the sale.
What struck me wasn’t the secrecy. It was the consistency. A recipe, once it’s right, becomes a promise. Every bucket, every location, every decade, the same flavour shows up.
That’s not an accident. That’s a system built to survive the absence of the person who invented it.
Which got me thinking about leadership.
It’s a question our corporate partners ask us constantly, whether they’re running a federal department, a financial services firm, or a national not-for-profit. Coast to coast, in public, private, and NFP organizations alike, the question underneath the question is always the same.
Can we build and develop leaders in a way that is relatable and not a flavor of the day?
Consistently, reliably, without depending entirely on who happens to be in the kitchen that day?
The honest answer is yes and no. Leadership development isn’t a fixed formula you measure out and never touch again.
People aren’t chicken. But the instinct behind the question is right.
Organizations that develop leaders well have a repeatable approach. They don’t reinvent the process every time a new manager gets promoted. They have a method, and the method holds up whether the person leading it is having a good day or a hard one.
I think of a director I coached years ago in the federal public service, newly promoted, inheriting a team that had burned through three managers in two years. She didn’t try to be liked. She picked three things she would do the same way every single week, the same Monday check-in, the same clear priority setting, the same follow through on what she’d promised, and she never let a hard week talk her out of any of them. Eighteen months later that team had the lowest attrition in her branch.
Nothing dramatic happened. She just never stopped serving the same recipe.
We’re exploring exactly this through our 2026 Work. Made Better Report interviews, sitting down with this year’s award winning leaders across the country to ask how they actually built the habits and cultures that made their teams thrive. One theme keeps surfacing before we’ve even finished the question. The leaders who make the biggest difference aren’t the most charismatic people in the room.
They’re the most consistent ones. Their teams know what to expect from them, and that predictability is where trust actually lives. Watch for the full report this fall.
Consistency is having a harder time than it used to. A recent Express Employment Professionals Canada survey, conducted with the Harris Poll, found that most Canadian hiring decision-makers are optimistic about the back half of 2026, yet 86 percent still expect real hiring challenges in the months ahead. Employee turnover now costs the average Canadian company more than $30,000 a year. That’s not a recruiting problem.
That’s a retention and development problem, and retention is downstream of leadership.
The same survey found that most Canadian companies are already using AI in the workplace, and a large share of hiring decision-makers are concerned about what that shift means for career opportunities for the next generation. Employers openly say they need better training pipelines to prepare people for what’s coming. That’s the moment we’re in. The technology is changing faster than most leadership development programs can keep up with, which makes the case for a repeatable recipe stronger, not weaker.
When everything else in the business is in motion, how you develop people can’t be the thing that’s improvised.
Here’s where the metaphor gets interesting. KFC didn’t succeed because the herbs and spices were exotic. Reportedly, most of them are things you’d find in any Canadian kitchen. Salt, pepper, paprika, thyme, basil, oregano. The secret was never the ingredients. It was the ratio, and the discipline to keep using that exact ratio when it would have been easier to cut corners.
Human-first organizations do the same thing with leadership.
They don’t borrow someone else’s culture wholesale and expect it to taste right. They take proven ingredients, clear communication, real accountability, consistent feedback, genuine care for people’s lives outside of work, and they combine them in a ratio that fits who they actually are. Then they protect that ratio the way that day planner is being protected, no photographs, no shortcuts for a photo op.
I’ve watched leaders try to copy another company’s playbook line for line and wonder why it falls flat. It falls flat because the ratio was never theirs. Earned authority, the kind that comes from actually doing the work of leading people well over years, always outperforms authority someone tries to claim by pointing at somebody else’s success.
KFC dropped Kentucky from its name in 1991, and the brand has drifted further from the place that built it ever since. I don’t say that as a criticism. Businesses evolve. But there’s a lesson in it for leadership too.
Organizations lose their recipe when they stop protecting what made them work in the first place. They chase growth, they chase efficiency, and they move away, literally or figuratively, from the values that built trust with their people. Then they wonder why engagement drops and why the next generation of leaders doesn’t feel connected to what the organization stands for.
The Canadian organizations we see thriving right now are actively resisting that drift. They know their recipe. They write it down. They teach it deliberately instead of hoping new leaders absorb it by osmosis. That’s the whole premise behind our own [LQ] Leadership Intelligence methodology work with clients, giving leaders a clear, repeatable framework instead of leaving good leadership up to instinct or luck.
[LQ] Leadership Intelligence
A recipe only works if someone protects it and someone else can follow it. That’s the entire idea behind [LQ]. It’s not a personality test and it’s not a list of inspirational traits.
It’s a repeatable approach to how a leader shows up, communicates, and builds trust, so the people around them get the same quality of leadership on a hard Tuesday that they get on an easy one. The organizations coming through our 2026 Work. Made Better. interviews all have some version of this. A method they protect, refine, and pass down deliberately.
Some things really are finger lickin’ good, and the ones that last are never an accident.
Along the road with you,
Alan
Get a first look at the 2026 Work. Made Better. Report, exploring the habits and practices award-winning Canadian leaders use to build trust, consistency, and stronger teams.
Great leadership isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about developing the habits, practices, and judgment you can rely on, and helping the next generation of leaders do the same.
Join Alan as he moderates an upcoming Canadian Bar Association event exploring leadership and career transitions for lawyers, and the opportunities that come with what’s next.
