FLR | Why Over-Promoting Yourself Kills Career Advancement in Canada (And What Actually Works)
Friday Leadership Report | Alan Kearns, Founder & Managing Partner, CareerJoy
Happy Friday.
I rode my bike downtown to see Pulp Fiction in 1994, knowing almost nothing about it. I walked out a different person. That kind of unexpected, electric experience stays with you. It’s the movie you didn’t see coming that cracks something wide open.
I had that same feeling recently, watching Marty Supreme, Josh Safdie’s film starring Timothée Chalamet as a 1950s ping-pong hustler named Marty Mauser. Yes, ping pong. I know how that sounds. But this film was extraordinary. Chalamet was completely transformed. The cinematography was stunning. The energy was relentless. I left the theatre thinking I’d just watched one of the best performances in years.
And then the Oscars happened. Nine nominations. Zero wins.
The film had earned more than $179 million at the box office, becoming the most successful A24 film ever made, swept the early awards circuit, and had critics in raptures. Then it walked out of the 98th Academy Awards completely empty-handed, one of the worst Oscar nights in Academy history for any film that had arrived with so much momentum.
So what went wrong?
The scale of the campaign only escalated as the season wore on. A staged Zoom-style promotional video went viral. Chalamet openly admitted to spending $100,000 of his own money on an SNL appearance. The press run included an orange blimp flying over New York, exclusive ping pong merchandise with fans lining up 24 hours to buy it, and Chalamet becoming the first person to appear atop the Las Vegas Sphere, lit up like an orange ping pong ball with the film’s motto stamped across it: “Dream Big.” By the time Oscar ballots were due, what had started as infectious energy had begun to read as something else entirely. Multiple industry insiders described his swagger as having genuinely put off voters.
Here was a brilliant film, a genuinely great performance, and a massive cultural moment. The campaign to promote it arguably killed its chances.
I have been thinking about this all week because I see the exact same dynamic play out in leadership and career advancement conversations across Canada every single day.
We have been coaching Canadian leaders through career transitions at CareerJoy for over two decades. Our 2025 Work. Made Better. Report, which draws on data from Canadian professionals navigating career change, promotion decisions, and leadership development, consistently surfaces one counterintuitive finding: the candidates who over-promote are frequently the ones who lose the room.
This isn’t a soft observation. Only 61.7% of Canadian workers believe their current job offers are good career advancement prospects, according to Statistics Canada. That means competition for visible opportunity is real, and the instinct to push harder, speak louder, and make your value impossible to miss is understandable. Recent research found that 93% of young Canadian women and gender-marginalized workers see no clear promotion pathway at their current workplace. People are anxious about advancement. That anxiety drives over-promotion. And over-promotion consistently backfires.
Our Work. Made Better. Report data shows that Canadian hiring panels and promotion decision-makers describe the candidates who stand out most as those who demonstrate curiosity, situational awareness, and a genuine interest in the organization’s actual problems. The candidates who were most negative were those who spent the conversation performing their own value rather than engaging with the room in front of them.
When we feel like we are being sold, we resist. That’s not unique to Hollywood’s award season. It happens in every boardroom, every interview panel, and every promotion conversation in the country.
One of the frameworks we use consistently with CareerJoy clients is the distinction between claimed authority and earned authority. These are not the same thing, and Canadian workplace culture, which tends to reward demonstrated competence over declared confidence, responds to them very differently.
Claimed authority sounds like: “I have led three major transformations and my team consistently exceeded targets.” Earned authority sounds like a room full of people who can describe, unprompted and in specific terms, exactly what it felt like to work through those moments with you.
One is a resume. The other is a reputation. Only one of them precedes you into the room.
Research consistently shows that roughly 40% of Canadian employees rank career advancement as a top factor in job satisfaction, which means most people in your organization are paying close attention to who gets rewarded and how. They notice the difference between leaders who talk about their impact and leaders who simply produce it. So do the people making the decisions.
Through our [LQ] framework, one of the most predictive dimensions we measure is situational intelligence: the ability to read what a moment requires and calibrate your presence accordingly.
The leaders who advance consistently in Canada are not the ones with the most polished personal brand. They are the ones who understand that trust is built through restraint as much as through visibility. They know when to speak and when to listen. They know that being asked for your perspective carries more weight than offering it on your own.
The deeper irony of the Marty Supreme situation is that the character Chalamet was playing, Marty Mauser, suffers from this exact flaw. He is a hustler who over-extends, who alienates the people he needs, who mistakes relentless ambition for legitimate authority. The film is a critique of that approach. And then the real-life awards campaign replicated the character’s most self-destructive quality. Dream Big is not a strategy. It’s an aesthetic. And the people whose votes you need eventually start to wonder whether all that noise is covering something up.
The most effective career advancement we see at CareerJoy consistently begins not with “how do I make my value visible” but with “what does this organization actually need, and do I understand it well enough to genuinely contribute?”
The best interviews I have heard from clients over the years were those in which the candidate forgot to be strategic because they became genuinely curious about the organization’s real challenges. The promotions that stuck were the ones where the leader’s readiness was already so evident to everyone around them that the formal decision felt like a formality.
The work speaks before you announce it. That is not a passive approach. It requires confidence, discipline, and a specific kind of intelligence: knowing that the quality of your presence matters more than its volume.
Marty Supreme deserved recognition. The film is that good. But somewhere between the blimp and the Vegas Sphere, the campaign stopped being about the work and started being about the campaign. And experienced voters, like experienced hiring panels, are very good at telling the difference.
The ping pong lesson for Canadian leaders navigating promotion conversations, job searches, and career transitions is straightforward: the game you play is more persuasive than anything you say about it.
Be so good at the thing that the thing speaks first.
Along the road with you,
Alan
Preparing for an interview or thinking about your next step? We help leaders show up with clarity, credibility, and impact.
👉 Explore our career transition support.
Leading a team or aiming for your next role? We help leaders build trust, credibility, and influence that drives real advancement.
Happy Friday,
A few years back, I was coaching a VP at a mid-sized Canadian financial firm. Brilliant person. Technically sharp, politically savvy, and completely exhausted from pretending.
Every Monday, she walked into that glass-walled boardroom and put on what she called her “executive face.” Calm, certain, in control. Never wrong. Never uncertain. Never, ever rattled.
“Alan,” she told me, “I feel like an actor in a play I didn’t audition for.”
Her team? They felt it too. Not the performance. They felt the distance. And distance, in leadership, is where trust goes to die.
We’ve been sold a lie for decades. The idea that leadership is a performance. That you project confidence until it becomes real. If you wear the mask long enough, eventually it becomes your face.
I understand where that advice came from. There’s something to the psychological principle that behaviour shapes belief, that acting a certain way can help you grow into it. But there’s a critical difference between stretching into a new version of yourself and fundamentally pretending to be someone you’re not.
Stretching is growth. Pretending is deception. And people, especially the smart, capable people you’re trying to lead, can tell the difference.
Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2025 report is a wake-up call for every Canadian leader. Global employee engagement has dropped to 21%, the lowest since the early days of the pandemic. In Canada and the United States combined, only 52% of workers describe themselves as “thriving,” and that figure fell by 4 percentage points in a single year.
Let that land. Fewer than one in four people globally feel genuinely engaged at work.
And here is the part that should matter most to you if you’re in a leadership role: Gallup’s research shows that managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement.
Seventy percent.
Your team’s experience at work is not primarily determined by your company’s strategy, your HR policies, or your benefits package. It’s determined by you, by how you show up.
Manager engagement itself fell from 30% to 27% between 2023 and 2024. The people responsible for driving team connection are themselves feeling disconnected. That’s not a strategy problem. That’s a humanity problem.
At CareerJoy, our own 2025 Work. Made Better Report echoes this. When we survey Canadian professionals on what they need most from their leaders, the answer isn’t more structure, cleaner KPIs, or better performance reviews. The answer, consistently, is connection. Being seen. Being trusted with honesty. Having a leader who is real.
Here’s where I want to be precise, because authenticity has become one of those words that gets hollowed out by overuse.
Authenticity in leadership doesn’t mean radical transparency. It doesn’t mean sharing every fear, doubt, or frustration with your team. It doesn’t mean abandoning professional judgment or emotional regulation.
What it means is this: you act in accordance with what you actually believe.
That’s it. When your behaviour matches your values, when your words align with your convictions, when the version of you that walks into a difficult conversation is recognizably the same person your family sees at home, that is authenticity.
In my [LQ] Leadership Intelligence framework, we talk about this as the alignment between your inner narrative and your outward leadership. Most leaders have a significant gap between the two. They believe in empathy, but they never show vulnerability. They believe in accountability, but they hedge and deflect when they make a mistake. They say they believe in their team, but their micromanagement tells a different story.
That gap is where trust leaks out. And in the current Canadian workplace environment, trust is the scarcest and most valuable resource you have.
I want to name the thing that actually gets in the way, because it’s not what most people think.
Most leaders I work with don’t hide behind a mask because they’re dishonest people. They do it because they’re afraid. Afraid that showing uncertainty will make them look weak. Afraid that admitting they don’t have all the answers will undermine confidence in their direction. Afraid that if people see who they really are, they won’t measure up.
I’ve seen this fear operate among directors at national Crown corporations, regional law partners, and founders running 200-person tech companies in Waterloo, Calgary, and Halifax. It’s remarkably consistent and remarkably human.
But here is what two decades of coaching Canadian leaders has taught me: the leaders who show up with the most genuine authority are not the ones who have all the answers. They’re the ones who are honest about what they don’t know, clear about what they stand for, and consistent in how they behave, whether they’re in front of the board or in a one-on-one with a junior employee on a Wednesday afternoon.
Authentic leadership takes courage. But it’s a very specific kind of courage: the courage to let your real beliefs drive your real behaviour, and to trust that people can handle the truth of who you are.
Back to that VP. We didn’t fix her leadership by helping her become a better performer. We fixed it by helping her stop performing.
The first thing she did was walk into a team meeting and say, “I’ve been thinking about how I show up here, and I don’t think it’s been working. I’ve been too focused on appearing to have everything together and not focused enough on actually being present with you.”
The room went quiet for about four seconds. And then something unlocked.
Her team started showing up differently, too. When the leader stops pretending, there’s suddenly permission for everyone else to stop pretending. And that’s when real work, creative work, brave work, the kind of work that actually moves organizations forward, becomes possible.
Gallup’s research on high-performing workplaces supports this. In organizations where engagement reaches the top quartile, turnover drops by 51% and productivity increases by 23%. Those aren’t numbers you get from a new policy. You get them from an environment of trust, and trust begins with a real leader.
I’ll leave you with this. If you’re honest with yourself, ask:
Where is the gap between what you believe and how you’re actually behaving? Maybe you believe your team is capable but you’re still making decisions without them. Maybe you believe in psychological safety but you shut down dissenting voices without realizing it.
What are you performing that you could just be? Not every professional standard requires a mask. Most of them just require integrity.
When did someone on your team last trust you with something uncomfortable? If it’s been a while, that’s information.
Canada’s workforce is fatigued and disconnected. The data is clear on that. But the data is equally clear that the cure isn’t a new engagement initiative or a better all-hands presentation. It’s the leadership that people can actually feel.
Be yourself. Not because it’s easier, it isn’t, at first. But because it’s the only thing that actually works.
Along the road with you,
Alan
Authentic leadership isn’t about personality. It’s about alignment between what you believe and how you show up.
CareerJoy’s leadership programs help leaders build the self-awareness, courage, and leadership intelligence required to lead with clarity and trust, even in difficult moments.
👉 Explore our leadership programs and start leading in a way that actually works.
For many women, authenticity in leadership comes with an added challenge: navigating expectations about how leaders “should” show up.
EmpowerHER is CareerJoy’s leadership program designed to help women step into leadership with confidence, clarity, and their full voice intact.
👉 Learn more about EmpowerHER and join a community of women leading on their own terms.
Happy Friday,
There’s an old statement that gets thrown around at every dinner party and first date: You’re either a dog person or a cat person.
I’d like to propose a third way. You can like both.
I grew up with cats. I actually have a scar above my eye from trying to protect myself from a dog. (The cat was fine, by the way. They usually are.) In my adult years, I got my first golden retriever, and I’ve had dogs ever since. Both animals are fascinating. Both have their strengths. And both have their wonderfully quirky things.
But this week, after reading about a brand new study out of Yamaguchi University in Japan, I find myself thinking a lot about cats. Specifically, what they can teach us about resilience.
Scientists have been puzzling over this one for literally centuries. How does a cat, dropped upside down with no surface to push against, manage to rotate mid-air and land on its feet almost every single time?
The first research paper attempting to answer that question was published in 1700. For context, Isaac Newton was still alive. The problem seemed simple to pose and nearly impossible to solve, because what cats appear to do should not be physically possible. An object in freefall, with no surface to push against, should not be able to change its orientation. And yet cats do it, consistently, instinctively, in under a second.
A study published this month in The Anatomical Record finally cracked a significant piece of it. Researchers at Yamaguchi University examined five cat spines in the laboratory, measuring strength, range of motion, and stiffness across different regions, then filmed live cats performing the maneuver. What they found was that the spine is not uniformly flexible. The thoracic region, the chest, is capable of nearly 50 degrees of twisting with very little effort. The lumbar region, the lower back, is considerably stiffer. This means the front half of the body can rotate dramatically while the rear stays relatively stable, and then the rear catches up.
Sequential rotation. Front first, rear follows. The result is a precise, controlled landing from virtually any starting position.
Here is what makes this remarkable from a physics standpoint. Cats accomplish this without violating the law of conservation of angular momentum. They have no functional collarbone and an unusually flexible backbone, meaning they are not a rigid body. They change their shape during the fall itself, and that shape change is what makes the rotation possible. It is not magic. It is not luck. It is an elegant biological system doing exactly what it was built to do, the moment it is needed.
And then they walk away. Cool. Completely unbothered.
The righting reflex can take less than a second, and a cat needs as little as two and a half feet of space to stick the landing. Less than a second to go from chaos to control.
Everything, actually.
Cats are not lucky. They are not fearless. They have something built into them, a system, that activates the moment things go sideways. They do not freeze. They do not over-correct wildly. They use sequential rotation: get the front half oriented first, and the rear follows. Step by step, mid-fall, they solve the problem.
That is exactly what resilient leaders do.
According to our 2025 Work. Made Better. Report, stories from organizations like Kriska Group, Pursuit, and CFMWS show how leaders are guiding teams through disruption with empathy, adaptability, and future-focused coaching. These are not leaders who never fell. They are leaders who know how to rotate mid-air.
The data is sobering. 42% of Canadian leaders believe low morale and burnout are harming performance, and poor work-life balance is costing employers an estimated $20 billion a year in lost productivity and health costs. Think about what that means at the team level. If you lead a group of ten people and only two of them are fully engaged, you are not running a team. You are managing drag. The other eight are present but not ignited, and no amount of process improvement or strategy deck fixes that without addressing the human underneath it.
Only 19% of Canadians say they are fully engaged at work.
Read that again. One in five.
They know which way is down, fast. When a cat slips, fluid-filled structures in the inner ear detect immediately that the body is no longer upright and send rapid signals to the brain. No denial. No delay. They orient to reality quickly.
Great leaders do this too. They do not spend six months pretending the market has not shifted, the team is not disengaged, or the strategy is not working. They feel the drop, and they get oriented. I have worked with senior leaders across Canada who spent enormous energy managing the appearance of stability while privately knowing the organization was in freefall. The ones who recovered fastest were the ones who named reality out loud, to themselves first, then to their teams. Orientation before action. Always.
They use flexibility where it matters, and stability where it does not. The thoracic spine twists dramatically. The lumbar holds firm. The cat does not go completely limp; that would be chaos. It does not go completely rigid, which would mean shattering on impact.
The best leaders I have worked with across Canada, after 25 years and over 30,000 leaders through our [LQ] Leadership Intelligence framework, have exactly this balance. They are enormously flexible in how they lead. They are fiercely stable in who they are. Character as the anchor. Adaptability is the approach. I think of a public sector leader we worked with in Ottawa who went through three deputy minister changes in eighteen months. Her team never lost cohesion. Not because the environment was stable, it absolutely was not, but because she was. She bent. She did not break. She knew who she was when everything around her was shifting.
They land and they move on. This might be the most underrated trait of all. Cats do not sit at the bottom of their fall reviewing what went wrong for three quarters. They walk away. They integrate the experience. They do not catastrophize. There is a reason we say cats have nine lives. It is not that they do not fall. It is not that falling defines them.
As we wrote in the Work. Made Better. Report, restructuring has become a constant feature of the Canadian workplace. In 2023 alone, more than 100,000 Canadians experienced layoffs or position eliminations across sectors from tech to retail to the public service. When we discuss a career change, we are not simply referring to switching employers. We are talking about navigating identity, resilience, and the ability to adapt to new chapters we did not always choose. Career transitions feel like falls. Sometimes they fall. But you have more of a righting reflex than you think. The professionals I have seen recover best are not the ones who avoided grief or skipped the hard conversations with themselves. They are the ones who moved through it with intention and came out the other side knowing themselves better than they did going in.
Here is the part that stays with me. Researchers discovered that cats who fall from greater heights sometimes activate their survival instincts more fully, but the recovery is harder. The bigger the fall, the more the system kicks in. But landing and truly recovering are two very different things.
I have seen this with leaders navigating major disruptions. A layoff after 20 years. A role elimination. A company is shutting down. The fall activates everything. They land. But the recovery, the bone-deep emotional work of rebuilding confidence, identity, and direction, takes real time and real support. Canada ranks 5th globally for work-life balance, yet 42% of employees still report poor mental health. The righting reflex gets you upright. But landing well, truly well, requires a culture that catches people, not just applauds their landing. Organizations that invest in that culture, in ethical transitions, real outplacement support, and genuine reintegration, are the ones that retain trust long after the turbulence passes. Not just with the people who left. With the people who stayed and watched how it was handled.
You do not need to be fearless. You do not need to pretend the fall is not happening. You need a flexible spine and the willingness to orient fast. You need to know which way is down, and then move.
The best leaders I know are not the ones who never fell. They are the ones who built the self-awareness, the relationships, and the team around them to right themselves, sequentially and deliberately, before they hit the ground. And when they did hit it, they got up, integrated the lesson, and walked forward.
At CareerJoy, we firmly believe in the presence of baseline leadership qualities in every individual. Our work is about cultivating those qualities into resilient, compassionate, modern leaders at every level of the organization. That belief was built over two decades of working with Canadian professionals through some of the hardest moments of their careers. It has never wavered.
Your righting reflex is in there.
Let’s activate it.
Have a great weekend, whether you are a dog person, a cat person, or the rare and wise third kind.
Along the road with you,
Alan
P.S Become a Leader Who Lands on Their Feet
Resilient leadership isn’t luck; it’s built through self-awareness, adaptability, and the ability to orient quickly when things change. Our leadership development programs help leaders strengthen those capabilities so they can guide their teams through uncertainty with clarity and confidence.
👉 Explore Leadership Development Solutions
P.P.S Strengthen Your Leadership Righting Reflex
Confidence and resilience don’t appear overnight — they grow through reflection, community, and the right support. EmpowerHER Women in Leadership is designed to help women strengthen their leadership voice, navigate moments of self-doubt, and move forward with intention.
As International Women’s Day approaches, I find myself thinking about my mother. The one-year anniversary of her death is approaching, and grief has a way of sharpening what truly matters.
Alice Kearns died on the same afternoon as the Boston Marathon. She passed at 2:05 p.m., uncannily close to that year’s winning time of 2:04:45. She had qualified for Boston 16 times and run it three times. For those of us who knew her, the timing felt less like a coincidence and more like punctuation on a life that was always, always in motion.
She was also a working mother who built a real career in a male-dominated industry, navigated the contradictions that still define work and life for women in Canada, and was honest, sometimes uncomfortably so, about the cost of doing both. Beside her through it all was my father, Jack, her partner of more than 60 years, who ran beside her on the roads, championed her ambitions, and never once made her career feel smaller than his.
Not a competitor. A champion.
That distinction to me mattered more than either of them probably named out loud.
Alice built her career in the male-dominated transportation industry. She became a trusted administrative and HR advisor to executives, known for her wise counsel, quiet strength, and no-nonsense standards that people either met or didn’t.
She was also a working mother in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, a time when that combination carried its own particular weight.
She was honest about it. Unflinchingly so.
“I don’t think I could be both a great mother and a great employee,” she told me once. “It might have been easier to choose one.”
That sentence stayed with me, not because it was defeatist (Alice was the furthest thing from that), but because it was true. It’s the invisible tax that so many women pay without anyone acknowledging it exists.
She led by example anyway. Her legacy wasn’t about packed lunches or school pickups. It was about what it looks like to live with conviction. To model excellence. To take your intellectual life seriously. To show up, even when showing up costs you something.
Here’s a statistic I think about often, and that I believe every Canadian leader needs to sit with:
Nearly 90% of women in Canada experience imposter syndrome at some point in their careers.
Ninety percent. That’s 9 out of every 10 women on your team, in your boardroom, in your leadership pipeline, who have experienced self-doubt strong enough to make them question whether they belong.
And here’s the part that makes it harder: only about 25% recognize it as imposter syndrome.
For the other 75%, it doesn’t arrive with a name. It shows up as over-preparation, hesitation before raising a hand, staying quiet in a meeting when they have something important to say, or opting out of a stretch opportunity—not because they aren’t qualified, but because they haven’t yet convinced themselves they are.
This isn’t a personal failing. It’s a structural one. Data from our work at CareerJoy, captured in The 2025 Work Made Better Report, make it clear that this pattern is persistent, pervasive, and remarkably underreported.
The women you admire most? The high performers? The ones who look most at ease in the room? The data indicates they’re likely carrying this as well.
The 2025 Work Made Better Report highlights a consistent theme: the gap between demonstrated competence and felt belonging is among the most underaddressed performance issues in Canadian organizations.
It’s not a pipeline problem. It’s a belonging problem.
Women are entering leadership roles in greater numbers than ever before in Canadian history. Yet the internal experience—the daily negotiation between confidence and doubt, between ambition and the fear of being seen as too much or not enough, hasn’t kept pace with external gains.
Leaders who ignore this aren’t just missing a culture opportunity. They’re leaving performance on the table.
In her final weeks, my mother was in palliative care. Her granddaughter Aine had just completed a half-marathon and called her grandmother from the finish line, breathless and proud.
Alice told her, “It’s not about the time you get—it’s about taking in the moments you have while you’re in the race.”
That was Alice. That was the whole philosophy, distilled to one sentence.
She died of complications from Norovirus. It was a short journey from diagnosis to death, unwelcome and fast, but also, as those things sometimes go, mercifully gentle.
In her final days, she reflected: “I was in a hard race. I told myself I wanted to finish it, just for me.”
She did.
My mother was not famous. She didn’t run a company or give a TED Talk. But she built a life of integrity, navigated real structural barriers with grace and grit, and left behind two grandchildren, Aidan and Aine, who sat by her bedside asking life’s big questions, and who are already living more fully because of what she modelled.
That’s leadership. The kind that doesn’t always show up on an org chart.
As you think about International Women’s Day this week, I’d invite you to go beyond the celebration and into the harder conversation:
What are the women on your team carrying that they haven’t named? What would it cost your culture to create space for that naming? And what kind of race are you building, one where people are only valued for their time, or one where they’re supported to take in the moments while they’re in it?
The data from CareerJoy’s Work Made Better report is clear: Canadian organizations that invest in psychological safety, belonging, and visible leadership development for women don’t just do better culturally. They outperform. That’s not soft. That’s strategy.
At CareerJoy, we’re hosting a complimentary panel conversation: “Do I Belong Here? Owning Your Career.”
This isn’t a conversation about eliminating doubt. It’s about learning how to keep showing up, even when it’s there. Three accomplished leaders who have built extraordinary careers and navigated imposter syndrome along the way:
Join us for a thoughtful, human conversation about confidence, growth, and why questioning yourself is often a sign you’re stretching, not that you don’t belong.
Monday, 10 March 2026, from 1 to 2 pm EST. Complimentary, on MS Teams.
Because 90% is not a niche problem. It’s a leadership emergency hiding in plain sight.
Along the road with you,
Alan
P.S Supporting Women Leaders Starts Here!
Supporting women leaders requires more than good intentions.
Our EmpowerHER Leadership Program helps organizations build confidence, influence, and leadership capacity for the women on their teams.
P.P.S Develop The Leaders Your Organization Needs
Strong leadership doesn’t happen by accident. It’s built through intentional development, real conversations, and the right support at the right time.
CareerJoy partners with organizations across Canada to strengthen leadership capacity through:
• Leadership development programs
• Executive and emerging leader coaching
• Succession planning and readiness initiatives
Happy Friday,
I was out for an early walk this week, headphones in, half-present to the neighbourhood and half-present to a podcast, when Eric Schmidt said something that made me stop on the sidewalk.
Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, was reflecting on his career. He mentioned, almost in passing, that when the opportunity at Google first came up, a number of people had already turned it down. He said yes. And he said it changed his life.
Then came the line I haven’t been able to shake.
“Keep betting on yourself. Say yes to that opportunity.”
Eric Schmidt, Former CEO, Google
I stood there for a moment, dog pulling at the leash, and thought: how many people have I worked with over the years have been handed their version of that opportunity and quietly talked themselves out of it?
The answer, if I’m honest, is a lot.
We’re smart people. We know how to construct a reasonable-sounding argument for why now isn’t the right time. Why we’re not quite ready. Why the risk outweighs the reward. We dress up hesitation in the language of strategy and call it wisdom.
Sometimes it is wisdom. But sometimes, and I’ve seen this hundreds of times in my work with leaders across Canada, it’s just fear with a good PR team.
This week I want to talk about that. And about what it actually looks like to bet on yourself, not in the dramatic Hollywood sense, but in the quiet, ordinary, often uncomfortable way that actually changes things.
We put out The 2025 Work. Made Better Report earlier this year, drawing on research with hundreds of Canadian organizations from coast to coast. One number in particular has stayed with me.
42% of Canadian employees report poor mental health at work.
Not globally. Here. In a country that ranks 5th in the world for work-life balance.
We’re doing a lot of things right. And something is still off. I think part of what’s off is this: a lot of us have gotten very good at building comfortable careers, and not quite good enough at building meaningful ones. And I say that with real empathy, because I understand how it happens. You take the safe role. Then the next safe role. You optimize for security and somewhere along the way, the spark gets a little quieter.
42% of Canadian employees report poor mental health at work, despite Canada ranking 5th globally for work-life balance (The 2025 Work. Made Better Report)
67% of Canadian employees say how a company handles layoffs would influence whether they’d ever want to work there again (The 2025 Work. Made Better Report)
31% of employees in Canada and the US are genuinely engaged at work. Nearly 7 in 10 are either checked out or quietly looking for the exit. (Gallup State of the Workforce, 2024)
That last number.
Fewer than one in three people genuinely engaged. I’m not sharing that to be dramatic. I’m sharing it because I think it points to something real: most organizations are sitting on an enormous amount of untapped human potential. The leaders who recognize that, and who are willing to do something about it starting with themselves, are the ones who change things.
Here’s a question I find myself asking a lot in coaching conversations.
Think back over the last year or two. Was there a moment where something opened up and you hesitated? A role that felt like a stretch. A conversation you kept putting off. A pivot you almost made but pulled back from at the last minute.
For most people, there’s at least one. Usually more.
And the interesting thing is, it’s rarely the risks people took that they regret. It’s the ones they didn’t. The conversations they didn’t start. The roles they didn’t apply for. The hands they didn’t raise.
Schmidt could have said no to Google with a perfectly reasonable explanation. The timing wasn’t ideal. It was a risky bet. There were other people better suited. Nobody would have known the difference.
But he would have.
69% of Canadian SMEs say their primary hiring obstacle is a shortage of qualified candidates. The people betting on themselves and growing into bigger roles are exactly who every organization in this country is looking for. (Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB), 2025)
Here’s what I find fascinating about the Canadian talent picture right now. The CFIB found that 69% of small and medium businesses say their biggest hiring challenge is simply finding qualified people. Statistics Canada’s own data shows nearly 37% of businesses expect difficulty recruiting skilled workers in the months ahead.
In other words: the people who say yes, who step into bigger roles before they feel completely ready, who back themselves when an opening appears. Those are exactly the people Canada’s organizations are struggling to find. That’s not a small thing. That’s an enormous opportunity if you’re willing to see yourself clearly.
And there’s another piece to this that I think gets underestimated. Gallup’s research found that 50% of people who go looking for a new job do so because of their manager. Not their salary. Not their commute. Their manager. Your own growth, or lack of it, isn’t just a personal matter. Your team is watching. And they’re drawing conclusions.
“Every layoff is not just an operational event. It is a cultural one.”
(The 2025 Work. Made Better Report)
One of the things The 2025 Work. Made Better Report found consistently is that people don’t leave organizations. They leave stagnation. When they can’t see a future, they find one somewhere else. And often, the leader who stopped growing is the reason they couldn’t see it.
The Conference Board of Canada’s research identifies confidence in senior leadership as the single most influential driver of employee engagement. Not the benefits package. Not the office design. Confidence in leadership. That’s built over time, through real decisions, real conversations, and real investment in yourself.
23% higher profit in business units with engaged workers versus disengaged ones. Engagement isn’t a feelings metric. It’s a performance metric. And it starts with the leader.
(Gallup State of the Global Workplace, 2025)
Gallup’s 2025 research also found something that I think every manager in Canada should read twice: active disengagement is cut in half for managers who receive ongoing development and have someone in their corner encouraging their growth. Half. That’s not a marginal improvement. That’s a transformation.
I want to be clear about what I’m not saying here. I’m not talking about recklessness. Not ego. Not ignoring the mortgage or the family or the very real weight of responsibility you carry.
In my experience working with leaders across Canada for over 20 years, betting on yourself looks a lot more ordinary than people expect.
In Practice, It Looks Like This
Saying yes before you feel completely ready. The best leaders I’ve worked with didn’t wait until every box was checked. They trusted that what they already had was enough to start, and they grew into the rest. They weren’t reckless. They were willing. Research from Leadership IQ found that employees who spend meaningful time with their leaders are 29% more inspired and 30% more engaged. The leader who stepped forward is the one creating that environment.
Staying in the room when things get uncomfortable. Leadership isn’t the highlight reel. It’s what you do when the conversation gets hard and you’d really rather be somewhere else. Mental Health Research Canada’s 2024 national study found that 23% of Canadian employees don’t believe their workplace is psychologically safe. Nearly one in four. That changes when leaders model it. When they stay, when they’re honest, when they don’t manage from a distance.
Investing in yourself when no one is making you. The 2025 Work. Made Better Report found that organizations with a strong culture of accountability, where leaders invest in themselves and their people, were three times more likely to report above-average retention and engagement. Not marginally better. Three times. That’s what compounding looks like in leadership.
Showing up for your people with real energy. You can’t give what you don’t have. About 71% of people say frequent, genuine recognition would make them less likely to leave their role. Leaders who are growing have that energy. Leaders who are running on empty, who stopped betting on themselves years ago. It shows. In every meeting. In every one-on-one. In every quiet signal the team is reading whether they know it or not.
We’ll never know who they were. They’ve gone on to live full, probably successful lives. I’m not suggesting they made a catastrophic mistake.
But I always come back to that detail in Schmidt’s story. Multiple people passed. Each with reasons. None of them are the ones we’re talking about right now.
In The 2025 Work. Made Better Report, we asked Canadian leaders and employees what they wanted most from their work. More than salary. More than flexibility. The answer, consistently, was meaning. To feel like what they were doing mattered. To feel like they were still becoming someone. To feel like the best chapters weren’t already behind them.
You don’t get there by playing it completely safe.
2.8× more likely to embrace change in high-trust organizations. Purpose and trust aren’t soft ideas. They’re structural advantages built by leaders who keep growing.
(Josh Bersin Research, via Gallup, 2024)
60% better performance from organizations with top-quartile cultures. Culture doesn’t build itself. It’s built by leaders who are still in motion.
(Harvard Business Review, 2023)
$29K average cost per employee lost to turnover in Canada. Investing in leadership development costs a fraction of that. The math is pretty straightforward.
(Groom & Associates, 2025)
I’ve worked with leaders from Halifax to Vancouver, from the federal public service to Bay Street to small family businesses in towns most people have never heard of. And one thing I notice, consistently, is that Canadians tend to undersell themselves.
Not out of laziness. Out of something that actually starts as a strength. We’re a collaborative culture. We make room for others. We don’t like to seem like we’re reaching. And somewhere in there, a lot of us learned to make ourselves a bit smaller than we need to be.
I had a conversation recently with a leader, I’ll call her Marie, who had been approached about a senior role at another organization. She had the experience. She had the relationships. By every reasonable measure, she was ready. But she’d been quietly talking herself out of it for three weeks by the time we spoke. Too much change. Too much risk. The timing wasn’t perfect.
Sound familiar?
We worked through it together. She took the role. Six months in, she told me it was the best professional decision she’d made in a decade. Not because it was easy. Because it was real.
The Conference Board of Canada found that 62% of executives identified cultural misalignment as the top barrier to organizational performance. In my experience, some of that misalignment starts much earlier than anyone expects. It starts with a leader who stopped backing themselves, and whose team quietly picked up on it.
So this is the invitation. Hold both.
Be the leader who listens and the one who steps forward. Be the one who makes room for others and the one who also takes up the space you’ve earned.
Schmidt didn’t get where he got by shrinking. Neither will you.
“If you don’t invest in yourself, who will? And if not now, when?”
Alan Kearns, Founder, CareerJoy
What’s the opportunity sitting in front of you right now that you’re about to talk yourself out of?
And if you’re honest, really honest, is the reason wisdom? Or is it fear wearing a sensible blazer?
I think about the people who said no to Google. They went on to live full, probably good lives.
I’m not suggesting they made a catastrophic mistake. But they’re not the ones we’re talking about right now. And somewhere, quietly, they probably know it.
The thing about betting on yourself is that it doesn’t announce itself as a big moment. It usually arrives looking like an uncomfortable conversation, an email you keep drafting and deleting, a role you almost didn’t apply for, a hand you nearly didn’t raise.
Roll the dice.
Not blindly. Not carelessly. But with the quiet understanding that a life well-led isn’t built by protecting yourself from failure. It’s built by making the real call, even when the outcome isn’t guaranteed. Especially then.
Eric Schmidt said yes.
I hope you do too.
Have a great weekend.
Along the road with you!
Alan
P.S Is your organization ready to be bold?
CareerJoy works with leaders and organizations across Canada to make work better. One real conversation at a time.
P.P.S Are you an ambitious professional looking to explore your next ‘yes’ moment?
Happy Friday
There was a moment last week that stopped a lot of us cold (pun intended).
Isabelle Weidemann, Valérie Maltais, and Ivanie Blondin stood on the Olympic podium in Milan, arms around each other, singing the national anthem together in French.
They had just defended their team pursuit gold.
They grew up skating together. They have shared this podium before. And Shania Twain’s Man! I Feel Like A Woman filled the oval as they skated their victory lap with Canadian flags.
If you’re in your 30s, that hits different. It was supposed to.
Valérie Maltais called it herself: “We’re just a bunch of madames out there on the ice.” Isabelle Weidemann joked that their pre-race prep involved a nap and some reading. And they won gold anyway. Again.
Here’s what I kept thinking: this wasn’t luck. This was a decade of investing in the right people, at the right time, in the right system together.
That’s succession planning at its finest. And most Canadian organizations are challenged in how they approach developing next-gen leaders.
We have been studying how Canadian leaders think about talent development and succession for years.
Our Work Made Better Report makes the picture painfully clear: the majority of Canadian organizations don’t have a documented, active succession plan for their senior leadership roles. Not because leaders don’t care, but because the work is harder, slower, and more uncomfortable than most strategic planning conversations allow for.
The numbers across sectors are sobering.
Research consistently shows that fewer than one in three Canadian organizations have a formalized succession plan for their most critical roles. Among mid-sized organizations, that number drops further.
A 2024 survey by the Human Resources Professionals Association found that 60% of Canadian HR leaders identified succession planning as a top priority, yet fewer than 35% reported having an active, current plan.
The Conference Board of Canada has documented similar patterns, noting that leadership continuity risk is among the top five organizational vulnerabilities for Canadian employers heading into the next decade, driven by an aging leadership population and accelerating retirement rates across the public and private sectors.
The problem isn’t awareness. It’s an urgency.
Most succession planning happens reactively, when someone announces a retirement, when burnout takes a key person offline, or when a critical vacancy lands on a leadership team’s agenda with three weeks’ notice.
The Weidemann-Maltais-Blondin team didn’t train for three weeks before the Olympics.
They trained for years.
They knew each other’s rhythms, blind spots, and strengths.
They trusted each other enough to take a nap before the most important race of their lives.
That’s the model.
This isn’t a public sector story or a private sector story. It’s a Canadian leadership story.
In the corporate sector, a 2024 Spencer Stuart study found that nearly 40% of CEO transitions at major Canadian companies over the prior five years involved an external hire because no internal candidate was ready.
That’s an expensive outcome in every sense: financially, culturally, and in terms of time lost to onboarding and strategic alignment.
In the not-for-profit space, where margin for error is even thinner, many executive directors carry institutional knowledge that simply has nowhere to go when they leave.
The Work Made Better Report highlights a consistent pattern CareerJoy has observed across industries: organizations tend to invest heavily in leadership development at the early and mid-career stages, then quietly stop once someone reaches a senior level.
The assumption is that by the time you’re a VP, a Director, or a C-suite leader, development is your own responsibility.
But that assumption leaves organizations with a bench that looks deep on paper and feels dangerously thin in practice.
One sector doing something about this right now is municipal government.
Our partners at the Ontario Municipal Administrators Association (OMAA) are actively seeking introductions to municipal leaders doing exemplary work in succession planning for senior leadership teams, including CAOs, CHROs, and Directors, because the sector recognizes what’s coming.
A significant wave of senior municipal leaders across Canada are within five to ten years of retirement, and the pipeline to replace them isn’t as ready as the sector needs it to be.
It’s a case study that leaders in healthcare, financial services, higher education, and the private sector should be watching closely, because the dynamic is the same even if the titles are different.
Based on what CareerJoy has learned working with leaders across Canada, here’s what distinguishes organizations that get succession right from those that scramble.
They name it. The highest-performing organizations we work with actually say the words: “We are developing you for this role.” Ambiguity is not kindness. It is a retention risk. Your best people are constantly being recruited. If they don’t know there’s a path, they find one somewhere else. The 2025 Work Made Better Report found that employees who feel their organization is investing in their long-term growth are significantly more likely to stay and perform at a higher level.
They separate potential from performance. Your top performer right now is not automatically your best succession candidate. The skills that make someone exceptional in an individual contributor or mid-management role often differ significantly from those required in a senior executive role. Succession planning means honestly mapping that gap and then building a bridge through coaching, stretch assignments, exposure to governance and strategy, and candid feedback conversations that most organizations avoid.
They treat it as ongoing rather than episodic. The organizations that struggle most are those that revisit succession plans when someone announces they’re leaving. The ones thriving treat it like a quarterly leadership conversation: who is ready now, who is eighteen months out, and who needs a specific experience to close the gap. That cadence is what turns intention into capability.
Here’s what makes the Canadian women’s team pursuit story resonate beyond sport.
It’s a story about what happens when people are developed with intention, given the right conditions to grow, and trusted to perform when it matters most.
Most leaders I work with want to build this.
They care deeply about leaving their organizations better than they found them. But the daily urgency of operations crowds out the strategic work of growing the people who will carry the mission forward.
So here’s the honest question, regardless of your sector or title:
If you were unavailable for the next 6 months, who would step in?
Are they ready?
Do they know they’re being developed for that?
If the answer feels uncertain, that’s not a failure. It’s a starting point.
The madames didn’t get to that podium by accident. And your organization’s next generation of leaders won’t either, unless someone decides to invest in them before it’s too urgent.
That’s the work. And it’s worth doing.
Along the road with you!
Alan
P.S Ready to Build Your Bench?
If this reflection raised even a small question about your own bench strength, you’re not alone.
Next week, in partnership with the Ontario Municipal Administrators’ Association (OMAA), we’re hosting:
Building Your Bench | Succession Planning for Municipal Leaders
A practical session designed specifically for municipal senior leaders who want to protect continuity, reduce risk, and intentionally develop the next generation of leadership before urgency forces the conversation.
Because podium moments are built years in advance.
If succession planning is on your radar — or should be — we’d be glad to have you join us.
👉 Register Here: https://share-na3.hsforms.com/2okxKEfn2Qau3GMPg2ycCuQ2mv71
P.P.S Strengthen Your Leadership Pipeline
If succession planning, leadership readiness, or talent development is on your radar this year, explore CareerJoy’s Leadership Development resources.
From executive coaching to team workshops and organization-wide leadership strategy, we partner with Canadian leaders to build capability before it’s urgent.
Happy Friday,
Like many of you, I’ve been glued to the Olympics this week (ads and all). The opening ceremonies were spectacular, and yes, we had opinions about the team gear, including Canada’s. Norway’s classic look? Absolutely perfect. But something happened during the ski jumping competition that stopped me in my tracks and hasn’t left my mind since.
Germany’s Philipp Raimund won Olympic gold. In ski jumping.
And he’s afraid of heights.
I had to sit with that for a moment. How does someone become the absolute best in the world at something that directly confronts their deepest fear? More importantly, what does this tell us about leadership, career choices, and the way we think about performance?
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: Most of us are leading while afraid, whether we admit it or not.
According to research from the Conference Board of Canada, nearly two-thirds of Canadian professionals report that fear plays a significant role in their career decision-making. Yet we rarely talk about it openly. We treat fear like a disqualifier, something that proves we’re not ready, not capable, not “leadership material.”
Raimund’s story blows that thinking apart.
He didn’t wait to overcome his fear of heights before becoming a ski jumper. He became a champion while carrying that fear. Every single jump was an act of courage—not because he was fearless, but because he was afraid and jumped anyway.
That’s not just athletic achievement. That’s self-leadership at its finest.
We’ve been sold a lie about readiness. We think we need to feel confident before we make the big move—taking the promotion, launching the business, having the difficult conversation, or pivoting industries. We’re waiting to stop being afraid before we act.
But what if fear isn’t the problem? What if it’s actually information?
Statistics Canada’s Labour Force Survey data shows that career transitions in Canada have increased by more than 30% over the past five years. What the numbers don’t tell you is that most of these transitions weren’t made by people who felt ready. They were made by people who recognized that the cost of staying still was higher than the risk of moving forward.
Research from the Canadian Centre for Diversity and Inclusion found that professionals who made significant career pivots reported that fear was present in their decision-making process, but it wasn’t the deciding factor. The deciding factor was clarity about what mattered to them.
Think about that. The best career decisions aren’t made in the absence of fear. They’re made in the presence of it.
Raimund didn’t need to love heights. He just needed to respect his fear enough to prepare for it, train through it, and refuse to let it make his decisions for him. He needed to know that standing at the top of that jump hill mattered more than the comfort of staying on solid ground.
Here’s where this gets personal: What are you not pursuing because you’re waiting to feel brave first?
Real self-leadership isn’t about being fearless. It’s about being honest with yourself about what scares you and doing the work anyway. Sometimes, the very thing you fear is exactly what you’re meant to pursue.
Some practical truths from working with thousands of Canadian professionals in career transition:
Fear is often a compass, not a stop sign. The things that scare us most are usually connected to what matters most. Raimund’s fear of heights didn’t mean he shouldn’t jump—it meant that jumping meant something significant. Every time he launched himself into the air, he chose his purpose over his comfort.
According to research from the Mental Health Commission of Canada, professionals who successfully navigate career transitions share a common trait: they’ve learned to distinguish between fear that protects them and fear that limits them. Protective fear keeps you from genuinely dangerous situations. Limiting fear keeps you from growth, opportunity, and becoming who you’re capable of being.
Preparation is how you honour fear. You don’t ignore it; you prepare for it. Raimund probably had more safety protocols, more mental conditioning, more support systems than jumpers who weren’t afraid. His fear made him better, not weaker. It made him more thorough, more dedicated, more committed to excellence.
This is something we see consistently in Canadian workplaces. The Conference Board of Canada’s research on high-performing teams found that individuals who acknowledged their fears and prepared accordingly outperformed those who either denied their fears or let them create paralysis. The difference wasn’t in the presence of fear. It was in the response.
Your fear doesn’t need permission to exist. Stop trying to eliminate it before you move—start moving with it. The Canadian Labour Congress reports that a significant percentage of workers who changed careers in recent years said their fears never fully went away. They just stopped waiting for them to disappear.
If you’re in any kind of leadership role (formal or informal), Raimund’s story should change how you think about your team.
The people who are most afraid might be your highest performers because of that fear, not in spite of it. They’re the ones who know the stakes. They’re the ones who prepare obsessively. They’re the ones who show up even when it’s hard.
Here’s what the research from Canadian HR organizations consistently shows: psychological safety in the workplace isn’t about eliminating fear or discomfort. It’s about creating an environment where people can be honest about what scares them and still feel supported in taking necessary risks.
The Chartered Professionals in Human Resources (CPHR) Canada studies indicate that organizations with high psychological safety don’t have fearless employees. They have employees who feel safe enough to admit fear and courageous enough to act anyway. That’s a crucial distinction.
Think about your own workplace for a moment. How many talented people are hiding their fears because they believe vulnerability equals weakness? How many high-potential employees are holding back because they’re terrified of the next level of responsibility—and mistakenly think that fear disqualifies them?
What if we created workplaces where people could say, “This terrifies me, and I’m doing it anyway,” and that was celebrated as strength, not questioned as doubt?
According to the Institute for Work and Health in Toronto, organizations that normalize conversations about challenge, fear, and growth see 40% higher engagement scores and significantly lower turnover among high performers. People don’t leave because the work is hard. They leave because they feel alone in finding it hard.
There’s something particularly relevant about this conversation in the Canadian context right now. We’re experiencing unprecedented workplace transformation. Remote work has fundamentally changed how we lead. Artificial intelligence is reshaping entire industries. The multigenerational workforce is creating new dynamics that require different leadership approaches.
The Future Skills Centre reports that 70% of Canadian workers will need significant reskilling in the next five years. That’s not a small adjustment. That’s facing fear on a national scale.
Every single person navigating this transformation is, in some way, a ski jumper with a fear of heights. We’re all being asked to leap into uncertainty, to develop new capabilities, to lead in ways we haven’t before. The question isn’t whether we’re afraid. The question is what we do with that fear.
Leaders who pretend this isn’t scary lose credibility. Leaders who acknowledge the challenge while demonstrating commitment to moving forward anyway? Those are the leaders people will follow.
So here’s my Friday challenge for you: What’s your ski jump?
What’s the thing you’ve been telling yourself you’ll do when you’re ready, when you’re braver, when you’re more confident? What’s the career move, the conversation, the pivot you’ve been avoiding because you can’t see past the fear?
Maybe (just maybe) your fear isn’t telling you to stop. Maybe it’s telling you this matters. Maybe it’s telling you that you’re capable of more than you think. Maybe it’s telling you that the jump is worth taking.
Raimund stood at the top of that hill, looked down at everything his fear warned could go wrong, and jumped anyway, not because he wasn’t afraid, but because becoming the best version of himself mattered more than staying comfortable.
Here’s what I know from decades of working with Canadian professionals in career transition: the people who look back with regret aren’t the ones who jumped and stumbled. They’re the ones who never jumped at all. They’re the ones who let fear write their story instead of writing it themselves.
You don’t need to love heights to jump. You just need to decide if the landing is worth it.
And here’s the beautiful part: once you’ve jumped once, the second jump is still scary—but it’s a familiar kind of scary. You’ve done hard things before, and you can do hard things again. Fear stops being a wall and starts becoming a companion on the journey.
What are you jumping toward? I’d genuinely love to hear what career move or leadership challenge you’ve been afraid to make. Drop a comment or send me a message. Let’s talk about it.
Have a courageous weekend, everyone. And if you’re watching the ski jumping events, watch with new eyes.
Those athletes aren’t fearless. They’re just braver than their fears.
That’s the kind of leader worth becoming.
along the road with you!
Alan
P.S The jump never stops being scary — but you don’t have to take it alone. Our leadership solutions are built for people ready to make the leap.
👉 Learn more about our leadership programs
P.P.S If you’re standing at the edge of a career transition, and not sure if you’re ready for what comes next, our coaches can help you move forward with clarity and confidence.
Happy Friday.
Today marks the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics, and I can’t help but reflect on my experience at the Paris Olympics opening ceremony last summer. Standing among thousands of spectators, feeling that collective energy as athletes from every corner of the globe celebrated years of dedication, it was electric.
Then, watching our Canadian Olympians compete, representing everything we value as a nation, remains one of my proudest moments as a Canadian.
But here’s what really struck me: becoming an Olympian and becoming a high performing leader follow remarkably similar paths. Both require daily disciplines. Both demand resilience through inevitable failures. Both need a structure that most people can’t see from the outside.
I once trained alongside a runner pursuing a spot on the Olympic team. What fascinated me wasn’t just his physical regimen. It was how structured every single day was. Wake up time. Nutrition. Training blocks. Recovery. Sleep. Reflection. It mirrored my own leadership development journey in ways I hadn’t expected.
According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report, only 23% of employees worldwide feel engaged at work, and the primary driver of that disengagement? Poor leadership. Yet most leaders lack any structured approach to their own development beyond what their organization mandates.
That gap? That’s where potential gets lost.
The Conference Board of Canada’s research shows that 68% of Canadian employees don’t feel their leaders are adequately prepared for the complexity of today’s workplace. Harvard Business Review’s research on leadership development reveals that most executives spend less time developing their leadership capabilities than they do on administrative tasks.
Think about that. An Olympic athlete wouldn’t dream of showing up to competition without years of structured training. Yet we expect leaders to navigate increasingly complex human dynamics, economic uncertainty, and organizational change with little more than good intentions and quarterly performance reviews.
The disconnect is real, and it’s costing us.
What I learned watching that Olympic hopeful train was this: success isn’t built in the moments everyone sees. It’s built in the 5 AM wake ups. The extra recovery session when you’re exhausted. The film review of your own performance when you’d rather celebrate or forget. The small, unglamorous choices made when no one’s watching.
Leadership works the same way.
According to Gallup’s research on employee retention, the number one reason people leave is managers, not companies. And what makes a manager worth staying for? Consistent growth, self awareness, and the discipline to show up as their best self daily.
The leaders who rise aren’t necessarily the most naturally talented. They’re the most disciplined. The ones who treat leadership development like an Olympic pursuit: structured, intentional, and relentless.
So what does Olympic level leadership discipline actually look like? Based on research from Harvard Business Review, Gallup, and the patterns we see in Canada’s top performing leaders, here are the non-negotiables:
Daily reflection practice. Just 15 minutes. Harvard Business Review found that leaders who spend time in deliberate reflection perform 23% better than peers who don’t. You’re not reflecting on what went wrong. You’re building pattern recognition. You’re developing the instinct that separates good leaders from great ones.
Structured feedback loops. Olympic athletes review performance footage constantly. Leaders need equivalent systems. Research published in HBR shows that leaders who actively seek feedback at least weekly build stronger teams and navigate change more effectively. They create informal channels. They ask specific questions. They treat feedback like data, not judgment.
Physical and mental recovery. The Canadian Mental Health Commission reports that 46% of Canadian leaders experience burnout symptoms. Yet recovery isn’t weakness. It’s strategy. Olympians understand that recovery is when growth actually happens. The same applies to leadership capacity.
Skills training beyond your role. Gallup’s research shows that employees whose managers invest in their own development are 3x more likely to be engaged at work. Learning adjacent skills like communication, emotional intelligence, and strategic thinking creates the versatility that defines adaptive leaders.
Here’s what no one tells you about Olympic athletes: they fail constantly. Every training session includes missed marks, bad form, off days. The difference isn’t avoiding failure. It’s the relationship with failure.
Harvard Business Review’s research on psychological safety shows that teams led by leaders who openly discuss failures and learning demonstrate significantly higher innovation and performance. Yet most leaders hide their struggles, creating cultures where failure becomes something to avoid rather than learn from.
The Olympic mindset doesn’t eliminate failure. It reframes it. Failure becomes data. Information. Course correction.
That shift, from failure as threat to failure as feedback, might be the single most important leadership discipline you can develop.
When we watch Olympians on the podium, we see the culmination. The medal. The anthem. The glory. We don’t see the thousands of hours that came before. The injuries. The doubts. The days when quitting felt easier than continuing.
Leadership success works the same way. We see the promotion, the successful project launch, the thriving team. We don’t see the morning routine, the difficult conversations practiced in advance, the self doubt managed through structure and discipline.
According to research in Harvard Business Review on sustained leadership excellence, leaders who maintain high performance over five plus years share one common trait: they built systems, not just skills. They created daily practices that didn’t rely on motivation or inspiration. They treated leadership like training: consistent, structured, and progressive.
Today, as we watch the Winter Olympics opening ceremony, thousands of athletes will walk into that stadium carrying dreams, discipline, and years of daily choices no one witnessed.
You’re on your own leadership journey. Maybe you’re early in the process, just building your training structure. Maybe you’re mid career, wondering if the daily disciplines still matter. Maybe you’re a senior leader realizing there’s always another level of performance to unlock.
The beautiful thing about the Olympic mindset is this: it’s never too late to start training with intention. And it’s always too early to stop.
What would change if you approached Monday morning like an athlete approaches competition day? Not with pressure or perfection, but with the confidence that comes from consistent, structured preparation.
With the knowledge that you’ve done the daily work, faced the failures, and built the discipline.
Gallup tells us that employees desperately want leaders who demonstrate intentionality and self awareness. The good news? That’s completely within your control. It just requires the same mindset that gets athletes to the Olympics: daily disciplines, structured growth, and the courage to treat your leadership development as seriously as your work output.
The opening ceremony is today. Your leadership training starts Monday morning, or whenever you decide you’re ready to close the gap between who you are and who you’re capable of becoming.
Let the games begin.
Along the road with you…
Alan
Happy Friday
There is a moment in almost every big leadership story where the cameras want drama, but the truth is quieter than that.
A person prepares in plain sight for years. A lot of it is boring. Repetition. Weather checks. Equipment checks. Mental reps. Sleep. Turning down shortcuts. Choosing the same disciplined basics again and again, until your nervous system has learned what your mind believes.
Then one day, the moment arrives, and the world calls it talent.
This week, Alex Honnold stepped into one of those moments on Taipei 101. A 101-storey skyscraper that rises 508 metres above the city. The climb was postponed by the weather, then completed the next day, in roughly 90 minutes. People watched it like a spectacle, but the deeper story was not the view from the top. The deeper story was the discipline to wait, the humility to adjust, and the calm to execute when the conditions were right.
And near the end of a clip making the rounds online, his wife says something that lands like a truth, not a slogan.
At the end of the day, I just have to trust him.
That line matters because most of us are living inside some version of the same equation: desire, risk, trust, and the long, hard road of consistency that makes the impossible possible.
Honnold shared a simple message that has been resonating with many people. Look at what is possible if you follow your desire.
That can sound like motivation, but I think it is something more precise. Desire is not a mood. It is not an impulse. It is not a moment of inspiration you catch on a Tuesday morning and lose by Thursday afternoon.
Real desire is a commitment you renew.
It asks for your calendar.
It asks for your habits.
It asks for the humility to remain a beginner longer than you want to.
It asks you to practice when nobody is watching.
It asks you to do fundamentals so many times that people start to assume it must be easy for you.
That is what excellence looks like in the real world.
It looks like quiet consistency.
And if you have ever built something hard, a business, a career, a family culture, a community initiative, you know the truth: the biggest wins rarely come from intensity. They come from repetition that becomes identity.
Stories like this always carry tension because part of us admires it, while another part is unsettled by it. That is normal. Some people see the climb and feel inspiration. Others feel concern because it is hard not to think about the margin for error.
Leadership is the same.
Most leaders do not fail because they lack ambition. They fail because they do not build a mature relationship with risk.
They either become reckless, chasing outcomes that look impressive, ignoring the cost to the people around them.
Or they become so cautious that they slowly abandon the very thing they were built to do.
Great leadership is the third option.
You name the risk clearly.
You respect it.
You prepare relentlessly.
You make smart decisions in real time, even if it disappoints people.
Postponing the climb because the conditions were not safe is not a lack of courage. It is discipline. It is someone choosing the long game over the highlight reel.
Most leaders do not need more courage. They need more discernment.
That is why his wife’s comment hits so hard.
At the end of the day, I just have to trust him.
That is not a romantic line. It is not blind faith. It is the kind of trust that comes from watching the process. From seeing patterns. From knowing how someone trains, how they think, how they handle fear, how they handle ego, and how they make decisions when the stakes are real.
In organizations, people rarely say it out loud, but they are constantly doing a version of that calculation.
Do I trust my leader’s judgement?
Do I trust the way they handle pressure?
Do I trust the way they communicate when the plan changes?
Do I trust that they will tell the truth, not just what sounds good?
Do I trust that they are prepared, not just confident?
Trust is not built by big moments. Trust is built by the small, repeatable behaviours that show who you are.
Consistency creates credibility.
Credibility creates trust.
Trust creates capacity.
Capacity is what lets teams climb hard things without breaking.
If you want a blunt snapshot of the modern workplace, it is this.
Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2025 global data summary reports that 31 percent of employees in the United States and Canada are engaged.
That is not a stat you glaze over. That is a signal.
It means most people are showing up, doing what they need to do, and holding something back. Energy. Commitment. Creativity. Belief. Emotional investment.
In the same regional snapshot, Gallup reports that 52 percent of employees in the United States and Canada are thriving. That is encouraging. It also means roughly half are not.
This is why trust is not a soft topic. It is an operational topic.
When engagement sits around a third, people notice follow-through in a way they did not use to. They notice whether you keep your word. They notice whether you change direction without explanation. They notice whether your optimism is grounded in preparation or just performative confidence.
Gallup also highlights how trust in leadership has become fragile. In one widely cited measure, only 21 percent of employees strongly agree they trust their organization’s leadership. Whether you apply that number to every Canadian organization or not, the direction is clear: trust is no longer automatic.
So the leadership question becomes practical.
What are you doing consistently that makes trust rational?
Not hopeful. Not emotional. Rational.
This is where our Work. Made Better. Report adds important context. Across Canada, employees are navigating sustained change, growing fatigue, and a rising expectation that leaders show up with more clarity and humanity. When you place that reality alongside Gallup’s engagement data, a simple pattern emerges:
The workplace does not need louder leadership. It needs steadier leadership.
Our findings point to three consistent themes.
In that environment, trust stops being abstract. It becomes practical. People decide, every day, whether it feels safe to give more of themselves to the work.
Taipei 101 is a strange and perfect choice for a climber known for cliffs. It is engineered. Regulated. Segmented. It is built for efficiency and stability, not for human hands.
Modern work is starting to feel more like the building than the mountain.
More systems.
More constraints.
More visibility.
More live commentary.
More pressure to perform in public, while you are still figuring it out in private.
So what does it look like to climb well in that kind of environment?
It looks like this.
You do not let noise set your pace.
You break the climb into sections.
You focus on the next hold, not the whole building.
You accept that conditions change, and you adjust without shame.
You recognize that one unforced error can have outsized consequences.
That last point is leadership in 2026. The margin for error feels thinner. Budgets are tighter. People are stretched. Reputations move faster than facts. Teams do not have the emotional surplus they once had.
So the leaders who do well are not the loudest. They are the clearest. The most consistent. The most grounded.
If you strip away the skyscraper, here is what this story offers leaders trying to build healthy teams and achieve real results.
If someone had to trust your judgement with their workload, their stress load, and their future, would your preparation make that trust feel safe?
Or would it feel like a leap of faith?
Because at the end of the day, that is what people are deciding about us, quietly, all the time.
Not whether we can do the big thing once.
But whether we have built the kind of consistency that makes the big thing sustainable.
And whether our ambition is anchored by responsibility.
That is the real climb.
Along the road with you
Alan
P.S
If you’re leading through complexity right now and want support that is practical, human, and grounded in real work, our leadership programs are designed to help leaders build clarity, trust, and consistency, especially when the margin for error feels thin.
👉 Learn more about our leadership programs
P.P.S
Workforce transitions are never just operational. How they’re handled shapes trust, morale, and what comes next. Our outplacement services support the human side of change — helping organizations navigate transitions with care, clarity, and respect for the people involved.
Happy Friday,
I watched Mark Carney’s Davos speech and felt that rare thing you get maybe a handful of times a year. A public leader naming something out loud that most people are privately thinking, but have been tiptoeing around because it feels impolite, risky, or just too heavy to say in a room full of power.
He called it a rupture, not a transition. He said the rules-based order is fading. And he used a metaphor from Václav Havel that hit like a clean punch.
A greengrocer puts a sign in his window every day. “Workers of the world, unite!” He does not believe it. No one believes it. But he puts it up anyway to avoid trouble and signal compliance.
Havel’s point was simple: systems do not survive on truth alone. They also survive on rituals. On people performing belief because it is safer than naming reality.
Carney’s message was that we are in a moment where pretending is no longer a strategy, and compliance does not buy safety.
That is the part I want to talk about today, because leadership is not just about vision, values, and culture decks. Leadership is about the courage to take the sign out of the window.
Not once. Every day.
In organizations, we rarely call it “living within a lie.” We soften it. We call it alignment. We call it strategic patience. We call it not rocking the boat. We call it “how things work around here.”
But you know the feeling.
You sit in a meeting where everyone repeats a story that no longer fits the data. Sales are “fine” even though pipeline quality is collapsing. Engagement is “steady” even though your best people are quietly interviewing. Your restructure is “rightsizing,” even though everyone knows it is a scramble to fix decisions that should have been made two years ago. Your AI plan is “accelerating productivity,” even though half the team is scared to admit they don’t understand what is changing.
You can feel the sign in the window.
Carney’s point, through Havel, is that these rituals become a kind of glue. They keep the system stable. Until they do not. And the danger is that stability becomes a substitute for truth.
In Davos, he makes a point that the power of the less powerful begins with honesty. That line matters in geopolitics, but it matters just as much inside a company where people feel decisions are happening to them rather than with them.
If you are leading anything right now, a team, a division, a whole organization, you are either rewarding truth-telling or you are rewarding sign-keeping. There is no neutral setting.
Most leaders have been trained for transition.
Transition assumes continuity. The system holds. The rules broadly work. You can tweak, modernize, and optimize while still trusting the underlying structure.
Rupture is different. Rupture means some of the assumptions that made your playbook work are no longer reliable.
Carney names a world where economic tools are used as weapons, where institutions are diminished, where strategic autonomy matters again, and where middle powers have to cooperate or be bullied.
Translate that into workplace leadership, and you get something like this:
Rupture is when your talent market changes faster than your compensation model.
Rupture is when the psychological contract at work breaks, and you cannot fix it with a new slogan.
Rupture is when your clients stop buying “bundles” and start buying outcomes.
Rupture occurs when your technology changes the work faster than your managers can lead people through the emotional impact.
In rupture, nostalgia becomes seductive. Leaders want the old normal back because it is familiar. Carney says it plainly: the old order is not coming back. Nostalgia is not a strategy.
That line belongs in more boardrooms.
One of the smartest moves Carney makes is refusing the false choice between values and power.
He frames Canada’s approach as principled and pragmatic, what he calls values-based realism. He talks about calibrating relationships so their depth reflects values, while also building strength at home and diversifying partnerships abroad.
That is a grown-up leadership stance. It is not idealism. It is not cynicism. It is a refusal to outsource your safety to wishful thinking.
In business terms, values-based realism looks like this:
You keep your standards, but you stop pretending every partner shares them.
You keep your culture, but you stop confusing culture with comfort.
You keep your mission, but you build the operational muscle to deliver it under pressure.
This is where many leaders struggle. They want to be principled, but they avoid the hard conversations that would make the organization more resilient. Or they get pragmatic, but they start shaving the values down until the team no longer trusts what leadership says.
Carney’s phrase that stuck with me was this: we are no longer relying only on the strength of our values, but also on the value of our strength.
That is not about becoming aggressive. It is about becoming capable.
Carney spends time on strategic autonomy: energy, food, critical minerals, finance, supply chains. The idea is straightforward. If the rules do not protect you, you must protect yourself.
Organizations have their own version of this.
Strategic autonomy is the capacity to keep operating when conditions tighten.
It is the ability to deliver without a single point of failure.
It is building bench strength instead of worshipping a few heroes.
It is making sure your knowledge does not live only in one person’s head.
It is reducing dependency on a single customer, market, vendor, channel, or leader.
I have seen this up close in restructures. The organizations that land best are not the ones with the prettiest messaging. They are the ones who have done the unglamorous work of building operational resilience before a crisis hits. They have options. They have redundancy. They have trusted relationships. They have leaders who are used to telling the truth early.
The ones that struggle are often the ones who believed the story that “it will probably be fine.” That is sign language.
Carney talks about different coalitions for different issues, and a dense web of connections across trade, investment, and culture.
Leadership takeaway: stop relying on one relationship to carry everything.
Modern work is coalition work.
The best leaders I know are not just managing their direct reports. They are building a network of trust across functions, levels, and external partners. They have a habit of connecting people who should know each other. They invest in credibility before they need it.
Carney drops a blunt, memorable line: if you are not at the table, you are on the menu.
In organizations, that is what happens to teams that do not build relationships across the enterprise. They get decided for. They get restructured without context.
Their work gets outsourced. Their budget gets cut because nobody understands the value they create. Not because they are bad people, but because they are not connected to power and narrative.
Coalition leadership is not politics. It is survival.
Here are three practical plays, written in human terms.
Name what is true before you name what is inspiring.
1. Name what is true before you name what is inspiring
If your people do not feel reality in your words, they will not trust your vision. Start with the rupture. What has changed? What is harder? What is no longer working?
What you do not know yet. Carney’s framing works because he starts with honesty, not spin.
2. Replace rituals with decisions
Every organization has rituals that signal comfort: status meetings that solve nothing, dashboards nobody uses, slogans that cover anxiety, performance language that avoids clarity. Pick one sign this quarter and remove it. Replace it with a decision that reduces ambiguity. People can handle hard news. They cannot handle endless pretending.
3. Build strength that matches your values
If you say you care about people, invest in leaders who can hold hard conversations. If you say you care about innovation, invest in capability, not just tools. If you say you care about trust, stop rewarding the people who keep bad news quiet. The value of your strength shows up in moments of pressure.
There is something specifically Canadian in Carney’s approach.
Not passive. Not loud. Clear-eyed. Coalition-minded. Practical. Values anchored.
It is a reminder that you do not have to be the biggest player in the room to lead. But you do have to stop pretending the room is governed by rules that are no longer enforced.
That applies to countries. It applies to companies. It applies to leadership teams navigating AI, inflation, talent volatility, and the quiet exhaustion sitting under the surface of so many workplaces.
He ends with a refusal to mourn. The old order is not coming back, and from the fracture, something better can be built if people stop performing.
That is the work.
Not optimism as a personality trait. Optimism as a discipline. Built on honesty, strength, and relationships that hold.
So here is the question I am carrying forward from Davos:
What signs are still in your window that you do not believe, and what would change if you took just one down this week?
Along the road with you!
Alan
P.S. Are you an executive in the Public Service looking to enhance your influence, build your network and better understand the interview process? Join us, in partnership with APEX at our upcoming Executive Career Series Panel Conversation on February 3 + 4.
Join our panelists;
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