Friday Leadership Report | Alan Kearns, Founder & Managing Partner, CareerJoy
Happy Friday,
I grew up in a house where my mother was the strongest voice in the room, and my father spent decades making sure everyone else knew it too. He was not threatened by her ambition. He championed it, professionally and personally, out loud and often. That was the model of leadership I inherited before I ever coached a single client.
Last week the world lost Gloria Steinem, one of the defining leaders of the feminist movement, at 92. I will admit I did not know her full story as well as I should have. Reading her biography this week, what struck me was how ordinary her starting point was. No Ivy League pedigree. No early privilege, economic or academic. Her breakthrough did not arrive as a single dramatic moment. It arrived one step in front of the other.
In 1968, an editor named Clay Felker hired her at New York magazine. Covering an abortion speak-out in Greenwich Village, she coined the phrase “reproductive freedom.” She had had an abortion herself in London at 22, and she later described that day in the Village as a turning point, a moment she called her “big click,” the start of her life as an active feminist. What she said about it stuck with me. She described it as the first time she took full responsibility for her own life, rather than letting things happen to her.
That is the sentence I want to sit with this Friday. Not the politics of the moment. The decision underneath it. She chose to direct her own life instead of letting it be directed for her. That is the same decision my mother made a generation earlier in her own career, and it is the same decision every leader I coach eventually has to make, regardless of what field they are in or what year they were born.
Steinem and women like my mother were generationally ahead of their time. They laid the foundation for a professional landscape that looks entirely different today. Statistics Canada released new data this March showing women now hold 23.2 percent of board director seats and 21.7 percent of top officer roles at Canadian corporations, both figures climbing steadily since 2016. The Federation of Law Societies of Canada reports that more than half of Canadian law school graduates are now women, and women make up the majority of lawyers with five years or less in practice. The Canadian Medical Association’s own data shows more than 40 percent of practising physicians in Canada are women, with well over half of current medical students being women.
Here is the part worth noticing. The entry points have opened wide. The senior ranks are still catching up. Women dominate the front door of these professions and remain underrepresented at the top of them. That gap is not evidence the work is finished. It is evidence of exactly how long foundational change takes to move through a system, and why the generation that broke the door open matters so much to the generation now walking through it.
The same pattern that reshaped law offices and hospital wards has now crossed fully into sport. The PWHL just closed its third regular season having drawn over 1.1 million fans across 120 games, an average of more than 9,300 fans per night, up 28 percent over the previous season and 71 percent over its inaugural year. Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, and Vancouver anchor a league that did not exist three years ago and is now setting attendance records in NHL arenas.
That growth did not happen because women’s hockey suddenly became good. It happened because the infrastructure, the investment, and the belief finally caught up to talent that had always been there. Basketball and soccer are following the same arc globally. This is not a niche trend. It is what happens whenever a system finally makes room for capability that was already present.
This week’s [LQ] question
At CareerJoy, we track this same pattern in our coaching work, captured over the years in the Work. Made Better. Report. The leaders who move fastest, regardless of gender, are rarely the ones waiting for permission or perfect circumstances. They are the ones who make an early, deliberate decision to stop letting their career happen to them and start directing it. That is the throughline from Steinem’s Greenwich Village moment to the leader in your own organization who finally stopped waiting to be noticed and started building the case for themselves. Self-direction is not a personality trait some leaders are born with. It is a decision, available to anyone, at any point in a career.
The question worth carrying into your weekend is simple. Where in your own leadership are you still waiting for something to happen to you, when the more honest move would be to direct it yourself?
Activism, like leadership, is rarely won in a single dramatic act. It is won chapter by chapter, through patient, brilliant work driven by passion and a clear sense of justice, far more than by anger. Steinem understood that. So did my mother. So, I suspect, do many of the leaders reading this.
Along the road with you,
Alan
Get a first look at the 2026 Work. Made Better. Report, exploring what helps people take ownership of their careers, lead with intention, and create workplaces where others can do the same.
Great leadership starts with the willingness to act, create clarity, and make things happen, even when the path isn’t perfectly clear. Explore CareerJoy’s leadership solutions for practical support in building stronger leaders and teams.
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.
Friday Leadership Report | Alan Kearns, Founder & Managing Partner, CareerJoy
Happy Friday,
I was standing in a Starbucks line last week, half listening to the order ahead of me. Oat milk, half sweet, extra hot, one pump instead of two. It took the barista three tries to get it right. I did some digging afterward and found the number that stopped me.
Starbucks has said publicly that its menu supports somewhere north of 170,000 possible drink combinations. Some estimates put the real number, once you count every modifier, well into the millions.
Nobody needs that many ways to order coffee. And yet here we are, standing in line, quietly exhausted by our own freedom to choose.
That is not just a coffee problem.
It is a leadership problem.
Many leaders we coach are drowning in optionality.
Which project gets resourced first. Which of six software tools the team should standardize on. Which of the four ways to deliver difficult feedback fits this particular person.
Robert Half Canada’s research, reported through The Logic, found that roughly one in four Canadian workers now describe themselves as burnt out, up from about one in five just a year earlier.
That is not a productivity problem. It is a volume problem. Too many open doors, not enough walls to lean against.
We have built a culture that treats unlimited options as a gift to leaders. I think it is closer to a trap.
A story crossed my desk about a training method called the Constraints Led Approach, or CLA, that is quietly reshaping how elite athletes learn.
For decades, sports training worked like this. Break a skill into its smallest parts, drill each part in isolation, hope it transfers to the chaos of a real game. Researchers now call this block training, and the evidence says it produces players who look perfect in practice and freeze under real pressure.
The CLA flips that model. Coaches deliberately add restrictions, a smaller playing area, a heavier ball, a defender who is not allowed to use his hands, and force the athlete to solve the problem in front of them, right now, with limited tools.
WNBA champion Kelsey Plum described what that shift did for her career. She said, “It changed my career.” Before the CLA, she was skilled but not purposeful. The constraint gave her purpose.
Kenny Atkinson brought this thinking into his interview for the Cleveland Cavaliers head coaching job, built around the idea that removing options, not adding them, was the path to a sharper team.
Professor Keith Davids, who coined the term CLA back in 1994, put it simply. He said, “Context shapes everything.” Take a person out of a realistic, limited environment and you do not get a better decision maker. You get someone who has only ever practised in a vacuum.
Liverpool’s goalkeeping coach, Fabian Otte, took this even further with his players. Anfield on a big match day is roughly 60,000 people singing at full volume, and no training pitch can replicate that noise. So Otte did the opposite of what you would expect.
Instead of piping in crowd noise to simulate the chaos, he handed his goalkeepers, including a global star like Alisson, construction earmuffs that blocked out sound entirely.
Strip away one input, and the brain has no choice but to sharpen the others. His players learned to read the game visually, without the audio cues they had always leaned on. When the real crowd noise hit on match day, they were already prepared for something harder than what they would actually face.
That is the part I keep coming back to. Otte did not add a variable. He removed one, on purpose, and the removal is what built the skill.
Here is what struck me. The athletes who thrive under the CLA are not the ones with the most options. They are the ones who have learned to find the one right move inside a tight, well-designed box. Fewer choices, sharper reads, faster execution.
In our own leadership work at CareerJoy, captured over the years, we hear a version of this constantly from senior leaders across the federal public service,, the Canadian Forces, health care and financial services.
The leaders who feel most in control are rarely the ones with the most options on the table. They are the ones who have built deliberate limits into how they decide.
A rule that says no more than three vendors get considered. A standing meeting that only allows two agenda items. A personal policy of never answering an email in the first hour of the day.
The constraint is not a restriction. It is the thing that makes a fast, confident decision possible.
Unlimited choice feels like freedom. In practice, it is often just friction wearing a nicer name.
The Robert Half Canada data is worth sitting with for a moment longer. Nearly a quarter of the Canadian workforce is telling researchers they are running on empty, and the trend line is moving the wrong way. Fatigue, low motivation, and slipping efficiency were the top three symptoms respondents named.
None of that surprises me. What does surprise me is how rarely we treat the volume of decisions a person faces in a day as the actual root cause. We treat burnout as a workload problem when it is often a choice architecture problem.
A leader who has to make forty unstructured decisions before lunch is not weak. They are undersupported by their own systems.
You do not need a sports science lab to apply this. Pick one area of your leadership where options have quietly multiplied past the point of usefulness. Maybe it is how you run one-on-ones. Maybe it is how many channels your team uses to reach you. Maybe it is how many strategic priorities you are technically holding at once.
Cut it down to a number that forces a sharper read. Three priorities, not nine. Two communication channels, not five. One consistent framework for hard conversations, not four depending on your mood.
Then hold the line. The constraint only works if it is real.
I think about this every time I board a WestJet flight. A pilot does not have unlimited options for how to respond to turbulence or a system alert. They have a checklist, built from decades of removing variables that do not matter so the ones that do stand out immediately.
Nobody would call that checklist a limitation on the pilot’s judgment. It is what makes fast, sound judgment possible at thirty-five thousand feet. Our teams deserve the same kind of scaffolding, whether that shows up in how you run a hiring process, how you structure a budget review, or how you decide what earns a place on this week’s agenda.
The same applies to hiring, an area where I watch leaders drown themselves in optionality more than almost any other. A search with twelve open criteria and no ranking produces a slower, worse decision than a search built around three non-negotiables and a clear tiebreaker.
The constraint is not there to limit the talent pool. It is there to let you actually recognize the right person when they show up.
This week’s [LQ] question
Where in your leadership have you mistaken more options for more freedom, and what would you have to cut to find your own version of Kelsey Plum’s purposeful game?
I will be thinking about that Starbucks line differently from now on. Sometimes the kindest thing a leader can do, for themselves and for their team, is close a few doors on purpose.
Along the road with you,
Alan
Get a first look at the 2026 Work. Made Better. Report, exploring how leadership and workplace culture shape how people show up, support one another, and feel about the work they do.
Great leadership is about creating the right constraints to bring clarity, sharpen decisions, and help people move forward with confidence. Explore CareerJoy’s leadership solutions to build stronger leadership practices.
Friday Leadership Report | Alan Kearns, Founder & Managing Partner, CareerJoy
Happy Friday,
I fly a lot. I was fortunate to grow up in a home where travel was part of life, and I can still remember my first flight on a United Airlines 747, headed to Hawaii as a kid, pressing my face to the window and thinking the plane looked bigger than our street.
That memory has never left me. I have logged a lot of miles since, for both pleasure and business, and somewhere along the way I became a genuinely calm traveller. I am grateful for that. Flying rattles a lot of people, and I understand why. But for me it has always felt like a pocket of stillness between two versions of a busy life.
These days I mostly fly WestJet. Part of that is personal. My son Aidan is a first officer with WestJet, based in Vancouver, and our family gets a travel benefit because of it, which I do not take for granted. But truthfully, even before that, I had already found myself drawn to WestJet’s culture. There is a warmth to the service that feels less scripted and more human than what I have experienced elsewhere.
A big part of what makes any flight memorable is not the aircraft. It is the seat you land in, the people you happen to sit beside, and the way the crew treats you. On a recent flight to Vancouver, one crew member gave me a small, quiet lesson in leadership that I have been thinking about ever since.
I like to chat with crew members when I fly. On this trip, I noticed a newer flight attendant, in his first week on the job, doing what most of us do when we are new anywhere. He was pleasant, capable, and still finding his footing. He asked a steady stream of questions throughout the flight to a more senior colleague, and that senior colleague is where the real story begins.
This man had a quiet, joyful calm about him. It showed up with passengers and with his own crew. Every time the new hire asked a question, he answered with patience and warmth, never rushed, never short. There was no performance in it. It was simply how he operated, flight after flight, question after question. What struck me most was not any single interaction. It was the consistency of it.
As we began our descent, I asked to speak with him directly. I told him what I had noticed, that his professionalism stood out, and that it was obvious he genuinely enjoyed his role. His name is Nigel Jacobsen. He has been in the industry for decades, including time on the Concorde. He shared that he could have retired years ago. He chooses not to. It showed in everything he did that day.
The flight attendant role is harder than most passengers give it credit for. It blends hospitality with safety, and it requires standing for hours, managing turbulence, and absorbing rudeness from passengers in a way pilots rarely have to. Nigel had clearly decided, somewhere along the way, that none of that would change how he showed up. We got to talking, and it turned out he was based in Vancouver too, and had flown many times with my son. When I spoke with Aidan afterward, he confirmed what I had already sensed. Nige, as the crew calls him, is a consummate professional, well liked by everyone he works with. I will admit the proud father moment was real.
Great brands are not built by mission statements.
They are built by people doing small things and big things the same way, every single time, regardless of who is watching. Airlines have planes, but like every organization, they are fundamentally human first experiences. They are shaped by people like Nigel, patiently mentoring someone in their first week, and by people like Aidan, quietly earning a reputation for skill and character among colleagues who fly with him again and again.
This is where I think a lot of Canadian leadership development sometimes gets it backward.
We chase charisma, big gestures, and grand strategic vision, when the actual differentiator inside most organizations is far less glamorous. It is whether someone can be trusted to show up the same way tomorrow as they did today. ADP Canada’s Workplace Trends report for 2026 names keeping work human-centric as one of the defining priorities for employers this year, even as technology and AI reshape nearly every function inside an organization. That is not a coincidence. The more automated and accelerated work becomes, the more consistency, patience, and genuine care stand out as the things that cannot be replicated.
Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends research backs this up from another angle. Nearly two-thirds of organizations surveyed believe their culture needs to change significantly because of AI. Leaders everywhere are wrestling with how to hold onto the human edge while everything around them speeds up. Nigel never read that report. He did not need to. He was living the answer at thirty-five thousand feet, one patient answer to a first-week question at a time.
In our own 2025 Work. Made Better. Report research, we see this pattern again and again across Canadian workplaces. When people describe the job or the organization that changed how they felt about their career, they rarely point to a policy or a perk. They point to a person. A manager who noticed them. A colleague who mentored them without being asked.
Someone who was consistent when consistency was not required of them.
That is the uncomfortable truth for a lot of Canadian organizations right now. You can build an excellent onboarding program, a competitive total rewards package, and a well designed engagement survey, and still lose people because the daily human experience did not match the brand promise. Culture is not what is written on the wall in the lobby. It is what happens between a new hire and a mentor on a Tuesday afternoon flight to Vancouver, with nobody from head office watching.
A few things stood out to me from that flight that I think apply directly to leadership, wherever you sit in an organization.
First, model the behaviour you want repeated, not the behaviour you want performed. Nigel was not putting on a show for me. He was simply doing what he always does. Leaders who are consistent in private, with no audience, are the ones whose teams actually absorb the standard.
Second, treat mentorship as part of the job, not an interruption to it. That senior flight attendant answered every question from his newer colleague as though it were the most important part of his shift, because in a real sense, it was. The people who will carry your culture forward five years from now are the ones being mentored today.
Third, remember that frontline roles carry weight that leadership often underestimates. The people closest to your customers are absorbing the hardest parts of the job, often with the least recognition. Noticing them, by name, matters more than most leaders realize.
Fourth, understand that longevity paired with genuine enjoyment is a leadership signal worth studying. Nigel could have retired years ago. He stayed because he still finds meaning in the work. Ask yourself who on your team fits that description, and ask what your organization is doing to make sure they stay.
Nigel’s story is a living example of what we measure inside [LQ] Leadership Intelligence.
Technical competence gets someone hired. Consistency, patience, and genuine care for the people around them are what make someone the person a new hire remembers for the rest of their career. That is the human layer of leadership that [LQ] is built to surface and strengthen in the leaders we coach.
Great organizations are not built by a single dramatic moment. They are built the way Nigel built his reputation, one patient answer, one calm presence, one small consistent choice at a time. If you lead people, in the air or on the ground, that is the standard worth aiming for.
Along the road with you,
Alan
Get a first look at the 2026 Work. Made Better. Report, exploring how leadership and workplace culture shape how people show up, support one another, and feel about the work they do.
Great leadership isn’t always about the big moment. It’s about how you show up day after day. CareerJoy’s leadership solutions help leaders strengthen the human side of leadership and build the kind of consistency people remember.
→ Develop the human side of leadership
Friday Leadership Report | Alan Kearns, Founder & Managing Partner, CareerJoy
Happy Friday,
I would love golf if it were six holes. I’ve said this out loud to more than one club member and gotten the same polite, pitying look each time, but I’m sticking to it. I love being outside, I love the game’s rhythm, I just don’t need eighteen holes of it to feel the pull. Give me six and I’m satisfied.
There’s a course I pass every time I drive up to the cottage, tucked along the Rideau corridor near Smiths Falls, Ontario. It’s an unassuming stretch of fairway you’d drive right by without a second look, except that it happens to be where one of Canada’s most successful female golfers learned the game. Brooke Henderson started swinging a club there at age three, taught by family, shaped by a small-town club, and eventually turned into a two-time major champion and the winningest Canadian professional golfer in history, man or woman.
Henderson made headlines again this summer, not for a tournament finish but for an engagement. What struck me wasn’t the announcement itself, it was what she said around it. After a stretch that included the loss of her longtime caddie (her sister Brittany, on maternity leave), a run of quiet results, and then a resurgence at the majors, Henderson credited her life off the course for fuelling her success on it. Not despite it. Because of it.
That is not a small thing for a leader to sit with.
I hear this phrase constantly in coaching conversations: “I’m good at compartmentalizing. Work stays at work.” It’s said with a kind of pride, as though the ability to wall off one part of life from another is a leadership skill worth boasting about.
I don’t believe it’s true, and I don’t think it’s even possible in the way people mean it. We are not two different people, a work version and a home version, switching costumes at the office door. We are one person carrying one nervous system, one set of relationships, one capacity for patience and presence, through every room we walk into. What depletes you in one context shows up as residue in the next. What restores you in one context shows up as fuel in the next. Henderson’s own words made that plain: her relationship, her family, her faith, all of it was not a distraction from her golf, it was the foundation under it.
Canadian leaders are, slowly, starting to reckon with this. But the data suggests we still have real ground to cover, and it lands hardest on the people running the organization.
Statistics Canada’s new Canadian Survey on Working Conditions, released in January 2026, is the first release of its kind, and it puts hard numbers to something leaders often only sense anecdotally. Workers in management occupations reported frequently working to tight deadlines at nearly double the rate of workers in jobs requiring a high school diploma or less, and over a third of managers said they completed unpaid work in their free time several times a month or more just to keep up. Men in particular reported workdays stretching past ten hours at close to double the rate of women, a pattern that quietly reshapes what happens at home long after the workday is supposed to have ended.
A separate national study from Mental Health Research Canada, surveying over five thousand employed Canadians, found that thirty-nine per cent of employees now report feeling burnt out often or always, up from thirty-five per cent just two years earlier. The same research points to something leaders can actually act on: organizations that treat burnout prevention as a real priority see burnout rates nearly cut in half compared to those that don’t, translating into meaningful savings per employee and a far healthier culture to lead inside of.
Read those numbers together and a pattern emerges. It isn’t that Canadian workers, or Canadian leaders, lack resilience. It’s that the structure of modern work, tight deadlines, blurred hours, unpaid overflow into evenings and weekends, keeps asking people to absorb strain quietly rather than address it structurally.
This is the part of the conversation I find leaders resist the longest, because it asks them to take responsibility for something that used to be considered private territory. But the research keeps closing that gap. When work strips someone of energy, patience, and a sense of control, that depletion doesn’t stay behind at the parking lot. It sits down at the dinner table. It shortens tempers with kids. It shows up as a distraction during a partner’s story about their day. And the reverse holds too, a stable, energizing, respected role at work becomes a resource people carry home and spend on the people they love.
I was in exactly this conversation yesterday with a CEO who is building an intentional leadership development program across their organization, specifically because they’ve started connecting the dots between how their leaders show up day to day and the ripple effects landing in their people’s homes, marriages, and communities. It wasn’t framed as a wellness initiative. It was framed as a culture strategy with a business case attached, because retention, engagement, and performance are all downstream of it.
This is the terrain we dug into with our Work. Made Better. Report, which looked closely at how Canadian organizations are rethinking the relationship between workplace culture and the wider lives their people lead. The throughline in that research mirrors what I hear in coaching rooms across the country: leaders who treat “work” and “life” as one continuous system, rather than two competing ones, build teams that are steadier, more loyal, and more resilient under pressure.
Start by retiring the language of separation. Stop praising people, including yourself, for the ability to shut work off like a switch or to never let home “leak into” the office. Neither is realistic, and pretending otherwise just pushes the strain underground where it’s harder to see and harder to support.
Instead, look at your culture through a single, integrated lens. Ask what your team’s workload, your meeting culture, your response-time expectations, your definition of a “committed” employee, are actually costing people once they leave the building. Then ask what a healthier version would look like, not as a perk, but as a design principle.
At CareerJoy, we use our [LQ] framework with leaders to help them see exactly where their own capacity is being spent, and where it could be protected and reinvested, both in their teams and in their own lives outside of work. It’s one small piece of a much bigger truth: leadership development isn’t just an organizational lever. It’s a family and community lever. Coast to coast, when we help someone lead better at work, we are, whether we name it explicitly or not, also helping them show up better at their kitchen table.
Brooke Henderson didn’t get engaged and then, coincidentally, play some of the best golf of her career. She built a life that made the golf possible. That’s not a coincidence available only to elite athletes. It’s available to every leader willing to stop pretending they’re two people, and start building a life, and a workplace, that supports the one person they actually are.
Even if, like me, you’d still rather play six holes than eighteen.
Along the road with you,
Alan
Get a first look at the 2026 Work. Made Better. Report, exploring how leadership, workplace culture, and the employee experience shape how people show up, not just at work, but in their lives beyond it.
Leadership isn’t about separating work from life. It’s about building the capacity to lead in a way that supports your people, performance, and life beyond work. That’s what CareerJoy’s leadership solutions are designed to help you do.
Friday Leadership Report | Alan Kearns, Founder & Managing Partner, CareerJoy
Happy Friday,
There is an old line that gets repeated so often it has lost most of its bite: you can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink. I used to think that was a tidy little proverb about stubbornness. I do not think that anymore.
A few years ago, I took riding lessons. I expected to feel confident, perhaps even a little in control. Instead, I felt much like a new leader in their first week with a team they did not build: fascinated, humbled, and more than a little intimidated. A horse weighs half a tonne and can sense hesitation in your hands before you recognize it yourself. There is no faking that relationship. The horse knows whether you are truly present or merely acting the part, and it responds accordingly.
A family member competes at a high level in equestrian sport; watching her with her horse shows what many workplaces have forgotten how to build. It is not command and obedience, but a relationship formed through countless small moments. The horse follows because it trusts where she is leading. No one drags a half-tonne animal over a jump; it goes because it chooses to go with her.
What strikes me most, watching that relationship up close, is how much of it happens before competition day. The trust is not built in the ring. It is built in the quiet, repetitive, unglamorous work of grooming, feeding, showing up the same way every single day, long before there is a ribbon on the line. Leadership works the same way. Nobody trusts a leader because of what happens in the crisis meeting. They trust a leader because of the hundred ordinary Tuesdays that came before it.
Monty Roberts died at the end of July, at 91, on the same California ranch where he spent most of his life. If the name is unfamiliar, his work will not be. He was the real horseman behind the idea people now call The Horse Whisperer, and he spent his life objecting, gently but firmly, to that word. He did not whisper to horses. He listened to them.
For six thousand years, horses were broken. Roberts grew up watching his own father do it that way, and he grew up questioning it. He spent his youth observing wild mustangs and noticed something that changed the entire profession. Herds are not led by the most dominant animal. They are led by the mare who has earned the trust of the herd through consistency, not force. Roberts built a method called Join-Up around that insight. Instead of breaking a horse’s will, a trainer earns its willingness. The horse is given the choice to approach, and it chooses to.
That is the whole method. Offer trust. Let the choice be real. Wait.
Queen Elizabeth II saw him demonstrate it in 1989 and became one of his most devoted champions for the rest of her life. His memoir sold more than five million copies. But the detail that stays with me is smaller than any of that. He did not call what he did dominance training or performance coaching or anything with an acronym. He called it listening, and he insisted that was the harder skill.
Here is where the horse barn and the boardroom stop being two different places.
The TELUS Mental Health Index has found that Canadian employees who report strong leadership from their manager score up to 21 points higher on measures of overall mental health than those who do not. Twenty-one points is not a rounding error. It is the difference between a workforce that is functioning and one that is quietly breaking down, and the variable driving that gap is not compensation or workload. It is whether people trust the person leading them.
I think about that stat next to Roberts’ mustangs. A horse that trusts its handler will walk into a trailer, jump a fence it cannot fully see over, stand still while someone works near its legs. None of that is natural behaviour for a prey animal. It only happens because trust has replaced fear as the operating system. Canadian employees are not so different. People will follow a leader into ambiguity, into a hard restructuring, into a stretch assignment that scares them, when trust is the foundation. Absent that trust, you can still get compliance. You will not get discretionary effort, and you will not get honesty when something is going wrong.
Join-Up works because it flips the traditional question. Traditional training asks, how do I get this animal to do what I want? Join-Up asks, what do I need to do so this animal chooses to be with me?
Many Canadian workplaces still ask the first question, only with more polished language. Engagement surveys, recognition programs, and wellness perks can all be useful, but they often still come from the same place: how do we get people to do what we want? Leaders who build lasting cultures ask the second question instead: what do I need to do so my team chooses to bring their full selves here, even when no one is watching?
Our own research at CareerJoy, through the upcoming The 2026 Work. Made Better Report, points to the same pattern from a different angle. The teams with the strongest performance outcomes are rarely the ones with the most oversight. They are the ones where trust has replaced surveillance as the default. It is slower to build. It is much faster to destroy. And it cannot be faked, which brings me back to that horse sensing your hesitation before you do.
We built [LQ] around a simple, uncomfortable observation. Most leadership development programs are still organized around competencies. Strategic thinking, communication, decision making, the usual list. Competencies matter, but they are not what determines whether a team chooses to follow someone into difficulty. Character does.
[LQ] defines four dimensions that determine whether a leader earns genuine followership or only compliance. Culture is the dimension most leadership programs overlook. A leader can be technically strong and still lead a team that does only the minimum because people do not trust what will happen if they raise concerns. Roberts understood this about horses long before most organizations understood it about people. The animal is not checking your résumé; it is deciding whether you are safe enough to be honest with.
That, in the end, is what psychological safety measures in a Canadian workplace. Not whether people are comfortable. Whether they believe telling you the truth will cost them something.
You cannot join-up a horse in an afternoon, and you cannot rebuild trust with a team in one all-hands meeting. But you can start the way Roberts started, by changing the question you are asking.
Stop asking how to get more performance out of people. Ask what you need to do so they choose to bring you their best without being prompted. Notice where you rely on control because it is faster, and be honest about what that speed costs in trust, honesty, and discretionary effort. Give people a real choice this week: how to approach a project, where to hold a meeting, or which problem to solve first. Then let their choice stand.
Watch, too, for the moments you are tempted to manage the reaction instead of the relationship. Roberts never tried to control how a mustang felt about him. He controlled what he offered it. Consistency, patience, room to approach on its own terms. That is a harder discipline than it sounds, especially for leaders who are rewarded for speed and decisiveness. But it is the only version of trust that holds up under pressure, which is exactly when Canadian teams need it most.
Roberts spent his whole career proving that force produces obedience and trust produces partnership. Canadian leaders are being asked to build partnership right now, in workplaces still adjusting to hybrid schedules, still absorbing economic pressure, still trying to figure out what loyalty even means anymore. The lesson from a ranch in California, and from a saddle I was not nearly as comfortable in as I hoped to be, is the same lesson either way.
You cannot make the horse drink. You can only become someone worth following to the water.
Along the road with you,
Alan
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It’s built in the hundred ordinary Tuesdays that came before it. That kind of consistency doesn’t happen by accident, and it’s what CareerJoy’s leadership solutions are built to support.
→ We can help you build that trust
Friday Leadership Report | Alan Kearns, Founder & Managing Partner, CareerJoy
Happy Friday.
Last weekend at the cottage, we noticed something strange out on the bay. A whole gathering of loons. We are not loon experts, but we know our lake. Two loons live in our bay, and they are territorial by nature. Seeing a crowd of them together was something we had never witnessed before, so naturally, we looked it up.
If you spend any time on Big Rideau this time of year, this is a good question to ask, because loon behaviour changes noticeably in late summer. Chicks raised through July and August are becoming independent, foraging on their own, which makes family groups overlap in ways that look like a sudden population boom. Adults are also molting, shedding flight feathers and becoming temporarily grounded, so they gather on large, food rich lakes where it is safer to feed while they cannot fly. And with breeding season winding down, birds that spent June defending their patch of water become far more tolerant of company. The territorial yodel gives way to softer tremolos and contact calls. The choir changes because the purpose changes.
On a lake the size of Big Rideau, five to fifteen loons together in late August is not unusual. Occasionally, especially as migration nears, you will see twenty or more in one spot. It is a quiet, slightly bittersweet marker of the season. The adults lose their sharp black and white breeding plumage, turn a duller grey, and begin the journey toward the Atlantic coast or the Great Lakes. If you have been hearing loons calling at dusk lately, that is the sound of families regrouping before the trip south.
I could not stop thinking about what that gathering means, because our team is doing something similar this September. We are moving to a hybrid model, in the office together every Tuesday and Thursday. And the loons, it turns out, are a pretty good metaphor for why that matters.
Canada’s remote work numbers have been telling a consistent story for four straight years. Statistics Canada reports that only 17.4% of employed Canadians were working mostly from home by mid-2025, down from the pandemic peak, while 77.6% were working entirely outside the home. The drift back to shared space has not been dramatic, but it has been steady, and it has not reversed.
What has changed is not just where people work, but how deliberately companies are designing the days people spend together. Robert Half Canada’s most recent workplace research found that a large share of employers now offer hybrid arrangements to employees at every level, not just senior staff, and that most workers are spending fewer than five full days a week in the office. In other words, the fight over full-time in-office versus full-time remote has mostly settled into something more interesting: leaders choosing which days matter enough to gather for, and building those days on purpose rather than defaulting to habit or policy.
That is exactly what our loons were doing. They were not gathering because a memo told them to. They gathered because late summer made proximity useful again. Food was concentrated. Safety in numbers mattered more than territory. The value of being together, for a season, outweighed the value of staying apart.
Our Work. Made Better. Report continues to surface the same pattern across Canadian organizations. The leaders whose teams stay engaged in a hybrid model are rarely the ones enforcing the most in-office days. They are the ones who make shared days feel meaningfully different from remote days, building real conversation, problem-solving, and relationship-building into the calendar instead of leaving them to chance.
That distinction is central to what we call [LQ] at CareerJoy. Leadership Intelligence is not about how many hours a leader spends in a boardroom; it is the ability to recognize what a moment requires—connection, focus, recognition, or space- and respond with intention instead of habit.
A loon does not gather out of routine; it gathers because the season calls for it. The best leaders I know do the same.
They do not fill office days with status updates that could have been emails. They use time together for the work that truly requires a room.
If your team is moving to a Tuesday-and-Thursday office model this fall, or something similar, it can be tempting to treat in-office days as the same online routine in a different location: the same meetings, the same screens, just without bedrooms and kitchen tables in the background. That wastes the opportunity and is one of the quickest ways to make people resent coming in.
Instead, try this: protect at least one block on each in-office day for agenda-free conversation, a walk, a coffee, or a genuine check-in on how someone is doing. Save decisions that benefit from real-time debate, especially those that get flattened into Slack threads, for the room.
And pay attention to who goes quiet online but comes alive in person. That person is showing you how they do their best thinking, and a purely online-centric culture can quietly cost you their best ideas.
Gallup’s global research on engagement has long shown that people who feel genuinely connected to their colleagues are dramatically less likely to disengage from their work. A hybrid model does not build that connection automatically. It only creates the conditions for it. What leaders do inside those conditions is the whole game.
Here is where this hits closest to home for me. A meaningful share of the people I coach are between roles, and the isolation of that stretch is real. Statistics Canada’s most recent data shows more than one in ten Canadians report feeling lonely often or always, and separate research on remote work found that roughly three in ten people with remote work experience have felt disconnected during it.
Job searching, for most people, is an even more remote experience than remote work itself. No team, no Tuesday and Thursday in the office, no one to grab a coffee with between calls.
If you are in transition right now, borrow the loons’ behaviour with intention. Gathering is not weakness; it is strategy. Find the bay that works for you, a peer group, a networking breakfast, or an old colleague you have been meaning to call, and show up the way those birds gather around good water.
Not to perform confidence, but because being near other people can change what you notice, who you meet, and how quickly you move forward. Careers, like lakes, are more generous to those who make themselves visible.
If you are the leader on the other side of that transition, a September gathering is not only about your team’s output. It also sends a signal to everyone watching from the shore: a new hire, an anxious employee, or someone in career transition wondering whether any workplace still values people over headcount. It shows that connection is something your organization still takes seriously.
Our bay only fills with loons for a few weeks a year. It is worth noticing when it happens, and it is worth asking why.
The same is true of your office on a Tuesday morning this fall. Notice who shows up, why they showed up, and what you are doing with the time once they are there. That is the whole difference between a hybrid policy and a human-first culture.
Along the road with you,
Alan
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Friday Leadership Report | Alan Kearns, Founder & Managing Partner, CareerJoy
Happy Friday,
Like over a billion people around the planet, our house was glued to the World Cup Final last weekend. We had our cottage neighbours over, snacks everywhere, kids running between the dock and the couch every time a whistle blew. Spain beat Argentina 1-0 after extra time, with substitute Ferran Torres scoring the winner in the 106th minute, and the place erupted like we’d scored it ourselves. It was one of those nights you want to bottle. Good food, good neighbours, a game that actually delivered.
Somewhere around the second half, one of our neighbours mentioned something I had no idea about. Every time that referee’s whistle cut through the noise, we were hearing a Canadian invention.
The Fox 40, the pealess whistle used in nearly every major sport on earth, was invented by Ron Foxcroft, a referee from Hamilton, Ontario. Foxcroft officiated the men’s Olympic gold medal basketball game in Montreal in 1976, and the whistle he was using that night had a small cork pea inside it, the traditional design at the time. Peas jam. When they jam, the whistle goes silent at exactly the moment it matters most.
Years later, working a pre-Olympic game in Sao Paulo, Foxcroft blew his whistle on a foul at centre court and nothing came out. The pea had stuck. Play continued, the crowd erupted, and things nearly turned ugly around him. That was the moment he decided enough was enough. Not because he saw a business opportunity. Because he was tired of being the guy standing there with a silent whistle in his hand.
Here’s the part I keep coming back to. Foxcroft wasn’t trying to build a global whistle empire. He made a wish list of features for a better whistle and brought it to a small plastics moulding shop in Ontario to see if they could build what he’d sketched. He was solving his own problem. The whistle now used by the NFL, NBA, NHL, FIFA, and dozens of other organizations worldwide started as one frustrated referee fixing the thing that kept failing him personally.
I see a version of this mistake constantly in my coaching work. Leaders reach for the big strategy. The five year vision. The transformation initiative with a consultant deck and a catchy name. Meanwhile, the actual thing breaking their team’s performance is sitting three feet in front of them, unaddressed, because it feels too small to be worth a leader’s attention.
New research on Canadian workplaces backs this up in a way that surprised me. HRD Canada’s Best Places to Work survey found that almost half of employees at Canada’s top rated employers were not formally asked for their views in the past year, and that figure runs considerably higher across Canadian employers more broadly. Think about that. These are the good employers, the ones making the lists, and still close to half their people haven’t been asked what’s actually going wrong on the ground.
The AI conversation is showing the same pattern from a different angle. BCG’s global AI at Work research found that while more than three quarters of leaders and managers now use generative AI regularly, frontline employee usage has stalled well below that. The gap isn’t a tools problem. It’s a leadership attention problem. BCG’s data shows positive sentiment toward AI among frontline employees rising from 15 percent to 55 percent when leadership support is strong, yet only a quarter of frontline employees currently experience that level of support from their leaders.
In both cases, the fix isn’t a bigger vision. It’s a leader deciding to notice the pea stuck in the whistle.
There’s a reason Foxcroft’s story lands the way it does. He didn’t set out to change officiating worldwide. He set out to never again stand silent and humiliated in front of a packed arena because a two dollar part failed him. The global impact was a byproduct of solving a real, specific, personal frustration well.
Leadership works the same way, in my experience. The leaders who build real trust with their teams aren’t the ones chasing the grandest possible mandate. They’re the ones who notice that one recurring complaint, that one broken handoff between departments, that one meeting where good people go quiet, and they actually fix it. Not because it will look impressive on a slide. Because it’s the thing standing in the way of their people doing good work.
That’s a harder discipline than it sounds. Big vision work is genuinely more comfortable for a lot of leaders. It’s abstract, it’s future focused, and nobody can accuse you of having missed the mark yet. Fixing the specific, present, unglamorous problem in front of you requires admitting something is broken right now, on your watch, and that you’re the one who has to deal with it.
This doesn’t require a new program or a survey nobody will fill out honestly. It starts smaller than that. Ask one person on your team, this week, what’s the one thing that keeps slowing them down that nobody higher up seems to notice. Then actually fix that one thing, visibly, before you move on to anything else.
Foxcroft didn’t start with a market study. He started with a wish list, a plastics shop down the road, and a specific, personal irritation he refused to keep living with. Most of the real fixes I’ve seen leaders make in organizations started the same way. Small, local, unglamorous, and completely solvable once someone with authority actually decided to pay attention to it instead of stepping over it on the way to the next big initiative.
The pattern holds whether you’re running a five person team or a national organization. Vision matters. But vision without the discipline of noticing what’s actually broken in front of you is just a nicer way of ignoring your people.
This is exactly why presence sits inside [LQ] as one of the traits I coach leaders on directly. Not vision. Not charisma. The discipline of actually seeing what’s happening in the room you’re standing in, rather than the room you wish you were leading instead. Leaders with high [LQ] don’t ignore the small, local, unglamorous problem because it feels beneath their title. They treat it as the whole job.
Foxcroft eventually built a company that sells whistles in over a hundred countries. But that came after the fix, not before it, and it came because he was still, first, a guy who wanted his own whistle to work.
This is the same lens we bring to our work with leaders and teams across Canada. Not another framework to memorize. A discipline of noticing the real, specific problem sitting in front of a leader right now, and building the capability to actually deal with it well. If your team has a pea stuck in the whistle somewhere, and you’re not sure where, that’s a conversation worth having.
Congratulations to Spain on a well earned title, and to every neighbour, cottage or otherwise, who made this an easy game to gather around.
Along the road with you,
Alan
Every team has them, a stuck complaint, a quiet handoff nobody fixed. The best leaders don’t wait for a bigger problem to justify their attention.
Foxcroft didn’t build a global company by thinking bigger. He built it by refusing to ignore what was broken right in front of him. Most leaders skip that step.
Friday Leadership Report | Alan Kearns, Founder & Managing Partner, CareerJoy
Happy Friday,
I have loved flying for as long as I can remember. It was one of the quiet gifts my parents gave me, the adventure of travel. As an only child, I got to see a good chunk of the world before most kids my age had left their province. But honestly, some of my favourite moments happened before we ever reached the destination.
I still remember my first time on a 747, watching the little screen in the seatback track our descent, the runway growing on the map until the wheels touched down.
That memory came back this past week after the Air Canada flight that went off the runway landing in Montreal. I follow these stories more closely than most people do. My son is a first officer with WestJet, based in Vancouver, and if you talk to anyone in aviation, they will tell you the same thing: takeoff and landing are where the real risk lives. Cruising altitude is the easy part. It’s the first and last few minutes of a flight that demand everything a pilot has.
So this week sent me down a research rabbit hole, and I found something that stopped me. It turns out that chasing a smooth landing, the kind that makes passengers clap, is often the very thing that causes accidents.
Most passengers judge a flight by two things: how the captain sounds on the PA, and how gently the plane sets down. Andrew McKechnie, a former British Airways captain who now runs his own aviation consultancy, says that instinct is misleading.
“From a safety standpoint, the best landing isn’t the softest one. It’s the one where the aircraft touches down at the right spot on the runway, at the right speed.”
Chasing that buttery smooth touchdown can actually push a pilot to float too far down the runway before setting the wheels down, or to flare too aggressively and risk a tail strike. In wet conditions, that extra float can be the difference between stopping safely and sliding off the end of the tarmac.
Read that again, because it is not intuitive.
The outcome everyone applauds, the smooth landing, is sometimes the by-product of a decision that quietly increases risk. Meanwhile, the landing that feels like a small thump is often the one that was flown correctly.
I think about this constantly in leadership work. How many of us are managing for the applause instead of the outcome?
The team member who never pushes back, who agrees in every meeting, who makes every interaction feel smooth, can look like your best player. But smoothness and safety are not the same thing. The people who tell you what you want to hear are not always the people you can trust with what actually matters.
The colleague who raises the uncomfortable question, who flags the risk nobody wants to name, is often doing the harder and more valuable work, even though the meeting feels bumpier because of it.
There is a second layer to this story that I think matters even more for how we lead.
Captain Chris Eades, who spent decades training pilots, shared that the best captains he flew with were the ones who gave their first officers real room to make their own calls, including the freedom to occasionally get it wrong and learn from it in real time.
One captain described a first officer misreading the landmarks on descent into Edinburgh, confidently announcing the wrong hill as their position marker. Rather than jumping in to correct him immediately, the senior captain let the moment play out, then calmly walked him through it once the mistake became obvious.
The first officer has said that single moment taught him more than a dozen textbook corrections would have.
That is not how most of us were taught to lead. Most of us were taught that the mark of a good manager is catching the error before it happens. But there is a cost to that instinct. When we intervene too early, every time, we do not just fix the mistake, we quietly teach our people to stop trusting their own judgment. We train dependence instead of capability.
The best leaders I know, and the best pilots by every account I have read this week, understand the difference between a mistake that is dangerous and a mistake that is instructive. Letting the second kind happen, inside a safe enough margin, is not weak leadership. It might be the most respectful thing you can do for someone’s growth.
This is where the runway metaphor lands squarely on the desk of every Canadian manager.
Most performance conversations still default to comfort metrics. Did they show up on time. Did they follow the process. Did they make the meeting feel easy. Those are the equivalent of judging a flight by how smooth the touchdown felt. They tell you almost nothing about whether the person is actually navigating well.
Gallup’s ongoing workplace research has found that managers alone account for roughly seventy percent of the variance in how engaged their teams are, and that employees who genuinely trust their leadership are dramatically more likely to stay and to bring their full effort to the work.
Trust, not compliance, is the variable doing the heavy lifting. A team member who is technically compliant but emotionally checked out, who never tells you what they actually think, is not a stable landing. They are a smooth touchdown that happened to work out this time
We see this same pattern in The 2025 Work. Made Better. Report. Across the Canadian organizations we studied, the healthiest teams were rarely the quietest ones. They were the teams where people felt safe enough to disagree with a leader without fear of being sidelined for it.
The report kept surfacing the same uncomfortable truth: leaders often mistake harmony for health, when what they are actually looking at is silence. And silence, like a landing that only looks smooth from the cabin, can be hiding a problem that surfaces later, often at a much higher cost.
The Canadian workplaces bucking this trend share a common trait. Their leaders built systems where dissent was treated as data, not disloyalty. They rewarded the people who spoke up early, even when the message was inconvenient, because catching the problem on approach is always cheaper than dealing with it after the wheels are down.
This is precisely what [LQ] Leadership Intelligence is built to measure. Not how smoothly a leader sounds on the PA, but how they actually perform in the moments that carry the most risk, the decisions on approach, the willingness to let someone else fly, the discipline to reward accurate feedback over easy agreement. A leader with a strong [LQ] does not need every landing to feel effortless. They need every landing to be safe, and they need their people to trust them enough to say so when it isn’t.
The next time a member of your team pushes back on you, or admits a mistake before you catch it, resist the urge to see that as turbulence. That is often the sound of the plane being flown correctly.
If you are curious where your own leadership tendencies sit on this spectrum, that is exactly the kind of conversation my team at CareerJoy exists to have with Canadian leaders.
Along the road with you,
Alan
The smoothest team isn’t always the healthiest one. If you’re not sure whether your team feels safe enough to disagree with you, that’s worth a conversation.
The instinct to jump in early often builds dependence, not capability. If that sounds familiar, let’s talk.
Friday Leadership Report | Alan Kearns, Founder & Managing Partner, CareerJoy
Happy Friday,
I was having an interesting conversation this week with one of my executive coaching clients. A large part of our conversation was about how much longer she was going to stay in her role. She’s good at what she does. She’s respected. And she’s tired in a way that has nothing to do with sleep.
One of my favourite books to read to my kids was Goodnight Moon. Page after page, a small rabbit says goodnight to everything in the room, the light, the clocks, the mittens, until finally, goodnight to the moon itself. The closest anyone has actually been able to say goodnight to the moon is Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
This week, Hansen said his own kind of goodnight. Three months after becoming the first Canadian to travel around the moon on the Artemis II mission, he announced he’s stepping back from full-time astronaut duties this September.
Here’s the part that caught me, though: Hansen didn’t call it an ending. In his own words, the move is “far from a departure.” He’s transitioning to serve as a reservist with the Royal Canadian Air Force, deliberately keeping the door open for what he called “creative, ongoing ways to support and enable the vital work happening in Canada with respect to space.” After 32 years of military service and 17 years as a CSA astronaut, he chose the moment.
Nobody pushed him out.
He looked at the mission he’d just completed and asked himself what came next, and he answered that question before the answer was made for him.
That’s exactly the conversation my client and I were having.
Most leaders don’t leave too early. They leave too late. They stay past the point where the role is stretching them and start living in the place where the role is depleting them, and the difference between those two states is enormous, even though it’s quiet and gradual enough that it’s easy to miss from the inside.
I ask my clients a version of the same question Hansen seemed to have already answered for himself. Are you still growing here, or are you just enduring here? Growth and endurance can look identical from the outside. Both involve showing up, doing the work, hitting the targets. But one is building something in you. The other is slowly using you up.
Character, not just competency, is what makes this distinction visible. A competent leader can endure a role for years past its expiry date and still perform well enough that nobody raises an alarm. A leader of strong character is the one willing to ask the harder question before performance actually slips, because they know the cost of staying isn’t always measured in output. Sometimes it’s measured in who they’re becoming while they wait too long to decide.
This isn’t a small or rare pattern. Deloitte Canada and LifeWorks surveyed more than 1,100 senior leaders across Canada, Europe, and the United States and found that slightly more than half, 51 percent, had contemplated leaving their roles. Not idly wondered. Contemplated. That’s one in two leaders sitting across the table from a decision they haven’t yet made.
And the pressure behind that number is real. Robert Half Canada’s most recent workforce data shows burnout among Canadian professionals has climbed sharply, up from 47 percent in late 2024 to well over six in ten workers reporting burnout now, with the trend still intensifying. Leaders are not exempt from that curve. If anything, they’re often the last to admit they’re on it, because admitting it can feel like admitting failure rather than admitting a season has changed.
I think that’s the trap. We’ve built a cultural story where staying equals loyalty and leaving equals giving up. But overstaying a role isn’t loyalty. It’s often just avoidance dressed up in a title.
Here’s where Hansen’s framing is worth sitting with a little longer. He didn’t leave space. He left one specific role inside a much bigger commitment to the same mission. That’s a distinction I try to help my clients see for themselves. Leaving a role isn’t the same as abandoning the work you care about. It’s often the only way to keep serving that work well.
Our 2025 Work. Made Better. Report, found that only 19 percent of Canadians say they’re fully engaged at work. Not disengaged. Not burned out. Just not fully in.
That gap, between showing up and actually being present, is where overstayed leadership tends to live. It’s rarely a dramatic collapse. It’s a slow drift toward going through the motions, and it’s contagious. Teams can feel when their leader has quietly checked out long before the leader admits it to themselves.
Real transition, done well, protects both the leader and everyone who depends on them. It means naming the moment honestly instead of waiting for a crisis to name it for you. It means grieving the loss, because there is a true loss in endings, even good ones, even chosen ones. And it means trusting that the space you create by leaving well is exactly the space where the next chapter, for you and for whoever steps into that role next, actually gets to begin.
This is where [LQ] becomes practical rather than theoretical. Leadership intelligence isn’t just the ability to run a role well. It’s the self-awareness to recognize when your season in that role is ending, and the courage to say so before the evidence forces your hand. The leaders I respect most aren’t the ones who never leave. They’re the ones who know exactly why they’re staying, and exactly when that reason has run its course.
Hansen’s retirement announcement noted something else worth mentioning. Once you leave certain roles, you genuinely cannot go back to them. There’s no re-entry path to being the astronaut who hasn’t yet flown to the moon. My client is facing something similar. If she leaves her role now, on her own terms, there’s no undoing that choice either. That permanence is precisely what makes the decision so hard, and precisely why it deserves more thought than most leaders give
But permanence cuts both ways. Staying too long is also, in its own quiet way, irreversible. Every month spent enduring instead of growing is a month you don’t get back either.
I shared with my client what I’m telling you now. There is a time to say goodnight to a role, the same way that small rabbit says goodnight to everything in the room before the lights go out and morning starts again. It’s not a failure to notice when that time has come. It’s one of the clearest signs of leadership character there is.
Jeremy Hansen flew farther from Earth than almost any human in history and came home knowing exactly when to say goodnight to that chapter. My client is doing the same work, closer to the ground but no less real. Wherever you are in your own leadership story this week, I’d ask you the same question I asked her.
Are you still growing in this role, or are you just enduring it?
The honest answer is usually the one you already know.
Along the road with you,
Alan
Most leaders don’t leave too early — they leave too late. If you’re asking yourself whether it’s time, let’s talk.
Good judgment under pressure isn’t luck. It’s built long before the pressure shows up.
