Friday Leadership Report | Alan Kearns, Founder & Managing Partner, CareerJoy
Happy Friday,
When the kids were small, the first computer that came into our home was a brand-new iMac, the blue one.
I can still picture it glowing on the desk like something from the future. My daughter had her heart set on pink, unfortunately that colour was not available.
That little machine started something in our house.
I have been a fan of Apple ever since. I even owned a Newton, the handheld Apple built long before anyone dreamed up an iPhone. So when the news broke that Tim Cook is stepping down as Apple’s CEO on September 1, with John Ternus taking over, I paid attention.
Not because of the products. Because of what Cook said about the man taking his seat.
Cook succeeded Steve Jobs in 2011, at one of the most uncertain moments in the company’s history. Jobs died six weeks after handing over the reins. Almost no one believed Apple could survive being separated from its founder. Cook proved them wrong, growing the company’s value by trillions and building entire new categories along the way. By any measure, he earned the right to choose his successor carefully.
So listen to how he described his pick. Cook called Ternus a brilliant engineer and a deep thinker. Then he went somewhere more revealing. He called him a person of remarkable character and a born leader. He said there was no one on the planet he trusted more to lead Apple into the future.
Read that again. The most valuable company in the world, run for a quarter century by two of the most analytical minds in business, and the handoff comes down to character. Not the resume. Not the patent count. The person.
I have been coaching leaders for nearly three decades. Our team at CareerJoy has worked with thousands of leaders and teams across Canada, from the federal public service to the Canadian Forces to financial services boardrooms. There is a pattern I see at the start of almost every leadership journey.
We begin with skills. We begin with competencies, benchmarking, and personality styles. Those things matter. Know thyself is ancient advice for a reason. Understanding how you show up, where your strengths sit, and how your style lands on others is genuinely useful. I would never tell a leader to skip that work.
But here is what I have noticed after all these years. We rarely talk about character.
We spend hours on a leader’s communication style and very little on their integrity under pressure. We will benchmark their strategic thinking and never ask whether they keep their word when it costs them something. And yet, when I look back at the real breakthroughs in a leadership development program, the moments where someone becomes the leader they were meant to be, character is almost always at the centre. So are the things that hold people back. It is rarely a missing skill. It is usually something deeper.
A leader can learn to run a meeting. A leader can learn to read a balance sheet. What a leader cannot fake, not for long, is who they are when no one is watching.
This is not just my observation from the coaching chair. Some of the best research on the subject comes from right here in Canada. At the Ivey Business School in London, Ontario, a team of researchers spent years studying what separates leaders who hold up under pressure from those who come apart. Their work began in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, when they studied more than three hundred leaders across business, government, and the nonprofit sector. Their conclusion was striking. Good leadership rests on three pillars: competencies, commitment, and character. When any one of them is missing, it quietly undermines the other two.
Sit with that for a moment. The competencies we obsess over in most development programs are one of three pillars. Character is not the soft addition at the end of the workshop. It is load-bearing. The same researchers mapped character into roughly a dozen dimensions, qualities like courage, integrity, humility, and compassion. They made the case that these can be developed deliberately, just as we build a skill.
That matters because it means character is not the hand you were dealt. It is the leader you choose to become.
The reason this is urgent right now is that Canadian workplaces are running low on the very thing character produces. Trust.
Recent research found that only about a third of employees say they trust senior leaders. Let that sink in. Only one out of three people look up to the people running their organization and place their trust in them. Gallup’s latest workplace data adds the why. Manager engagement has fallen to roughly 22%, down sharply over the past few years, and managers account for around 70% of the variation in their teams’ engagement.
The people meant to carry the culture are themselves running on empty, and their teams can feel it.
Here is the connection that ties it all together. People do not follow competence. They follow character. They will give grace to a leader who is still learning the job. They will not follow a leader they do not trust. Trust is not a program you roll out. It is the residue of character, observed over time.
There is a phrase we often return to in our work. Earned authority outperforms claimed authority. A title gives you a position. It does not give you a following. People decide whether to truly follow you based on what they see you do in the small moments, far more than on the big speeches.
This is why Cook’s choice resonates. Ternus has spent twenty-five years inside Apple. He did not claim the role. He earned it, one product and one hard decision at a time, until the person who knew the company best looked around and trusted him above everyone else. That is character compounding over a career. You cannot install it in a workshop. You build it, day by day.
And this is the part that gives me hope for the leaders I work with. Character is not fixed. It is not a lucky accident of personality. It is formed, tested, and strengthened in the same way muscles are. The leaders who grow the most are the ones willing to look honestly at who they are becoming, not just what they can do.
This is the heart of how we approach leadership development at CareerJoy in Canada. The Canadian research I mentioned lands on three pillars: competencies, commitment, and character. Our own [LQ] Leadership Intelligence model builds on that foundation and adds a fourth, because we have seen what happens after a leader grows.
Commitment comes first because nothing else matters if a leader is not all in. Character comes next because it is the foundation on which everything else stands. Competencies come third, the skills and capabilities we so often start with and should probably hold a little more loosely. And culture comes fourth because a leader’s truest legacy is the environment they leave behind for those who come after them.
Notice what that ordering says. Most leadership programs and most companies run it backwards. They lead with competencies and treat character as a nice-to-have. We think that is exactly why so many talented people stall. They have polished every skill and never done the deeper work. The [LQ] framework puts character where it belongs, near the foundation, because that is where great leaders actually build from.
Apple just reminded the entire business world of this in the most public way possible. The most analytical company on earth chose its next leader on character. If that is the standard in Cupertino, it is worth asking what standard we are holding in our own organizations here at home.
You do not need to run a four-trillion-dollar company for this to apply to you. Whether you lead a team of three or a department of three hundred, the question is the same. When your people describe you, do they reach first for your skills or for your character?
That is the question worth carrying into the weekend.
If you are wrestling with it, that is a good sign. It usually means you care about becoming the kind of leader people choose to follow. That work, the genuine inner work of leadership, is exactly what our coaching at CareerJoy is built for. We help Canadian leaders go beyond benchmarks and develop greater skills that change how they lead. If this is your season for that, we would be glad to walk it with you.
Steve Jobs built something extraordinary. Tim Cook protected it and grew it. And by choosing character first on his way out the door, he left the rest of us with the only question that has ever really mattered in leadership. Not whether you are capable enough.
Whether you are someone worth following.
Along the road with you,
Alan
One in three Canadian employees trust their senior leaders. We are trying to understand why and what changes it. The Work. Made Better. Report 2026 needs your voice.
If your organization is in the middle of a leadership transition, the character of how you handle it matters as much as the outcome. Let’s talk about how CareerJoy can help.
