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.
