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.
