Motivation changes when summer arrives. School’s out for summer. The vacation calendar is full. Employees have cottage weekends, family trips, and days off planned. Parents are juggling camps, childcare, and kids who’d much rather be outside than following anyone’s schedule. And, honestly, most of us would rather be at the beach than sitting in another meeting on a beautiful summer afternoon. But the work still has to get done. That doesn’t mean leaders need to pretend summer

\ Information becomes valuable when we use it. We often hear the phrase, “Feedback is a gift.” I understand the intention. Feedback can be valuable. It can help us grow, improve, and see things we might otherwise miss. But I prefer a different way of thinking about it: Feedback is data. Data isn’t inherently good or bad. It’s information. It gives us something to examine, understand, and act on. That distinction matters. When someone tells us our communication wasn’t clear, a

The future of leadership is still human I recently read a New York Times article with a title that made me smile: That Meeting You Hate May Keep A.I. From Stealing Your Job. The idea is worth thinking about. AI can analyze information, generate reports, summarize data, draft presentations, and help us work more efficiently. But work has never been only about producing information. It’s about persuading someone to support a difficult decision. Reassuring a team when uncertaint

Prepared teams can weather almost anything. There’s something spectacular about a summer thunderstorm in Canada. The air changes first. The humidity builds. The sky darkens. Then comes the distant rumble, followed by flashes of lightning and the kind of heavy rain that makes you stop what you’re doing and watch. When you’re safely inside, a storm can be beautiful. Powerful. Even calming in its own way.But that same storm feels very different if you’re caught outside without s

Some leadership stays with us forever. Father’s Day is a meaningful day for me. I’m incredibly grateful to be the father of two wonderful 10-year-old girls. Being their dad is one of the greatest joys and most important responsibilities of my life. But Father’s Day is also a day of reflection. I lost my own father almost 30 years ago. And a year ago, our family lost my father-in-law, Tony Fry. Tony wasn’t simply my father-in-law. He was a deeply important part of our lives –

Your reaction teaches people what to say next time. I worked with a leader who couldn’t understand why his team rarely brought problems to him until they had become urgent. He genuinely believed his door was open. And technically, it was. But when someone did raise a concern, his first response was often frustration: “Why didn’t we catch this earlier?”“How did this happen?”“Who dropped the ball?” They weren’t unreasonable questions. But in that moment, before anyone felt hear