A view from the edge.
Essays on leadership, purpose, and the work of leading from a deeper place.
Written for leaders looking for substance.
Leading Through the Holiday Season
Year-end deadlines and budgets land on top of holiday events, staff illness and everyone’s own family expectations. Leaders carry their own load and their team’s at the same time. That weight doesn’t stay at the office. It comes home with us, often without our noticing.
This season, my hope for you is permission. You don’t have to finish the year perfectly or make the holidays good for everyone. Here is a checklist that isn’t another to-do list.
The Reservoir
Most leadership writing treats trust as a feeling — something that develops between people over time, or emerges when a team works well together. This is the wrong frame. Trust behaves more like stored water. It accumulates in the easy weeks so it is there in the hard ones. As AI takes over more of the work and teams grow more depersonalized, the leaders who know how to build trust are going to matter more, not less. An essay on what a group of volunteers reclaiming brownfield land in downtown Red Deer has taught me about leading on uncertain ground.
“I Didn’t Listen. I Just Kept Pushing”
It's a phrase I've heard in so many contexts. From leaders, from clients, from people I love. It almost never arrives in the moment. It arrives after. After the diagnosis. After the marriage ended. After the team member who kept raising the same concern finally stopped raising it, and then left.