Three Things You Can Say to Enhance Collaboration
Language is an amazing thing. What we say and how we say it reflects who we are and what we value. Whether you are speaking out of habit or stepping out of your comfort zone to make a point, the…
Three Ways to Make a Difference According to Jane Goodall
Jane Goodall passed away on October 1, 2025. She left a legacy of curiosity, compassion, and difference making that touched literally every continent and impacted millions of humans and animals alike. One of my students at Camosun College used this…
How “The Bear” Shows Why Leaders Gain More by Letting Go
I was away from work on holidays for five of the last six weeks. While I was away, our team advanced work, made hard decisions (some of which I probably wouldn’t have made), and generated great ideas. The high performance…
Evaluating Costs
Leaders are evaluating costs and making decisions pretty much every day. Here is a list of all the costs (more or less) that you should consider when making decisions. Evaluating costs Every choice we make incurs and activates costs. This…
How to Break Toxic Culture at Work
Between April and September 2021, more than 24 million American employees left their jobs, which was a record. More than half of Canadian employees would rather quit their job than return to the office full-time. As the Great Resignation rolls…
Business Strategy, but make it Cycling
I recently finished Holocracy by Brian J. Robertson and one of the metaphors he uses in the book is that business strategy should be like riding a bicycle. Good strategies adapt and adjust based on member and community needs, kinda…
The Cooperative Talent Cloud
The War for Talent is over. Talent won (and is still winning). The way we work is experiencing a significant shift. The conventional notion of a multi-decade career with one employer is being replaced by short-term, dynamic engagements that workers…
Three Ways to Break Your Bias
Vancity Credit Union is completing a month of learning about unconscious bias. Partnering with the NeuroLeadership Institute (NLI), all employees are completing online learning and discussing bias within teams. A quick Google search will reveal dozens of articles about how…
A Turn the Temperature Down Haiku
It’s too hot these days. Politics. Planet. Culture. Leaders turn it down. – A haiku about listening more than we talk, seeking to understand and find common ground, and probably riding bikes and walking around a little bit more.
How Language Creates and Erodes Interdependence
I agree with Batman that our actions matter more than who we are underneath because actions reveal our true character. I also notice how much language influences who leaders are and what we stand for. I notice this the most…