ACHIEVE Centre for Leadership

When was the last time you had space to think about something out loud, with other leaders who understand the role?

Chris has seen the results firsthand: when leaders finally have that kind of space, things change quickly. They get clearer, make better decisions, and the organizations they lead feel the positive impact.

The ACHIEVE Leadership Retreat Leading from the Inside Out offers something different from other leadership training.

It's a small group of leaders coming together to step back and look at their leadership from a different angle. We’re not talking about heavy power point lead sessions (even though there may be a few slides…) but reflection and conversation with people navigating similar challenges.

If you’re curious about what’s next for your leadership, check the link in the comments for the event details.

Chris has over 25 years of experience but was only 10 years into his management career before anyone asked him what kind of manager he wanted to be.

10 years!!!!

When he finally sat with the question, he had some good answers. Then he looked at how he was really showing up, and realized he was doing the opposite.

It's more common than most senior leaders would admit. It can feel like the role doesn't make space for that level of reflection. You get pulled into the doing, the meetings, the decisions, the fires, all without having the time to think about the how underneath all of it.

The cost shows downstream: disengagement, eroded trust, talented people quietly checking out. Usually by the time it's visible, it's been building for a while.

That experience is part of what led Chris to co-author You Can Manage (he wrote a book!!), and focus the ACHIEVE Leadership Retreat around a simple but rarely asked question:

Who do you want to be as a leader, and are you being that person right now?

This July in Canmore, that's where it starts. If you’re ready to move beyond tactics, and look honestly at the way you’re leading, check the link in the comments.

Disagreements and varying opinions are a common theme in workplaces, and that’s ok. We’ve all experienced it. It doesn’t mean that one person is in the right or wrong.

But when certain tensions continue to arise, you might find yourself wondering “what can I do for my team?”

It’s easy, take one breath in, and one breath out.

In ACHIEVE’s new blog, David Jung walks us through the concept of “Polarity Management.”

It can be a bit of a head scratcher, and you might be asking yourself, “What in the world is “Polarity Management?’ “and “What do you mean BREATHE?!”

Don’t worry, we’re going to give you a quick run down.

Polarity Management is the idea that some conflicting tensions don't have to work against each other — they can work together. Like breathing, great teams need both the "inhale" of clarity and structure and the "exhale" of ideas and responsiveness.

For leaders, these tensions aren't problems to solve; they're opportunities to navigate through conflict to help your team grow.

What does your team do to encourage insightful feedback that foster growth within your workspace? Let us know in the comments.

Read more about polarity management on our blog: https://vist.ly/57jhm

Threatening your team into high performance is a strategy. Just not a good one.

We've all heard of the manager who's tried monitoring task completion, ranking employees, and firing two people as a warning to the rest. The result? A team that was deeply motivated...to avoid him.

Rewards aren't the magic fix either. Research suggests that over time, the reward becomes the only reason someone does the job, and it has to keep getting bigger to work at all.

What actually moves the needle is giving people purpose, autonomy, and the chance to do work that plays to their strengths.

New blog explores the shift from extrinsic to intrinsic motivation, and five practical ways to get there.

Wanting to be a great leader is the entry fee, not the qualification.

Mark Schinkel (one of our incredible ACHIEVE facilitators) tells a story about his hockey career. He was motivated, competitive, and committed. He also barely cracked the university roster.

Meanwhile, teammates with twice the talent never made it either, because drive and skill alone weren't enough. The whole package was required.

Leadership works the same way. The managers who plateau aren't usually the ones who stopped caring. They're the ones who got good at one or two parts of the job and assumed that was enough.

This week's blog breaks it down into three elements: mindset, tasks, and skills. Most people lead heavy in one, light in another, and blind to the third.

It's worth asking honestly which one you've been neglecting.

Here's the part that can sting a little: you can quote every leadership framework ever written and still be ineffective in the room. Knowledge without ex*****on is just vocabulary.

Which of the three, mindset, tasks, or skills, do you think most leaders neglect most?

3 Elements of Sustainable and Effective Leadership - ACHIEVE The reality is that sustainable, effective leadership needs to flow from a solid, grounded sense of vision, values, and strategy. However, it doesn’t stop there.

“Fake it 'till you make it.”

Let's be real, that's really bad leadership advice...and pretending to have everything figured out is exhausting.

What we hear from managers instead is simple:

“I don’t want to fake confidence. I just want to be a good manager”

The shift that makes leadership feel less out of control, isn’t about acting more confident, but about becoming more aligned with yourself.

When your values and behaviours line up, you’ll notice quickly that
• Conversations feel more natural
• Trust builds faster
• Your team starts being more open and honest (not more awkward silent meetings...)

Try This:
Choose two or three values that matter to you as a leader (e.g., fairness, curiosity, growth) then turn each into something your team can actually see:

• Growth → Regular development conversations
• Fairness → Explain your decisions
• Accountability → Own mistakes openly

Small actions like these shape culture faster than big leadership statements