A 360-degree review told Tyler Chisholm exactly what was wrong with his leadership: he filled every room, jumped to conclusions, and never let his team finish a sentence. His team had stopped contributing. They were just waiting to be told what to do.

In this episode of The Executive Commute, Jayson Krause talks with Tyler Chisholm, CEO and author of Curious as Hell, about the moment that feedback forced him to rebuild how he leads. Tyler unpacks the difference between the leader he was in the boardroom and the host he'd become on his own podcast, and how closing that gap turned curiosity from a personality trait into a daily discipline. They get into where curiosity actually helps, where it gets weaponized into control, and what it takes to build a team that feels safe enough to think out loud.

They cover:

• The feedback that forced a leadership reset
• Curiosity as a practice, not a trait: self, relational, and strategic curiosity
• How questions get weaponized to control instead of learning
• Where curiosity fails (and command and control takes over)
• A simple tool for pausing before you react
• What actually predicts whether a leader succeeds or fails

If your meetings go quiet the moment you start talking, this one's worth the full hour.

Follow Jayson Krause:

YouTube: / @jaysonkrauseleadership
LinkedIn: / jayson-krause

0:00 - Introduction
0:41 - The 360 Review That Changed His Leadership
3:43 - What Changed When "Podcast Tyler" Led Meetings
6:00 - Tracking Fixed vs. Growth Mindset After Every Call
8:41 - From Playful Trait to Deliberate Practice
10:05 - Why Tyler Wrote Curious as Hell
13:21 - Writing in Flow: AI as Collaborator
15:50 - The Self Curiosity the Book Forced to the Surface
17:31 - Defining Curiosity as a Leadership Practice
19:16 - The "No Time to Be Curious" Myth
22:03 - The Latin Root of Curiosity
28:44 - Weaponizing Curiosity
29:39 - Isn't a Leader's Job to Manipulate?
37:18 - Self Curiosity Comes First
39:19 - When Curiosity Isn't the Right Tool
42:17 - The Tactical Sigh
45:08 - Would You Rather: Curious vs. Safe to Be Curious Around
46:34 - Creating the Conditions for Curiosity
49:13 - The Nuclear Button
52:06 - The Cost of Reacting Instead of Leading
53:00 - True or False: Questions and Culture Health
56:02 - The Worst Advice About Curiosity
57:31 - "Tell Me More": Curious vs. Diagnostic Questions
59:38 - How to Know Curiosity Is Missing
1:02:42 - Know When to Call a Coach
1:04:51 - The Invisible Force Behind Leadership Success
1:06:26 - Closing Thoughts

In Episode #112 of The Executive Commute, Jayson Krause is joined by experienced entrepreneur, former CEO, and TEC Canada Chair Mark Terrill for a candid conversation about transparency in leadership.

They explore why transparency is essential for building trust, particularly during difficult periods, and why employees create their own explanations when leaders fail to communicate clearly.

Mark also explains why effective transparency does not mean sharing everything. Leaders must balance openness with confidentiality, timing, focus, and empathy. When handled poorly, transparency can become oversharing, venting, or an overload of information that creates more fear than alignment.

This episode will challenge you to consider what your team needs to hear, what you may be withholding, and how more intentional communication could strengthen your leadership.

Episode timestamps:

00:00 Can a leader become more transparent?
01:13 The cost of holding back
06:43 Why transparency builds trust
09:45 Transparency versus full disclosure
11:47 Mark's leadership journey
22:14 What transparency really means
26:22 Why openness is mistaken for weakness
31:04 What breaks when transparency is missing
31:54 Leading transparently through tough times
34:04 The illusion of transparency
36:55 Becoming a more transparent leader
37:48 Mark's greatest moment of self-doubt
42:10 Spotting a lack of transparency
44:42 Advanced transparency
49:03 The dark side of transparency
52:00 Transparency versus venting
54:04 The transparency paradox
56:01 When total transparency becomes harmful
58:21 Getting transparency right
61:37 Can transparency reduce honesty?
64:09 Damaging transparency advice
65:37 Can transparent leaders fail?
66:43 The importance of pivoting quickly
68:38 Final takeaway

Follow Jayson Krause
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3Voc2qOmcqGKfqy6CDiZOw
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayson-krause/

In Episode #113 of The Executive Commute, Jayson Krause is joined by Level 52 coach and facilitator Lara Koretsky for an honest exploration of resilience, adversity, and growth.

Resilience is often described as the ability to bounce back or keep pushing when life becomes difficult. Lara challenges that definition. True resilience is not about returning to who you were before adversity or ignoring the toll it has taken. It is the ability to learn, adapt, recover, and create something stronger from the experience.

Drawing from profound personal loss, family challenges, burnout, career transitions, and years of developing leaders, Lara explains why resilience is not a fixed personality trait. It is a capacity that can be strengthened.

Jayson and Lara explore the five pillars of resilience, the difference between grit and grind, why workplaces often reward the wrong behaviours, and how perseverance can become toxic when it causes people to tolerate the intolerable.

They also examine an important leadership tension: how do you challenge people to grow without rescuing them, overwhelming them, or carrying their backpack for them?

Episode timestamps:

00:00 What resilience really is

00:40 Lara's experience with adversity

01:51 Resilience is a muscle

02:23 Lessons from Lara's father

03:24 Medical assistance in dying

04:21 Creativity through grief

06:21 Lara's career journey

08:58 Feeling least resilient

10:10 Learning from rejected feedback

11:19 The kintsugi metaphor

13:35 Moving beyond "bouncing back"

15:19 Owning your role in adversity

16:35 Defining resilience

16:45 Why grinding through is not resilience

17:31 Choosing where to persist

19:30 Recovery creates growth

20:13 Myths about resilience

21:09 When organizations reward burnout

23:28 Why leaders wait until it is too late

25:22 Building resilience proactively

25:31 The five pillars of resilience

29:09 Humour versus avoidance

30:29 Stealing opportunities for growth

31:38 Do not carry someone else's backpack

34:04 Choosing hope

35:22 Choice within resilience

35:57 The downside of resilience

37:47 Can resilience prevent growth?

40:58 Toxic perseverance

42:18 Grit versus grind

43:11 Knowing when to keep going

44:24 Strategic quitting

45:22 Organizational responsibility for resilience

46:08 Expanding people's capacity

47:50 Workload and real priorities

49:03 Why recovery is essential

49:29 Resilience and stress exposure

50:58 Training adaptability

51:50 How organizations create fragility

53:37 Hiring for resilience

54:48 Where leaders should begin

56:29 The worst resilience advice

56:45 The key lesson

57:09 Writing your resilience story

59:03 Stepping into the real work

60:00 Closing reflections

Follow Jayson Krause

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3Voc2qOmcqGKfqy6CDiZOw

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayson-krause/

Empathy gets treated like a personality trait: you either have it or you don't. Roxana Radulescu, Level 52 coach and facilitator, argues that's wrong. It's a muscle, and most leaders are either overusing it, avoiding it, or using it to avoid the hard conversation instead of having it.

In this episode of The Executive Commute, Jayson Krause talks with Roxana about what empathy actually is (her definition: care plus trust), what it isn't (sympathy, agreement, an excuse to skip feedback), and where it goes wrong at the top of organizations. They dig into a Yale psychologist's argument that empathy fuels bias and tribalism, why holding more power tends to erode it, and whether "care first" leadership is a real strategy or just a nicer way to describe layoffs.

They cover:

- Empathy defined: care plus trust, not sympathy
- The line between empathy and judgment
- The case against empathy: bias, favoritism, and in-group tribalism
- Why power erodes empathy (and what that means for executives)
- Empathy's role in high-stakes, high-performance teams
- A simple starting point for building the empathy muscle

If you've ever held back a hard conversation because you "didn't want to make it worse," or wondered whether empathy and high standards can coexist, this conversation will change how you think about both.

Follow Jayson Krause

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3Voc2qOmcqGKfqy6CDiZOw
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayson-krause/

0:00 - Introduction
0:34 - How Roxana Became a Coach
1:28 - Coaching a Room Full of Experts
2:39 - What Qualifies Someone to Talk About Empathy
4:55 - Defining Empathy: Care Plus Trust
7:39 - Empathy Mapping and the Right Use of Empathy
10:07 - The Opposite of Empathy: Arrogance and Judgment
11:06 - Judgment vs. Appraisal
12:25 - The Case Against Empathy (Paul Bloom)
13:56 - When a Leader Has Too Much Empathy
16:09 - Balancing Empathy With Getting Things Done
21:08 - Naming the Emotion in the Room
23:52 - What Matters More Than Empathy: Feedback
27:14 - What Is Self-Empathy?
28:06 - True or False: Does Promoting Empathetic Leaders Spread Empathy?
29:00 - Power and the Erosion of Empathy
31:08 - "Care First" Leadership vs. Corporate Doublespeak
32:16 - Empathy in the Face of Layoffs
35:02 - The Real Roots of the Word Empathy
36:09 - True or False: Are Women Wired to Be More Empathetic?
38:10 - True or False: Does Empathy Lead to Fairer Decisions?
41:20 - Empathy in High-Performance Environments
42:53 - Can You Have Connection Without Empathy?
45:02 - Would You Rather: Deep Empathy for Your Circle vs. Moderate Empathy for All
49:09 - The Cost of Carrying Empathy
50:40 - A Real Example: Giving Feedback With Empathy
52:16 - Empathy as a Muscle: Where to Start
54:24 - The Worst Advice About Bringing Empathy to Leadership
56:26 - Closing Thought

Most leaders think burnout comes from too much work. So they respond with wellness programs, lighter workloads, and lunch hour yoga. Then nothing changes.

In this episode of The Executive Commute, Jayson Krause sits down with Dr. Tianne Foster, physician, burnout researcher, and author of Reality Check, to unpack what actually drives burnout and why most organizations are solving the wrong problem.

Trained across Canada, the US, and the UK, Dr. Foster became obsessed with burnout after a senior physician told her entire class to get out of medicine while they still could. Her conclusion: burnout isn't an individual weakness. It's a mismatch between people and the environment they work in, and it starts with leadership.

In this episode:

• The six workplace factors that drive burnout (workload is only one of them)
• Why nurses turn down pay raises in toxic workplaces, and what that means for retention
• How to tell the difference between burnout, depression, and a hard season
• Why treating burnout as an individual problem lets organizations off the hook
• The Yale finding that high engagement scores can be an early warning, not a win
• The petri dish question every leader should ask about their culture

If your best people are running on fumes and your wellness budget isn't moving the needle, this conversation explains what's actually happening and where to intervene.

Follow Jayson Krause

YouTube: / @jaysonkrauseleadership
LinkedIn: / jayson-krause

0:00 - "Get Out While You Still Can": The Story That Started It All
3:15 - Why Trust Dr. Foster on Burnout
7:38 - The Six Workplace Factors That Drive Burnout
10:16 - Compensation, Fairness, and Why Raises Don't Fix Toxic Workplaces
13:38 - Defining Burnout (and How It Differs From Depression)
15:25 - Stress vs. Burnout: What People Get Wrong
17:28 - The Noonday Demon: Burnout as a Collapse of Meaning
19:51 - The Petri Dish: How Burnout Spreads Through Organizations
22:15 - Growth Requires Stress: The Weight Room Analogy
25:32 - Should Burnout Be a Medical Diagnosis?
28:31 - Jayson's Own Brush With Burnout
31:53 - The Superhero Persona (and Its Kryptonite)
34:53 - Why Wellness Programs Fail
37:40 - Would You Rather: $1M Wellness Budget or Fire One Leader?
39:27 - True or False: Burnout Myths (and a Yale Surprise)
44:48 - High Achievement Without Sacrifice: Know Your Values
48:13 - First Signs of Burnout and the Simplest Way Back

Welcome to The Meaningful Leader — July Edition.

This month, we're looking at the invisible forces that shape how leaders and teams actually perform: the standards we fail to define, the belonging we misunderstand, the thinking environments we create, and the warning lights we ignore.

Three of this month's sections were sparked by great conversations I had on The Executive Commute with Level 52 coach and facilitator - Jessica Heafey, Flow state advisor - Dr. Murray Heber, and author of Reality Check - Dr. Tianne Foster. Links to each full discussion are below.

https://www.level52.ca/podcast-linktree

But the thread running through all of them is simple: meaningful leadership is not built by using better words. It's built by confronting what those words actually require.

High performance. Belonging. Flow. Burnout.

We throw these terms around like their meanings are obvious. They're not. And when leaders don't define them clearly, teams are left guessing, pretending, protecting, or quietly drifting.

Let's get into it.

Dr. Murray Heber argues that mindset may be a much bigger factor than effort.

In this episode of The Executive Commute, Jayson Krause and Dr. Murray Heber explore the science of flow state, why high performers burn out, and how leaders can create the conditions for peak performance without relying on constant pressure.

They discuss the difference between playing to win and playing not to lose, why curiosity is one of the most powerful tools available to leaders, and how confusion can sometimes be the pattern interrupt needed to break cycles of stress, anxiety, and overthinking.

This conversation explores:

• what flow state actually is
• why grinding eventually stops working
• how leaders unintentionally block performance
• the relationship between curiosity and creativity
• why urgency can undermine innovation
• how to create the conditions for team flow

Follow Jayson Krause

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@JaysonKrauseLeadership

File lives here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1v0QiTchc7WibsnSKcihDx2cEDBhhku5_/view?usp=drive_link