John Juricic: We are live on Sidney Breakfast Club after hours. Okay. So for the, let me see how many folks we have. Oh gosh. Shawn, we are up to 32 billion. You know, it is always higher. It keeps getting larger every time. That is amazing. It is very.

Shawn O'Hara: It is very popular.

John Juricic: Very popular. Clearly people are interested. Anyway, this is something that we have started to build upon the momentum of the previous meeting. It was a record attendance to listen to. There were four individuals. Three of them are online today, and Jen could not join us, and we were talking about leadership. I called it Leadership Insights 2026. Welcome to the broadcast, Lacey, Trisha and Jesse.

Trisha Sterloff: Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

John Juricic: Absolutely. Well, thanks for joining us again. Welcome. Some, you know, there have been folks who said, no, we do not want anything to do with this. And, you know, how could they not want to be part of this? But Sidney Breakfast Club, for those individuals not familiar with it, really is turning into a Lower Vancouver Island slash Peninsula business incubator. This is where a lot of business is being talked about. It is a networking club. We try to learn about business, we try to learn about stuff, and we had a really great start to the year talking about leadership, which in my opinion means something different to every person I talk to. And so I would love to start off with really where you guys, you know, how you define leadership, and let us start there, because Lacey, you are on my left, at least in the box to my left. Why do we not begin with you if that is okay?

Lacey Sheardown: Totally. Yeah, so perfect. I will just introduce myself quickly, so I am Lacey Sheardown, and I am the GM of a small business called MeetEdgar. MeetEdgar is a scheduling and automation platform for social media. I am based here in Victoria and I have a remote team all around the world. There are just six of us on MeetEdgar, so it is a bit of a different perspective from leadership in that it is a small remote team.

John Juricic: Small remote team. Yeah, for sure. Mm-hmm. Okay.

Lacey Sheardown: Mm-hmm. I think generally leadership to me, I have been really lucky to have some fantastic mentors in my time and people that I still look up to to this day. When I do things or say things, that person is in the back of my head and I think, oh, that is what she would have said, or what he would have said. I always think for me, I always say that I am just the biggest cheerleader on the team. That is my job, to support people, give them the fuel that they need, and then I get out of their way. That is how I view leadership. That is so remarkable, you know, what part is maybe the most important, getting out of the way.

John Juricic: Oh my gosh. I cannot express to you enough, folks who think they are leaders do not get out of the way and let other people do their thing. Congratulations. Okay, we will shift over. Tricia, what do you think? Or first of all, hi, introduce yourself.

Trisha Sterloff: Hi. So for those of you who are watching who do not know me, hi everyone. I am Trisha Sterloff. I am a career and leadership coach. I focus on leaders who are typically in their early to mid career stages, and they are looking to either get up and move up, get out and do something totally different, or really feel that they are having more impact right where they are at. Just to pick up on what you were saying, John, about getting out of the way, we were talking in a masterclass that I had last week around how to navigate leadership transitions, and that getting out of the way piece is so important when you have leaders who have moved up because they are so good at doing.

Trisha Sterloff: How to help leaders transition out of being the fantastic doer that you are to the person who actually leads the way and helps others shine, which I know Lacey does so well, especially with a remote team, because that has its own challenges.

John Juricic: Yeah. In fact, many times the exact opposite. The great doers are bad leaders.

Trisha Sterloff: It depends why you want leadership. I think that is a really important piece too. Why do you want to be in a leadership position? Is it for the title, for the money, or is it because you really want to lead others and help others shine? You are going to end up with two very different types of leaders depending on what the motivation is. It is really around helping to support people be the best leaders that they can so they keep their teams engaged.

John Juricic: Yeah. Thank you. Jesse is somebody I have recently met, do not know a lot of your background. Both Lacey and Tricia I have known for a while. Quite fascinated to hear always from new folks that I am not familiar with what their thoughts are on these things that we hang around in. So tell us what you do and your perspectives on leadership.

Jessy Savage: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me back here. It is great to be a part of this again and to get to talk a bit about leadership. For me, leadership was this completely accidental thing that I walked into as a result of burnout a few years ago. I own a company called Victoria Digital Marketing. We do everything from web design, online marketing, but we also do print marketing and we do a lot of coaching for business owners as well.

Jessy Savage: As you can imagine, doing all that myself was a little too much, so leadership just was not actually a choice for me. It was kind of sink or swim, and my biggest philosophy when it comes to leadership is about being wrong. I love being wrong. Leadership to me is all about humility and actually being able to relate to your team, not from an elevated level, but actually placing yourself amongst them as well and hiring people that are a lot smarter than me.

John Juricic: Thank you. Thank you very. Shawn, do we have any comments?

Shawn O'Hara: No. No, just.

John Juricic: It is because there are too many, right? There are too many people to write them. Yeah, I get that right here. I challenge, I have got to challenge the three of you. I challenge myself. In fact, there has been a huge debate around leadership, especially globally, internationally. Prime Minister Mark Carney has identified that we have actually reached a rupture in the way that our countries are talking with each other globally. Leadership is now beginning to look differently for different people and different cultures.

John Juricic: Clearly an American type leadership in general, I mean, there are 400 million people down there, so you cannot say everyone is like that, but it is now more do as I tell you, whereas there is another sort of middle power level of leadership of people going, no, let us work collaboratively together. At what stage do you find you have to balance that? Because at some point, leadership is moving a stalled organization. You have got to move it to do something, or circle talkers, they just talk in circles and never get anywhere. How do you balance what are now clearly two define definitions of leadership out there? Anyone can go for that.

Trisha Sterloff: Maybe I will think out loud.

John Juricic: Yeah, let us do that.

Trisha Sterloff: Right on. Jesse can jump in. I really like what Jesse said around having humility and knowing that you do not necessarily have all the answers all of the time. That command and control way of leading I think has been tried and tested over centuries at this point, and there may be very specific times where you have to get a little bit like that. Emergency management command and control structure works really well for that.

Trisha Sterloff: But when you are working with an organization, it is a living, breathing thing, and you are bringing in people from different cultures, different generations. They all come with different ways of working and different expectations. My personal approach is you do not ever really need to get command and control, but if you do see things going sideways, people who talk in circles or whatever it may be, people who cannot deliver for whatever reason, there is usually a root cause to that specific problem, and so getting curious and actually digging into that and being a coach, a mentor, and yes, a boss. There are things that are non-negotiables that have to get done, but I think coming at that as the one-off versus the command and control structure that really is proven out that it fractures things, unless there are very specific things, emergency management is a perfect example.

Trisha Sterloff: You do not have time. You have to get something done. But I would say the vast majority of our work is not that, and so it does take a more thoughtful approach to be able to turn things around without damaging the culture that you are trying to build.

John Juricic: Any other input?

Jessy Savage: Yeah, I can speak to that. Yeah, so my first job, my boss was very, you know, do this now, I am the boss, I am bossing you around, and there is no way I could say no because I was 10 years old and it was my dad. I hope we passed the statute of limitations on child labor laws. It was an interesting experience. I was very young and it was very authoritative. It was, you do this now. That is kind of the atmosphere that I grew up in. We are really good friends today and he has chilled out a lot.

Jessy Savage: I think also for me too, as a leader, we get stressed out. One of the most important things for me is to not show that to the team. What I learned from my dad actually was that if you are having difficulties internally, sleep on it. Sleep on a hard decision. Sleep on your feelings. With our team, we are very varied people, and a lot of what you have to do as well to lead a team of people is that you have to become adaptive to everybody's personalities, to become adaptive to everybody's learning capabilities and skills and how they prefer to have feedback as well. I am very lucky that that is a skill that I definitely have, so I am able to relate to each team member in a different way and provide different amounts of structure because everybody is so unique and individualized. That has been really impactful for me.

John Juricic: Fascinating. Thank you.

Lacey Sheardown: That is great. I do not know that I have a lot more to add. Both of you made some really good points. I think the thing that I might add, I mean, I think we have all had that boss that has been the bossy boss, and none of us want to be that. It is not great for team culture and no one enjoys working with someone like that.

Lacey Sheardown: For me, the other piece I want to add is about getting buy-in. I think a lot of the team's motivation, if they feel like they are part of what you are growing and what your purpose is, you do not need to be a bossy boss. People are there doing it because they really want to and they care about it. I love what Jesse said about recognizing that you are not the smartest person in the room and you should not be. You want to surround yourself with people who are experts in their own job and then let them do that. Like Tricia said, if it is emergency management, someone has got to come in and lay down the law on the steps, but in the course of everyday business, it is really collaborative and just asking questions. I do not have a lot to add other than the buy-in piece. Everyone has kind of touched on it.

John Juricic: Mm-hmm. Thank you. Fascinating. Shawn, do you want to chirp in? I do not want to silence you because you are managing the millions of chat box there.

Shawn O'Hara: Yeah, I am just distracted. I have been putting everybody's web address in and it has disappeared.

John Juricic: Oh really?

Shawn O'Hara: Yeah.

John Juricic: Well, we will make sure.

Shawn O'Hara: Anyway, what I was going to comment is yes, praise is incredibly individualistic, the amount of praise that people want. As leaders, we always have to be aware. Some people like it publicly in front of the whole team, to say, hey, you did a fantastic job. Others want it to be quiet, yeah, you did well, and that is it. Knowing that makes a huge difference.

Trisha Sterloff: I find that true, Shawn, and being typically an extrovert, I would say I did not catch onto it as early as I would have liked to if I am honest, because I think, oh, telling everybody, you know, hey, Joe did a great job today. Meanwhile, Joe is an introvert and wants to crawl under the table. It is really important, like Jessie said, I think she really captured it well. Understanding people's preferences is important and it is a sign of respect to your teammates. I learned it early on and I never forgot it.

Shawn O'Hara: It even has an impact in brainstorming, for example. Any kind of team meeting, some people brimming with ideas will not say anything because it is in front of the group. It can be hard to either pull that out or somehow have them contribute.

John Juricic: All right. We are going to go to the elephant in the room. I am going to bring it up. Clearly there are three business leaders. You are all young. You are all younger than me. I am 67. I have a son who is 43. You are 67 too. Sure, you are all younger than all that, but you are also all women. I think it is worth discussing that, not in a misogynistic way, but in a strategic way. Are there differences in leadership styles and management between men and women?

John Juricic: Do you find yourself defaulting to, well, that is a guy and I kind of know how I am going to deal with that person? I really hate that that would have to be the case, but I am interested in your response.

Jessy Savage: I cannot necessarily think of any differences. It is interesting because I do not think that I really have a lot of communication or conversations within the community about leadership with other business owners that I can think of. I do not really know if I lead the business in a different way than men ever would. I do know that in my industry, the last marketing agency that I worked for, I worked for two men up in Kelowna, and they were fantastic.

Jessy Savage: They actually really kind of shaped the way that I built my business. They took me in, they put me through so much training, they showed me all their processes for managing, for bidding on projects, for client communication, for everything. I would say that the female led company that I have built is actually modeled after the one where I worked for these two incredible men. Maybe I do lead similarly that way. That was my inspiration.

John Juricic: Very cool. Well, can I comment on something that I thought kind of ties into your question from when we were at the breakfast club meeting? The four of us stood up there and talked about things that were maybe more like emotional and connection with our team.

Lacey Sheardown: We all talked about vulnerability and transparency, and there were a lot of themes like that across the panel. Afterwards, one of the attendees came up to me and kind of noted that we had not really talked about forecasting or, you know, the actual business stats and things like that. I was like, well, for starters, that would have been a really boring panel.

Lacey Sheardown: We all do that stuff for our business, but it is just not really interesting to talk about. I thought it was interesting, and I do not know if that is a female male lens at all, I am not saying that, but it was a male attendee who said that to me.

John Juricic: Well, it is. I can tell you.

Lacey Sheardown: Yeah. To me, I do not know, maybe there is some more, I do not know, maybe a bit of the emotional intelligence, I do not know.

John Juricic: Is much higher. Is much higher in my opinion. Now, I come from a, so there is also male, female, and young and old, and so it depends on that matrix where you land. Male and old are going to fall into objective type discussions, determining metrics and KPIs and all that kind of crap. Now Jesse's experience has been maybe young and male that was perhaps more empathetic, more understanding, more humanity based decision making, as opposed to, I am going to just generically call it Excel-based decision making.

John Juricic: For an older generation who are aging out, thank God we are aging out, because look at the mess it has got us into, globally at least anyway. I think on many levels, older males could learn so much about empathy and emotion and understanding. You know, Lacey, you and I have a shared now family experience and my grandkids are in hockey, and holy mackerel are these kind of extremities all over the place in the rink. First of all, the moms are together, at least from my experience. All the dads are together, and I am like, what is up with that to begin with? I would much rather go sit with the moms. That is a far more interesting conversation to me. Different reactions to their kids.

Shawn O'Hara: Who yells at the.

John Juricic: At end of the game.

Shawn O'Hara: Yells at the coach. Who yells at the coach.

John Juricic: Well, the men do. At least in my experience, the men are yelling and the women are actually the ones who are getting their kids to successfully react to the consequences of whatever is going on. The men are blah, blah, blah, blah. They rant apart, the kids are crying, the mom comes in, solves the problem. It is like some kind of global microscope at the rink, and I am just looking at this going, what the hell?

John Juricic: Of course that is family dynamics too, right? So what do you think, Lacey? Am I like.

Lacey Sheardown: Well, hockey is a whole nother discussion when you add that into it. When you look at the hockey lens and not the business lens, that is, I do not think we want to go there.

John Juricic: Yeah, but am I not describing.

Lacey Sheardown: No, no, it is very different. My oldest is in hockey and she is an elite goalie. My youngest is just brand new to hockey, U7, the little itty bitty ones who can barely skate. I made a point of being an on-ice helper. I never played hockey. I played ringette because in the small town I was from, girls did not get to play hockey. So I was in figure skating, and then I switched to ringette.

Lacey Sheardown: I am not much of a skater. Anyways, I am on the ice, but I am making a point of being out there because out of all the on-ice helpers, there are two women, and there must be 12 men because we have a, it is a very big group, it is like 54 kids. I am out there just honestly, I was like, I just want to be out there and show kids that girls can be on skates too.

John Juricic: It is remarkable. Back to this kind of telling leadership versus empathetic leadership or collaborative leadership. A lot of the dads are telling these kids what to do and the kids are not doing it, so they are getting louder and more angry and more reactionary and louder. Whereas the moms are coming from empathy, well, my kid, maybe he did not have enough rest, maybe she did not have enough to eat, why do we not try better next time, all this. So starkly different.

John Juricic: Even though it is hockey, they all have jobs. They are all potentially managers of somebody. Maybe a lot of them could be teachers. So it is hockey, but it is life. Frankly, the more empathetic human understanding solutions are working. They work. I do think that female leadership coming from that sort of DNA place is better and more effective than male leadership. Actually, male leadership could be a component of a female leadership box of tools.

John Juricic: There will be the, these people do this, these people do that, but to have the overall leader be a female, we are long overdue. Long overdue. I know we did not bring it up before because it is not fair at sort of a community level to say that just because you are a female, you are going to be boxed into this way. But when you look at actually what is going on, there are strengths and weaknesses from both genders.

Lacey Sheardown: Yeah, but I mean, you have to be so careful though, because within each, there are outstanding people and people who are not. I had a female leader who I can think of as an example of not what to do. I remember going into one of my first, it was like an employee review thing, and I was terrified because she had never given me any feedback, so I did not know whether I was going in doing a great job or a bad job.

Lacey Sheardown: I kind of said that to her, like I was nervous. She said, I think you look nervous or whatever, and I said, yeah, I am because I do not know how I am doing. She said, oh, well if I do not say anything, it means you are doing a great job. That was an example of someone who had no idea of what motivated me. I was at the time young, and I did not have a lot of confidence and I needed some reassurance I was on the right track, because sometimes in business, even if you are doing a good job in your role, the numbers might not match too.

Lacey Sheardown: At the time this was a struggle in this business, and I was meant to be making sales, which I am a terrible salesperson, and I hated making sales calls, and they were not coming together for me. After that, I did feel like, okay, I am doing a good job, but I just remember that and I thought to myself, I am never ever going to do that to someone who I work with. You should know where you stand. There should be no meeting requests that I ever send anyone where they feel terrified to meet with me.

John Juricic: Yeah, they are so well done.

Lacey Sheardown: That was a female leader.

John Juricic: Yeah.

Trisha Sterloff: I guess maybe I could jump in here too, because John and I have had some of these discussions offline. I think there are a couple of things. Number one, I have noticed a huge difference in the workplace from when I started in 2003 in government here in British Columbia to now. There were women who had never even mentioned the fact that they had children. That was totally offside. People did not talk about their personal lives at all at work. It was keep work at work and home at home, which I think we all acknowledge now is a pipe dream for most people because both affect the other.

Trisha Sterloff: The other thing though, I actually agree. In certain industries, it is so much more male dominated than in other industries. In the public sector, you see more people on the social sector are female, more people on the natural resource sector are male. That is just the way it has played out. To pick up on what Lacey was saying, I actually started something in 2014 because I had had a couple of bad experiences, particularly with female leaders. I started a group called, not creatively called, but Women Leading in Government, and my whole goal is to try and ensure that women start supporting each other in a better way.

Trisha Sterloff: When I first started in government, there was a scarcity mindset around leadership positions for females, and so it almost became, if I started climbing a ladder and that is where you wanted to go, you might have to pull me off the ladder to get up there. I think that is totally destructive. It is unnecessary. I think that whether we are talking male or female, I would say all of us bring with us masculine and feminine energies.

Lacey Sheardown: Mm-hmm.

Trisha Sterloff: It is how we use both of those and when we use those and apply those that really actually matter. Maybe women do have more accessibility to those feminine energies, but to Jesse's point, I have had wonderful mentors and bosses that were men and wonderful mentors and bosses that were women, and equally bad ones on both sides. I think it is really about making sure that you are using the energies that you have and getting to know the people that you are wanting to lead.

John Juricic: Yeah.

Trisha Sterloff: If that matters.

Jessy Savage: Yeah. Echoing that, I actually, kind of on the flip side of it, I had a really interesting experience when I brought on my project manager a few months ago where she told me that she had worked for women before and she found that working for women, they were a lot harder to work for and mean. I was like, oh, that is really interesting. It was also really interesting to have that very frank, honest feedback from her right from the start, because then it is kind of, it is nice to have that backstory and to understand that she will probably require leadership in a completely different way, and that it is worth it to be more empathetic.

Jessy Savage: She is fantastic. I want to keep her around for forever. I want to make sure I am leading her correctly.

John Juricic: That is fascinating. This is fun. Thank you. I am learning stuff every minute. We are at half an hour, and at least all of us understand that our digital audience has got a short attention span, and so why do we not wrap things up. If I may ask each of you to look into the future now. A very, very uncertain future for our countries, our communities. There I think has to be some pretty dramatic change for us to survive economically, culturally, politically.

John Juricic: I am not being pessimistic. I just think that is where the world is at now, trying to understand how to fit together in a better way. Maybe we end up with what do you think we should be doing, or what kind of leadership attributes might we tell the community to think about doing more of in the future? How about that for an end question. I should have given that to you beforehand. Hey, Shawn, you can speak to that if you want, or maybe how can we recognize traits in others and encourage or dissuade them too?

John Juricic: Yeah. Okay. Does somebody want to start or is that not fair? Go ahead, Jesse.

Jessy Savage: No, I can go. Okay. So here is the thing about me is I am actually like a total boomer millennial. There are definitely a lot more of my traits that are kind of boomer, but I think the general empathy and imperfectness and honesty of leadership is where I do fall into that very millennial kind of category. Again, I do not want to be perfect. I want my team to know when I make mistakes. I want to be the person that they can come to and they are like, hey, you did this wrong, and I am like, yeah, I did, thank you for telling me, because that is the only way that we can learn.

Jessy Savage: I think that if you think you are done learning, you are. You are just so far behind the line. You are wrong. You absolutely are wrong. You are never done learning as a leader or as a team member. For me, that is what I would recommend for leaders moving forward, is stop thinking you are perfect because you are really not, and let your team teach you.

John Juricic: That is so cool.

Trisha Sterloff: Maybe I am going to pick up on Jesse, what you were saying, if that is okay. I also think it is okay not to have all the answers. It is okay right now that everything is uncertain and you are not going to have all the answers as a leader, and that is fine. I think having conversations like we are right now and building community, John, like you do through Sidney Breakfast Club and there are other places.

Trisha Sterloff: Finding some more community as a leader is great because you get different perspectives, and I know that it is so easy sometimes to just be narrowly focused on where you are at and what is going on, but broadening out your perspective I think can give you a little bit of innovative ideas, but I also think it can help ground you a little bit more in these uncertain times to know you are not in it all by yourself. It is again okay that you do not know everything that is going to be coming up.

Trisha Sterloff: Just communicate really clearly with your team about what you do know, what you do not know, and what you can and cannot talk about. Open that bridge to your team because they are feeling it right now.

Lacey Sheardown: I love it. I am going to feed off of that too.

Shawn O'Hara: Right?

Lacey Sheardown: I think what I wanted to talk about too is, for me, being consistently honest and as transparent as I can be. I think all of us are doing that, and I love how you said it is okay to admit we do not know, and I think people would way rather hear that than some kind of BS answer anyways. I think we have Brené Brown to thank for making this more out there, about being bravely vulnerable.

Lacey Sheardown: Sometimes we have seen leaders who just, you know, they have all the answers and they have got all the right things to say and they are using big fancy words. It does not feel authentic and it does not help us connect with that person at all. I think this brave vulnerability as a leader helps you connect with your team and it will help them feel valued in what you are doing and your shared purpose will feel more real. I think people have to have enough confidence actually to be vulnerable, because I think it is just ego and a mask that a lot of people put on when they have all the answers.

Lacey Sheardown: I do not believe it for a second. I would way rather hear the mistakes and what you do not know, because as Jessie said, no one knows it all. It is okay. You just do not. If you think you do, then you are not someone I want to be at the table with.

Shawn O'Hara: You are wrong.

Lacey Sheardown: Exactly. You are wrong. You are wrong.

John Juricic: This has been extra. Really, I did not expect this. This has been so enlightening. I have learned so much from you all. Thank you. This is being recorded and we will distribute this to as many folks as I can, and I know that you will share. I am going to end the stream now. It takes about three or four seconds for that to happen. Try to, you know, do not start talking about something you do not want the public to hear. So thank you all. Thanks to everyone who is listening. Thanks to everyone who is jumping on. Thanks to the three of you, and Shawn, thank you very much for co-hosting.

Shawn O'Hara: Thank you.

John Juricic: Till we meet again.

Shawn O'Hara: Yeah, and our thousands of listeners, stay tuned.

Lacey Sheardown: Thank you.

John Juricic: Exactly.

Lacey Sheardown: Thank you. Yes.

Links

Lacey Sheardown on LinkedIn | MeetEdgar

Trisha Sterloff on LinkedIn | Spotlight Leadership Group

Jessy Savage on LinkedIn | Victoria Digital Marketing 

John Juricic on LinkedIn | Harbour Digital Media