I want to get it right, not to be right
That sounds like modesty. It isn’t. It’s the most practical thing I know about leading people.
A leader who needs to be right gets agreement. A leader who wants to get it right gets the truth, and the truth is the only thing you can actually act on. Most of the serious mistakes I’ve watched organizations make were visible to someone closer to the work, well before the decision was taken. The information just never reached the person making it. That’s true at the top, and it’s true two layers down.
Twenty years ago I read a Harvard Business Review piece by David Garvin and Michael Roberto that changed how I run a room. Their distinction was simple: most decision-making is advocacy, a contest of ideas where people arrive to persuade. The alternative is inquiry, a shared search for the best answer rather than your answer.
I still hand that article to leaders I mentor. It’s the difference between a team that debates to win and a team that debates to learn, and it shows up in everything I do, how I facilitate, how I coach, how I handle the moment when someone in the room thinks I’m wrong.
Especially that moment. Collaboration isn’t harmony. It’s productive tension inside enough trust to survive it.
When I took over as SVP Channels at TELUS, the business was at an inflection point. Product differentiation in Canadian wireless was disappearing, every carrier had the same phones, the same plans, the same promotions. It was clear to me that our next advantage would come from how we made people feel when they bought, not from what we sold.
Our Western dealer network disagreed. They had built real success on place and promotion, and they believed in it. This wasn’t a lack of commitment. It was conviction, which is much harder to move.
A colleague, Brent Johnston, opened our offsite with a story about Christopher Columbus who sailed west guided by assumptions that were confidently held, carefully reasoned, and wrong. The Earth’s size. The distance to Asia. The supplies required. By every measure he should have failed. Instead he ran into a continent nobody had accounted for.
The point wasn’t luck. It was that intelligent people with good data can be wrong about what is true. The room shifted from asking “are we right?” to asking “what if we’re wrong?” That’s when the alignment started.
When teams resist change, it’s rarely because they don’t care. It’s because they believe. The work is creating conditions where people feel safe enough to examine what they believe, and that is a management job as much as a leadership one.
What this means in a room with your managers
I ask more than I tell. I’ll bring twenty-five years of having made these decisions myself, and I’ll put it on the table as evidence rather than instruction. Your managers will be expected to disagree with me, and the program works better when they do.
I won’t soften the standards to be liked, and I won’t enforce them without earning the right to. Both halves matter. That’s the whole argument.
Twenty-five years leading sales, retail and channel organizations in Canadian telecom and retail. TELUS Mobility (2000–2005), TELUS Customer Solutions (2006–2012), The Source (2013–2014), Match Marketing Group (2015–2018), Rogers Communications (2018–2021). Teams of up to 3,000 people across as many as 700 locations.
MBA and Bachelor of Commerce, Concordia University, Montreal — Royal Bank of Canada Gold Medal as highest-ranking student. Governance Essentials, Institute of Corporate Directors. Based in Vancouver, working across Canada.