The habits that made you an exceptional doer are the same ones quietly working against your team now.

Jennifer Lussier spent six years raising her hand for every available role at Platform Calgary, moving from contract advisor to COO after her tech startup failed in 2019. She ran the organization as interim CEO for six months while simultaneously competing in a formal three-interview search to make the role permanent, and was elected CEO two months before this conversation was recorded.

This episode goes directly into what actually changes when the title changes, and why most of that change is subtraction.

KEY THEMES FROM THIS EPISODE

• Making everybody a leader: Jennifer is building a culture at Platform where every team member, from VP to the person at the cafe counter, operates with a shared set of fundamentals: agency, resilience, adaptability, and mentorship. The goal is an organization where people make values-aligned decisions without waiting for direction from above.

• High stakes vs. low stakes: One of the most expensive habits in leadership is reading every situation as critical. Jennifer trained herself to ask the actual size of the risk before responding, and describes how reframing a media appearance as just answering a question to another human changed her performance under pressure.

• Transparent leadership with calibration: Jennifer leads with openness, including sharing the uncertainty of her own interim process with her team in real time. But she draws a deliberate line: shoulder the scary parts, communicate the known.

• Naming your bias before the meeting: When Jennifer has a gut read on a decision, she states it before the discussion starts. Here is my bias. Call it out. It removes the dynamic where the team performs agreement because the leader has already landed somewhere.

• The COO-to-CEO shift: The operational instinct to solve, fix, and stay in the details does not disappear when the title changes. Jennifer describes the deliberate work of pulling out of people’s business to focus on what only the CEO can do: build better leaders and look further down the road.

• Career trees: Platform is building multi-path career development internally, where team members can move across functions with an internal mentor guiding the transition. The goal is to send people out more capable than they arrived, even if that means losing them.

CHAPTERS

• 0:00 — Introduction
• 1:13 — What Platform Calgary does
• 4:32 — Jennifer’s path: startup failure, advisory work, Platform
• 7:28 — What capital L leadership actually looks like
• 10:18 — Making everybody a leader: the fundamentals framework
• 14:21 — High stakes vs. low stakes: reading the actual size of the risk
• 16:00 — Transparent leadership: what to share and what to shoulder
• 21:16 — The stories we tell ourselves and how they limit us
• 25:04 — Career trees and building agency in your team
• 27:09 — The 150-partner story: what belief does to performance
• 34:29 — Making better leaders is the job now
• 35:50 — What the COO has to let die for the CEO to grow
• 40:52 — Self-regulation: keeping score for yourself
• 44:15 — The interim process: applying for your own job
• 51:28 — Vote for Jen: what transparency gets back
• 55:29 — The watch: anchor and armour
• 59:21 — Naming your bias before the discussion starts
• 1:07:15 — Platform’s 2030 vision: beyond the echo chamber

Connect with Jennifer Lussier

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