The skills that got you promoted are the same ones quietly strangling your team's potential.

Jayson Krause spent eight years as a funded national team bobsled athlete before discovering that the most important performance arena is not a track. It is the room where a senior leader decides whether to solve a problem or ask a question. Since 2010, he has worked with CEOs, founders, and senior executives across Canada and the US, and his message is consistent: curiosity is not a soft skill. It is an operational discipline with a measurable ROI.

This conversation goes directly at the habits, reward systems, and hidden costs that keep smart leaders stuck, and the framework for getting unstuck.

Key themes from this episode:

• The three triggers that bring leaders to coaching: the board mandate, the proactive edge-seeker, and the nightmare that wakes you up at 2 am. Mandated coaching rarely works. Pain is what actually creates space for real change.
• The Awareness, Intention, Experiment, Reflection (A-I-E-R) model: how to move from reaction to reflection before you blow it, borrowed from elite sport and applied directly to leadership behaviour.
• The seduction of solving: every time you answer a question your team could have answered themselves, you get a dopamine hit and they lose a development opportunity. The habit is well-intentioned and quietly destructive.
• Relational equity: your engagement problem is not a culture problem. It is a measurement problem. Jayson explains what to track instead.
• The meerkat story: a COO described by his team as the Grim Reaper rebuilt his entire reputation in six months through deliberate, specific work. This is what that actually looks like.
• What happens when you ask your team "What would make this the best year of your professional career?" and actually wait for the answer: most leaders have never asked it. Most teams have never been asked.

Chapters:

• 0:00 — Introduction
• 1:29 — Jayson's path: from national team athlete to executive coach
• 3:57 — Coaching without having been there: the asset nobody talks about
• 6:18 — The three triggers for coaching
• 9:32 — Why leaders default to tactics over self-awareness
• 11:56 — The question every leader needs to sit with
• 13:41 — "Subtle is significant": the bobsled lesson that changes how you run a team
• 19:01 — How values get weaponized — and what to do before it happens
• 22:14 — The AIER model: awareness, intention, experiment, reflection
• 27:35 — The dopamine trap: why you keep solving problems that aren't yours to solve
• 33:09 — The risk of certainty (and the illusion hiding inside it)
• 40:27 — The CFO who became the Grim Reaper — and then became a meerkat
• 49:05 — Relational equity: the only engagement metric that actually matters
• 54:29 — Joe's story: what happens when a leader refuses the narrative
• 1:03:15 — The skin-covered Petri dish: why the leader's culture is always ground zero
• 1:09:02 — Canada vs. the US: same humans, different appetite for investment
• 1:11:16 — Jayson's parting challenge

Connect with Jayson Krause: linkedin.com/in/jayson-krause

Learn more about Level 52

Brought to you by clearmotive marketing

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Season one of Curious as Hell asked one question: What does it really mean to lead today? Over six conversations, a pattern kept emerging. The leaders who were doing it well weren't the most credentialed or the most certain. They were the ones who had stopped pretending they had all the answers.

In this final episode of Season 1, Tyler is joined by Meghan, a PhD in Industrial/Organizational Psychology and the founder of Pebble, who steps in as co-host to help unpack what the season's guests were really saying. Together they work through three themes: Curiosity, Not Expertise; Relational and Co-Created; and Growth Through Reflection.

Part 1: Curiosity, Not Expertise

The guests who led best had learned, sometimes painfully, to stop leading from what they knew and start leading from what they were willing to find out. Tyler shares the 360 feedback that first cracked open his own leadership. Bobbie Racette talks about the tunnel vision of a startup founder who was moving one direction while the business quietly went another. Iggy Domagalski looks back at the opinions he confused for facts. Lara Murphy unpacks the real difference between asking for help and just delegating work.

Meghan brings the research lens: why do leaders cling to expertise even when it is clearly not working? Part of it is identity. When you got promoted because you were the best at something, letting go of that thing can feel like letting go of the reason you are in the room. What you have instead of expertise, she argues, is the people around you. That is the resource.

Part 2: Relational and Co-Created

Jennifer Lussier's team made "Vote for Jen" stickers when she was interviewing for the CEO role she had been filling as interim. That story, Tyler says, does not require an engagement survey to interpret. Meghan builds on it: the research keeps pointing to the same thing, that the relationship with your manager is the primary driver of whether someone stays, contributes, or quietly leaves. Jayson Krause calls it relational equity and argues that most organizations are measuring the wrong thing entirely.

Lara Murphy shares the moment her team told her to go prep for a big presentation instead of joining the call. She did not need to be in the room. The team had it. Tyler and Meghan argue that this is what letting go actually looks like in practice. And then the harder version: what do you do when your door is always open but no one ever walks through it? Meghan is direct: that is a cop-out. Leadership is not waiting for people to come to you. It means walking out of your own door first.

Part 3: Growth Through Reflection

This section starts with Iggy Domagalski and his think day: a few hours at Starbucks, phone off, handwritten notes, specific problems on paper. No laptop. Just tea and uninterrupted thinking time. Meghan connects it to the research on sustained high performance. The leaders who do not burn out tend to have what she calls an "other world," something completely separate from work that creates a flow state: a tango dancer, a clarinet player, a tractor on a rural property.

Bobbie Racette talks about what it took to stop being the victim of an acquisition and choose to learn from it instead. Three or four months of sitting with it before the reframe clicked. Tyler connects it to what Meghan's PhD research keeps returning to: the interior condition of the leader is the foundation on which everything else is built.

Jayson Krause closes it out with the AIER framework: a cycle that starts with awareness and moves through intention, experiment, and reflection. It is the operating system of a leader who is actually growing instead of just grinding.

This is the episode to start with if you have not listened yet. And it is the episode to come back to once you have.

Connect with Meghan Donahoe, PhD (ABD), founder of Pebble.

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

Learn more about Platform Calgary

Brought to you by clearmotive marketing

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A leader who thinks they have all the answers is not leading. They are performing certainty, and that performance has a price.

Tyler Chisholm is the founder of clearmotive, the author of *Curious as Hell: Leading and Growing with Curiosity*, and the host of this new podcast series. In this first episode, fellow podcaster and former journalist Leah Sarich turns the mic on Tyler to surface the origin story behind the book, the philosophy behind the show, and the very specific, very costly moments that convinced him certainty is the real risk in leadership.

What emerges is a candid account of how a leader who once believed he had all the answers learned, painfully and more than once, what that certainty actually cost. Tyler walks through the pool cue story from when he was 19, the failed business sale from his early 30s, the fixed vs. growth scorecard he built during COVID, and the results he has seen at clearmotive, including a significant increase in profit margin with 10 fewer full-time staff.

Key themes from this episode:

Why certainty, not ignorance, is the most dangerous thing a leader can carry into a room. The distinction is uncomfortable, but Tyler makes it plainly: you can be uncertain about something you know nothing about, or you can be certain about something you have misunderstood completely, and the second one is the one that will cost you.

What the leadership 360 actually revealed, and why the feedback "Tyler, you're showing up asking questions you already know the answer to" landed harder than any performance review. The gap between performing curiosity and practising it is where most leaders quietly live.

How the facts vs. feelings framework cuts through the noise in difficult meetings. When Tyler walks through this exercise, the point becomes clear: most of what leaders call a problem is actually a feeling they have not yet examined.

What psychological safety actually means in practice. Not a feelings discussion. Not a culture initiative. The freedom to dissent, and the moment-by-moment test of how a leader treats the person who uses it.

Why self-curiosity is the only legitimate starting point, and what it looks like to build it through low-tech, deliberate practice.

How Microsoft's transformation under Satya Nadella illustrates the business case for curious leadership at scale, from billion-dollar to trillion-dollar company.

Chapters:

0:00 — Introduction

2:37 — How podcasting opened the door to curiosity

7:28 — The risk of certainty: season 1 theme

10:45 — The rutabaga: what is on the book cover and why

15:33 — The pool cue story: an early lesson in not pretending

18:53 — When certainty cost everything: the failed business sale

21:16 — The fixed vs. growth scorecard

23:36 — Why the current leadership model is breaking down

26:47 — Curiosity as a cure for leader burnout

29:07 — What curiosity looks like on a Wednesday

33:27 — Listening as the engine of curiosity

38:55 — Psychological safety: the freedom to dissent

47:00 — Curiosity checkpoints

47:24 — Real results at clearmotive

52:37 — The Microsoft story

52:52 — What Tyler hopes leaders take away

54:24 — What to expect from Curious as Hell

Connect with Leah Sarich

Learn more about clearmotive

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