The Great Canadian
LEADERSHIP
Podcast

Can you persuade another without feeling pushy or manipulative? Short answer… YES! In this episode, you’ll uncover easy ways to persuade, whether you’re writing or speaking. Your emails, communications and interactions motivate others to action.
This episode is “How to Be Persuasive from Writing to Speaking”. Our host, Joel Silverstone, shares with you the strategies and insights to make persuasion simple and respectful. You will find the ideas and tips to balance emotions and logic that connect with the other to be persuasive. Because persuasion is making it easy for the other person. Join us on how you can do this with your writing and communication skills. This is part of our 4-part series on the soft skills you need for 2023: Empathy in Business, Leading Complex Projects with Clarity, Change - Turning Resistance into Resilience, and How to Be Persuasive in Your Writing and Communication.

Empathy is one of the most important leadership skills you should be using more often. The research says that 76% of people who experienced empathy from their leaders reported they were engaged, compared with only 32% who experienced less empathy.
Empathy is a crucial business skill because it enables collaboration, motivation, and feeling respected. Empathy is foundational to emotional intelligence; but how do you make it part of your everyday interactions? By being more empathetic, you create a ripple effect where people’s perspectives and emotions are acknowledged - it doesn’t mean you have to agree with them, but they feel heard and understood. In fact, 67% of people with highly empathic managers, report often or always being engaged, compared to only 24% of people with less empathic managers.
In this episode, you’ll find some ideas that can help with building your awareness of empathy and how to make this soft skill a business behaviour. This episode is called “Empathy in Business”. Our host, Joel Silverstone, shares with you the strategies and insights to make empathy your opportunity to engage and collaborate in your professional (and personal) settings.
This is part of our 4-part series on the soft skills you need for 2023 – Change - Turning Resistance into Resilience, Persuasion in Your Writing and Communication Skills, and Leading Complex Projects with Clarity.

When leading a complex project, how do you get to the desired outcome? How do you lead and communicate to motivate and engage towards the outcome?
In this episode, Leading Complex Projects with Clarity, we discuss the importance of the human factor, the people that are going to make this successful. According to our guest, Nada Darwiche, projects are not linear lines and where we get stuck is the ‘on time, on budget’ result. A successful project focuses on the people – making sure they understand the message being delivered and why it matters to them, their team and the organization.
This is part of our four-part series on the soft skills you need for 2023. Our other three parts are: Change - Turning Resistance into Resilience, Empathy in Business, and Persuasion in Your Writing and Communication Skills.
Our guest, Nada Darwiche, is a Principal at NDC Group and a Sr. Lead Consultant with Optimus SBR. She has more than 20 years of business experience consulting for Fortune 1000 companies in the areas of change management, strategy, project management/implementation, process improvement and pitch development. She has led many client engagements focusing on key strategic initiatives, delivering sustained, bottom-line benefits as well as enhanced key partner relationships.
Listen in as Nada shares her experience as Project Leader #3, how she had to switch hats from project management to change management, and how she dealt with the resistance of teams to get the project back to ‘on time and on budget’!

Have you committed to making a change, or are currently dealing with a change? Maybe it’s your resolution to get fit. Or maybe at work you’re navigating a hybrid environment; your team is having to do more with less and navigate new technology and new roles. Change can be exciting, stressful or a combination of these heightened emotions. Logically, you understand all this – so why is change difficult to implement?
In this episode, you’ll find some ideas that can help with change and relate to the examples of not just dealing with change, but how to build resilience from it.
This episode is called “Change - Turning Resistance into Resilience”. Our host, Joel Silverstone, shares with you the strategies and insights to make change an opportunity to move forward and not backtrack or get stuck.
This is part of our 4-part series on the soft skills you need for 2023 - empathy in business, persuasion in your writing and communication skills, and leading complex projects with clarity.

For 2023, it’s not just a ping-pong table that’s going to keep employees (and you) motivated and feeling appreciated. HR trends for 2023 say that organizations will need to focus more on the well-being of employees.
A Forbes article shares that 20-50% of all employee attrition is attributed to burnout.
This episode we’re discussing how to win the retention game through the idea of renewal. How do we make people more resilient against burnout? The importance of quality short breaks moves us to a better flow and quality to our work. We have been moving between hybrid, remote, and the office…we start to run out of mental energy, stop making rational decisions and feel stressed. For 2023, it’s important to prioritize renewal. How do you lead that? What does that look and sound like? We discuss with Kerry O’Brien, Sr .
Talent Development PM at Axonify, about how to put renewal into our work and why it impacts the retention and productivity of the people in your organization. Our guest, Kerry O’Brien, is a 14-year veteran of Talent Development, primarily growing and scaling teams in the tech sector.