Brock President Lesley Rigg and Chancellor Hilary Pearson participated in a fireside chat at a leadership event in January. They discussed leadership as a journey shaped by self-awareness, team building, and moral clarity. They explored generational shifts, the importance of listening to youth, and embedding Brock’s values of creativity, curiosity, and courage. Pearson also highlighted the power of mentorship and thought leadership, urging connection and empathy as essential tools for navigating change and leading with purpose. A transcript of this conversation follows.
President Rigg: You’ve been in leader leadership positions at a national level. Could you discuss your leadership journey and what were the most important aspects of that journey?
Chancellor Pearson: I think that a characteristic of good leadership is self-awareness, being humble about who you are. It’s not always all about you. It’s a mix of the personal characteristics that people have combined with the professional roles that they have played and the opportunities that they’ve had and all that adds up to successful leadership.
I’m the eldest of five children. As an oldest child, I guess I’m typical. I was not rebellious. I was not someone who deviated from expectations. I wanted very much to please, but also to take responsibility. When I got to university, I had several leadership opportunities, which I didn’t understand then as leadership opportunities per se. I was thinking of them more as personal opportunities to learn. That’s another important thing I think about leadership, which is you need to be open to learning. You’re never finished with learning. In my first year at university, there was an election for a year representative, and I put my hand up for it. As a first-year representative, you’re immediately into student government and then into the governance of the college as a whole. In my third year I was elected student female head of college. I didn’t quite recognize it as leadership. At that point, I understood that it was a responsible role and that I had to do the things that were expected of me. Go to the meetings of the board at Trinity College, be aware of the concerns of the students and then speak about those concerns to the administration of the college. But I wasn’t thinking of myself in the traditional leadership sense. It wasn’t an organizational leadership role.
Where I really learned a lot about leadership was not in a formal leadership role myself, but watching leaders. My career has been tri sectoral in a sense. I worked for the government in the public sector, I worked for the private sector, and then I worked for the nonprofit sector. In all those sectors, I had increasingly responsible roles. In government, I had an opportunity to work in the Cabinet Office, and I was a member of the secretariat that supported the Priorities and Planning Committee of Cabinet, which was chaired by the Prime Minister. This was in1990, Brian Mulroney was Prime Minister, and it was an incredibly turbulent period. I listened to the Prime Minister, and I listened to the other senior members of cabinet. These were all the most senior members of cabinet, leaders of their departments and portfolios. It was an amazing learning opportunity for me,
I also had a role as the chief coordinator of the relationships between the deputy minister of Finance and his senior people, all the assistant deputy ministers, and I was also the liaison with the minister’s office and the people in the minister’s office. So I basically had a, finger on the pulse of the department. I had to make sure that the wheels turned, that people were informed when they needed to be informed, and that the deputy minister was properly briefed. I had a bird’s eye view of how leaders operated and how they reacted to crisis. How do you stay calm in a crisis? How do you think about what needs to be done and who needs to be informed and how you’re going to organize yourself to react. This was very rich learning.
In 2001, I was in my early 40s and I got the opportunity to start something, new, a network for charitable foundations. They had agreed that they needed to come together for a purpose, which was to advocate for themselves, to tell a story about the role of private philanthropy in Canada. Why it matters, why governments should care about private philanthropy, why public policy was important for private giving. Why should public policy and public money be spent to incentivize private giving?
In leadership terms, my question was would I be able to start this network. Would I be able to build an organization? Would I be able to hire people? Would I be able to work with a board of very powerful people who are used to having their own way? And would I be able to bring new members into this network? I had not done any of those things before. But at that point in my life, I realized that I had the experience of setting a vision for where I wanted to go and then setting the priorities to get there. If I hadn’t come in with an idea of where I thought I could go with this and what it could accomplish, I would have been out in a year because I wouldn’t have known what to do.
It was something that I was almost unconsciously prepared for through the experiences I’d had listening to and watching leaders, I had a sense of what I had to do right from the beginning. I was there as a leader for 18 years and built it over time, I think successfully. That’s essentially what has allowed me to have the kind of national platform and profile that I have in philanthropy and has brought me to Brock too.
President Rigg: I think as you were talking about that last step when you started to build the network you were building a team. When you got to this network, there was a need to hire people, as you said, and build that team and you had a goal. You knew where you wanted to go. I know a lot of leaders think about the outcomes and maybe not so much how the culture of the team that you build leads to those outcomes. Could you discuss the importance to you of culture in that environment and how it helped you achieve the goals that you were looking to achieve?
Chancellor Pearson: the most difficult thing for me was identifying the right people, getting them into the right jobs, encouraging them, assessing them, in a couple of cases, having to move them. That’s hard because you’re changing people’s lives when you make decisions about whether they’re good for that job or not.
It was not a one woman show, right from the beginning. It had to be a team. I didn’t have the resources to build a very large team. So, I had to be very careful about who I brought into the different roles. In fact, I had to define the roles and then I had to figure out how I would be able to recruit the right people into those roles. Over the 18 years, probably the most difficult things that I had to confront were people issues. Sometimes the team worked and sometimes it didn’t. When it didn’t it was often because of a personality on the team and the fact that we were not all on the same page, we were not aligned. It’s fine to have a very different group of people, with different backgrounds. In fact, I think it’s good to have people with different personalities and backgrounds, but they need to agree on how to work with each other and also agree on the purpose of the organization. And where things didn’t work, it was for the reason, usually that the person was behaving in a way that meant that the other members of the team couldn’t trust them.
I think that is so important. You must be able to trust the people you’re working with, both your colleagues, your peers, and the person you’re reporting to. And you as the leader need to be able to trust the people who are reporting to you. We had a pretty flat organization because we were so small. It wasn’t a hierarchy, and my preferred way of working is flat. I like to sit around the table and talk to my colleagues and fully engage them in the work. For example, my board met four times a year and I always included my staff members at the board meetings because they were my team and they needed to hear directly what the board was saying, what the concerns of the board were, what questions they had. And I also gave them responsibility for answering those questions. You think that you’re the one who gets to make the final decision on anything. While it’s true as a leader that you should be making the final decisions, you do need to leave room for debate, discussion, input from your colleagues that then leads hopefully to consensus so that the decision emerges as part of a group decision. It isn’t the leader saying, OK, now we’re going to do this. I had to fight my own tendency to do that.
In the nonprofit sector, where you’re responsible to a board, the board sees only the CEO as their employee. In a perfect world of governance, the board takes a step back from management, doesn’t get involved in operations, doesn’t start to interfere in the allocation of resources on a day-by-day basis. They might approve the budget, which of course is an allocation of resources on the advice of the CEO or the leader, but they shouldn’t be involved in the day-to-day. So, the leader is functioning between the board and the staff and negotiating the different points of view because there can be quite different perspectives between board and staff.
I do see real challenges for leaders now as we see a generational shift. I’m seeing this in philanthropy right now, which is fascinating to me. Many young leaders are coming on to the boards of the foundations or as staff leaders. I find that this generation is coming in with quite different ideas about what philanthropy is about, what its role is in our society, what they should be caring about and how they should be doing it. The young leaders that I’ve been talking to are saying we should be rethinking the use of foundation assets. Whether assets are investments or cash or grants, it’s all social capital, it’s all capital devoted to public benefit. Therefore, we should be more creative, we should be more innovative in the way we are thinking about deploying that capital. Maybe we’re doing more social investing, mission related investing. We’re using capital wherever we can to accomplish our mission. We might be guaranteeing a loan. We might be supporting a mortgage for a charity. We might be investing directly in a renewable energy company. We might be spending money ourselves in a program that we want to run as a foundation. The point here is that I think the generational thinking is different.
Of course, baby boomers are still very much involved in leadership roles and on boards. And this would be true not just in nonprofits and foundations, but also, I think universities. I think the coming changes in age and demography and composition are going to affect leaders and the challenges that leaders have because they’re managing people who are coming in with rather different expectations.
President Rigg: The team here has come together over the last year to create a new strategic plan. One of the things that I love about the strategic plan is in the title where we say the point to Brock is to transform people and reimagine the future through creativity, curiosity, and courage. Those three words were picked very carefully from the feedback that we received. Have those words played a role in your journey? And how could we think about ensuring that those values or words are embedded in our organization?
Chancellor Pearson: that’s an interesting question. It prompted me to think, Leslie, about words that spontaneously come to mind for me if I think about good leaders. I wrote down curiosity. That was my first word. I think courage is the second. I’ll talk about this a bit in relation to me, but I’ll just tell you what my other words were: self-awareness. And diplomacy. The ability to empathize, to understand, to put yourself in the minds of others and understand where they’re coming from and use that to come to a place where people can agree. That’s how I see diplomacy.
I think you can build your self-awareness, and your curiosity. I think you can build your diplomatic skills as well, but you do need to have an inherent ability to analyze yourself, to have insight. And then the other word that came to mind for me was confidence. You need to be confident in your leadership because the people around you are looking to you to set the way. People in organizations especially are looking to the leader to have a sense of what the priority is, what they should be working on, how they should be working on it. So you have to have confidence as a leader in your direction. Then you can set and communicate it.
For myself, I know that I had diplomatic skills from some of the other jobs that I’d had in my career, but I didn’t have confidence and courage until I got to my early 40s. When I was interviewed for the job at Philanthropic Foundations Canada, I had to step up and say to the foundation leaders who were interviewing me, why they should hire me. I didn’t know anything about philanthropy or foundations. I didn’t know very much about standing up an organization. There were a lot of things that disqualified me on paper. I had to have the confidence and the courage to make the argument to them about how I could deliver for them. It was only in that process that I realized If I have the confidence and the courage to be able to make this argument, then I think I can carry on.
Leadership is a journey. So, you’re not always the same leader at different stages in your life and in your career. I think you evolve and you can be a leader in different ways. The most typical form of leadership that people will think of first will be organizational leadership with the title that’s attached to it, whether it’s president or executive director or CEO. But I think there are other forms of leadership that you either are able to develop or demonstrate or you don’t. We can talk about why some leaders are bad leaders. They can be organizational leaders, they can be in the role, but they might not be good leaders because they may not be a moral leader. I think you must be able to show others what matters, what values drive you, and how those values inform your leadership. So I think that moral leadership in many ways is what determines whether you’re successful as an organizational leader.
There are other forms of leadership, as I come towards the end of my career, that are becoming more important to me, such as thought leadership. I think you should always be able to demonstrate thought leadership to some degree. It’s about vision, really. It’s about understanding what you are trying to do and how you are going to get there. Thought leadership is really thinking deeply about the work you are doing.
In my case, it’s thinking about philanthropy and the role of philanthropy, thinking about the purposes of philanthropy, how philanthropy is expressed in society and how it can be made better than it is. Thought leadership is about having those thoughts and then expressing them in a way that’s helpful to other people. As I have moved out of an organizational leadership role, I have moved into a thought leadership role.
As many of you know, I wrote a book about Canadian foundations when I left Philanthropic Foundations Canada because although I had spent 18 years trying to tell the story of Canadian philanthropy, it had never been told at book length and in a way that might be accessible to people who didn’t know very much about foundations. So that was an important project for me. I continue to write. I write a blog regularly. I write articles, I write book reviews about philanthropy and more broadly about the nonprofit sector and the charitable sector.
Also in my post-PFC life, I co-chaired an advisory committee on the charitable sector, which was set up by the federal government and reported to the Minister of Revenue This was an important leadership role, in that I could bring to bear all the things that I had learned throughout my career about the regulation of the charitable sector, the rules that govern and shape the functions and work of charities. We were trying to shape a set of recommendations to the Minister around how tax policy and regulatory policy could support and encourage and help the sector flourish. I felt that that was an area where I could exercise thought leadership.
The last form of leadership is mentor mentorship, which I think is a much softer form of leadership. I find younger people are often coming to me now and asking for advice or simply to help them talk through some of the issues that they’re dealing with and asking for my perspective. I find mentoring very satisfying. You can be a mentor almost at any point. I’m sure many of you are mentors because you’re working with young people, you’re surrounded by young people who are better now at asking for mentorship than they used to be. When I was young it didn’t really cross my mind. I thought I had to do it all by myself, I had to learn on my own. I don’t think that’s true as much. I see more young people understanding that mentorship can be important to them. They’re asking older people What did you do in your career? How did you make choices? How did you end up where you are? These conversations do help them evaluate what’s possible for them and maybe finally gives them more courage at an earlier age.
President Rigg: I wonder if we could just end with maybe one nugget that you want to share with this team. If there was one piece of advice that you could give them, what would it be?
Chancellor Pearson: I actually have three pieces of advice not just one. I want to come back on the issue of people and how hard it is as a leader to be successful if you don’t have good people and a really strong team around you. As I worked with different teams over my career, I realized that I had to do three things for them. I had to remove the fear. People often are afraid of saying something that is challenging to the leader. They don’t want to seem to be oppositional. They want to comply. So, they’re afraid of speaking out. And I absolutely disagree with leaders who create fear around them. You have to remove the fear and you have to keep reassuring people. You also have to incentivize the learning. It’s important for people to feel comfortable to say not only I don’t know the answer to that, but also how can I learn? How can I figure out the answer and be rewarded for figuring out the answer? It’s also important to reward behavior. That can be as simple as saying what a great job or, I really appreciated that memo you wrote me or, I noticed what you did, with your peers yesterday and I’m really pleased that you did that. I was surprised at how many leaders just completely ignore this and don’t take the time to reward the behavior that is creating better trust, more collegiality and more creativity in the team.
The last thing I would say is that I recognize the pressures that you are under. Everyone at the university right now is under tremendous pressure, financial pressure, political expectations, community expectations, the legacy of the university itself. This is the 60th anniversary of Brock and you want to honor that and build on it. You want to be part of an organization that can successfully take that legacy forward and make the university an even more important part of the community. I think the only way to get through all that pressure is to stay very connected, to be very trusting of each other, to rely on each other, to work through it by sharing as much as possible with each other. Each of you has your own set of responsibilities, you are all leaders and it’s important not to forget that you can get support from the people around you. The leader at the top sets the tone and if the leader at the top is saying to you as leaders, trust your teams, trust each other, trust me, let’s figure it out, you can all follow that lead. My advice is to focus on connection and on team sharing and trust building. It really makes a difference.
President Rigg: That’s helpful. I think everybody around the room is feeling that pressure. So I think they will be taking that advice to heart for sure. Thank you, Hilary. Let me open it for questions.
Brian: I have to make the assumption that you grew up in an atmosphere of liberal politics. So my question is, as you were amassing models for leadership and looking at what you thought was good and what was not, to what extent, if any, did party politics play a role in your early experiences or what you took from that?
Chancellor: I would say that I learned early on that the part of my background that had to do with diplomacy was much more me than the political part of my background. My father was a diplomat. My grandfather, of course, too had a long career as a diplomat before he became a politician, which I think is really important. Probably the most important lessons that my grandfather learned as a leader came from his diplomacy career and not necessarily from his political career. He brought into his role as a political leader, characteristics that had created success for him as a diplomat. He was always very empathetic and curious. He was very much a people person and he had a personality that was quite resilient, he was confident in himself. In other words, he was a grounded person. He didn’t have to pretend to be anything other than he was. I think all of that was important because when he became a political leader, I think he was able to build a strong team of people around him. He looked for strong people who had good ideas, intelligent people who could make a difference in their portfolios and to the country. He knew he had to make decisions at the end of the day, and he did. And he had a lot of courage.
My father was never interested in politics. He was very close to his father, and they shared a lot of interests in foreign policy. But my father was a very different personality, not a natural politician at all. And I think he made the right choice. He was much more an academic. He was someone who always had the long arc of history in mind. He didn’t respond to things in the moment. He was very thoughtful, and I really respected that. That was more the influence I grew up with, although I knew my grandfather quite well. The world of politics has not really had much attraction for me. Yet I really admire the people who are willing to step up and to be leaders in politics and in government especially. I think it takes a certain resilience and the skin of a rhinoceros basically to be in politics and a willingness to be ruthless and to speak in a way that is not native to me.
Brad: I’ve been thinking in recent months, especially in the context of the strategic plan, about the ways in which our approach to enacting the plan can rely on the insights from our largest constituency here at Brock which is our 19,000 students. I have been thinking about the idea of inverting the organizational pyramid perhaps not in practice, but at least in principle, such that students are at the top as the largest constituency and structural leaders such as us, the board and so on, are actually at the bottom. I was thinking about that in the context of your comments around mentorship and the idea that we have many youth who are seeking mentors and finding those learnings as a way to inform their next steps. What are your thoughts on the idea of reverse mentorship in the context of that inverted organizational triangle and how we all might be taking our cues and getting our guidance from the students who are going to be carrying the organization forward.
Chancellor: that’s an interesting way of looking at it. I agree that young people need to be listened to and we have to find ways of including them. One of the things that I find people in philanthropy are quite concerned about right now is the lack of social cohesion. People in foundations, are noticing, as we all are, the polarization, isolation, loneliness, anger, division, sense of unease and, in some cases, outright expressions of hatred that are really troubling. I don’t want to exaggerate them. But I do think a lot of foundations now in Canada, as in the United States, are asking what can we do to counter what we see as waves of misinformation, of isolation and loneliness. The increase in mental illness among young people, increases in anxiety and depression are very concerning. So how do we include young people? How do we make them feel empowered, is the question. Can we as foundations build processes, can we help to fund and convene discussions, dialogues, how can we reach across difference? How can we create space for young people especially to come together?
I think different leaders in university have an opportunity to create or spaces for young people to come together, not to talk about academics, not to talk about their careers and where they’re going to end up, how can they get a good job although they worry about all of that. But just to give them a chance to talk about what matters to them. And then find a way to engage them productively in a purposeful thing that they can do. Perhaps working in the community, reaching out beyond the university. The President and I have spoken about how Brock relates to community, not just how Brock succeeds in itself and within itself, but also how it reaches into community. We have talked about students being able to make a difference immediately in their areas of interest, through experiential learning, but also the ways in which they have volunteered and connected. And I think to the extent that they have those opportunities, they’re going to feel more hopeful.
President Rigg: Hilary, thank you so much. I think it’s so important for us that in these turbulent times, if I want to put it that way, we take time for ourselves to think, to reflect. And in your comments, the word listening came up a lot. it’s important for us to listen to each other, listen to our students and listen to the community. We have so much to offer as an institution in the post secondary space. We are the future of Canada and leadership is an important aspect of that.
You made important comments around self reflection, thinking about your team, being empathetic and understanding the dynamics of what’s happening and ensuring that we’re reminding people when they’re doing a good job, not just when things need to change. It’s so important for us to anchor ourselves in that positivity so that we can do the work that needs to get done. But to be in that space, it does take some time for ourselves, some time to reflect and time to listen. So thank you for being here and thank you for your words and your leadership, not just here at Brock, but across the country.