Unlocking the Culture Advantage: 5 Insights from the Canada’s Most Admired™ Toronto Fall Summit

On October 28, 2025, more than 220 corporate leaders and heads of people and culture gathered at Toronto’s MaRS Discovery District for the Waterstone MacKay Canada’s Most Admired™ Toronto Fall Summit. The event brought together CEOs, CPCOs, and senior leaders from across industries for an afternoon focused on one central theme: leading through change and strengthening culture to accelerate performance.

From navigating transformation to integrating AI into the employee experience, the conversations reinforced a clear message: strategy sets direction, but culture determines whether organizations can execute, adapt, and thrive.

Through a series of fireside chats and panel discussions, CEOs and heads of people and culture winners from the Canada’s Most Admired™ community shared what it takes to intentionally build high-performance cultures.

1. Culture and performance are two sides of the same coin

Here are 5 key insights from the summit on how organizations are using culture to navigate complexity, strengthen leadership, and drive sustainable growth.

Culture isn’t separate from performance — it enables it. The best organizations make their culture the foundation for delivering results.

 “We define our culture as being at the intersection between purpose, passion, and performance.”
— Zahid Salman, President & CEO, GreenShield

Leaders emphasized that the most successful organizations treat culture as their operating model, not a side initiative. Culture shapes how decisions are made, how people show up for one another, and how teams navigate disruption.

Winning organizations measure, manage, and evolve culture with the same rigor they apply to strategy. When purpose, accountability, and values are aligned, culture becomes a multiplier of execution that accelerates results through engagement, clarity, and trust.

“Culture and performance are inseparable. The most powerful driver of breakout growth is setting the expectation for culture — whether it exists yet or not. You must define the ambition upfront: ‘this is the culture we aspire to’ — then lead your teams to operate that way every day.”
— Katy Boshart, President and CEO, Manulife Bank of Canada

Actionable takeaways:

• Align culture metrics with business outcomes. Track engagement, trust, and alignment metrics alongside financial KPIs to evaluate how culture drives outcomes.
• Integrate purpose into everything you do. Translate the company’s mission into action and help connect everyone’s role to it — it will ensure that everyone has meaningful work.
• Use storytelling to connect impact to purpose. Regularly share examples of how teams’ work creates tangible value for customers, communities, and stakeholders.

2. Leadership accountability drives high-performance cultures

Leaders today are being called to do more than deliver results — they must set the behavioural standard for how those results are achieved. The most admired organizations hold leaders accountable not just for what they do, but how they do it.

True accountability creates a climate where feedback is expected, ownership is shared, and trust grows. Empathy without clarity can make a culture feel supportive but stagnant; the best leaders pair care with accountability to keep performance high. By contrast, leaders who combine compassion with candour help people rise to their potential and make accountability a source of motivation.

Deb Craven, President of Longo’s, described how the organization has evolved its “treat you like family” culture to balance care with accountability:

“Being treated like family doesn’t mean you get away with everything — it means you hold yourself to a higher level of accountability because you wouldn’t let your family get away with it either.”

Actionable takeaways:

• Integrate your values and behavioural expectations into performance management and coaching. Tie recognition, promotions, and rewards to how results are achieved, not just the metrics themselves.
• Train leaders in feedback and coaching. Build capability and confidence to have honest, constructive performance conversations that motivate improvement.
• Model vulnerability at the top. Encourage senior leaders to share lessons learned and own mistakes publicly — it normalizes accountability across the organization.

3. Clarity is the catalyst of alignment

When communication is clear, consistent, and connected to action, it aligns people, decisions, and priorities. In fast-moving environments, ambiguity breeds hesitation and disengagement.

“When you have complexity, the number one thing you should focus on is clarity.”
— Dave Wessinger, Co-Founder and CEO, PointClickCare

In times of rapid change, employees look to leaders for certainty, direction, and meaning. The organizations that thrive are those where people understand not just the “what,” but the “why” and the “how.”

“Communicating effectively is a superpower that leaders need to have. It’s having clarity of thought, but also making sure people truly understand, not just hear, what you’re saying.”
— Stella Fong, Global SVP of People and Culture, Flipp

Great leaders create clarity by showing how each person’s work connects to the bigger picture and by communicating with focus and simplicity.

Actionable takeaways:

• Simplify strategy. Reduce plans to a small set of clear, measurable priorities that everyone can articulate.
• Make communication a leadership discipline. Coach leaders to translate complex strategies into simple, repeatable messages that reinforce purpose.
• Connect the dots for employees. Help employees understand how their work contributes to the organization’s goals and success.

4. AI adoption is a cultural shift

Technology — especially AI — is reshaping how people work, learn, and make decisions. Every discussion at the summit reinforced the same principle: AI transformation is as much a cultural challenge as it is a technical one.

Organizations that succeed are those that frame technology as an enabler of human capability, not a replacement for it.

“AI isn’t replacing jobs, it’s replacing tasks. It’s freeing up capacity to focus on the human-centered activities: building relationships, critical thinking, and high-level strategy.”
— Teresa Palandra, President, Mercer Canada

Leaders must create psychological safety around experimentation, establish guardrails for responsible use, and communicate clearly about how AI supports people’s work.

“Normalize AI curiosity. Get people used to experimenting with tools and seeing how it can help them improve their workflow.”
— Brandon Peterson, CEO, SiteTechnology

Adoption accelerates when employees feel informed, empowered, and included in the change journey.

Actionable takeaways:

• Build digital confidence. Offer training and learning pathways that help employees explore AI tools safely and understand their purpose.
• Clarify governance and guardrails. Define what responsible use looks like. Data privacy, transparency, and ethical standards should be part of every rollout.
• Communicate the “why.” Explain how technology improves efficiency, reduces administrative work, and creates space for higher-value, human-centered contributions.

5. Leadership development is a growth strategy

Leadership development isn’t just about training programs or technical competencies — it’s about building the mindset, emotional intelligence, and resilience that allow leaders to model the behaviours a high-performance culture requires.

“We have this moment in time where we need unstoppable CEOs and business leaders to help us embrace change. Our brains aren’t designed for the stress and pace we’re facing. We have to strengthen our mental fitness, stay above the line, and surround ourselves with positive people.”
— Nancy MacKay, Founder & CEO, MacKay CEO Forums

Today’s leaders must navigate complexity, inspire accountability, and manage their own and their teams’ energy. When leaders understand how to balance performance with wellbeing, clarity with empathy, and urgency with reflection, they unlock engagement, innovation, and sustainable results across every level of the organization.

“For us as a senior team, it was important to invest in ourselves and our teammates so that we could both develop and model the necessary behaviours to create the environment that we were espousing.”
— Matthew Snyder, SVP & CHRO, SE Health

Actionable takeaways:

• Build mental fitness into leadership development. Equip leaders with tools and habits to recognize stress triggers, reframe challenges, and lead from a positive state.
• Redefine what leadership success looks like. Evaluate leaders not just on results, but on their ability to elevate and inspire others through engagement, collaboration, and learning.
• Invest in leadership development. Create coaching cultures and continuous development pathways that turn leadership into a shared organizational capability.

Turn culture into your competitive advantage

Culture doesn’t evolve by chance — it’s built by design.Andwhen purpose, accountability, clarity, and leadership development align, culture becomes not just an enabler of performance but the engine that drives it.

Expanding on this idea, Waterstone’s 2025 Canada’s Most Admired™ Key Themes highlight how leading organizations across the country are connecting purpose to strategy, leadership to growth, and care to accountability to build workplaces that engage their people, accelerate performance, and drive sustainable results.

At Waterstone, we believe culture is the most enduring driver of organizational success and we’ve built our solutions around that philosophy. Through our Executive Search and Leadership & Culture Advisory services, we help organizations identify leaders who align with their values, measure and strengthen their cultures, and create clear roadmaps for high performance and growth. Connect with us to learn how Waterstone can help turn your culture into a sustainable competitive advantage.