About Chris

Most leaders know what needs to change.

Goals, plans and strategic objectives look like the answer. They're not. If they were, having them would have fixed it by now.

I'm Chris Wiersma. I run a Calgary-based consulting and leadership coaching practice for CEOs, founders and their leadership teams. It's built on one question: what explains the difference between what we are doing and what we're capable of?

Where this comes from

Since 1994, I've led organizations with P&L responsibility up to $40M. They were for-profit and non-profit, in medical device manufacturing, aquaculture, precision agriculture, real estate and the non-profit sector. Some firms were local. Others were global.

Along the way, I led turnarounds using SMART goals and every other standard leadership tool.

So I went to Harvard to study why. Why have these convincing tools, in use for decades, never closed the gap between knowing and doing? The answer surprised me. The problem isn't that we haven't found the answer. It's that we found practices that look like the answer, and we can't find them unconvincing: goals, plans, strategies and metrics.

What I found

The plan was never the variable. The system that determines what happens to the plan is.

If plans are like gasoline then that system is like the engine. Guess what happens when you keep pouring better and better fuel into a flawed system?

That system doesn't show up in the strategy deck. It shows up in the distance between what a team could deliver and what it does, and in a new plan that won't do what the last one didn't. Underneath, it's usually a conflict between the goals leaders think they have and the hidden goals that actually have them. Surface that, and capability that was always there gets put to work. That's the work beneath the work.

"The ultimate state of motivation for work is when people sense and understand a relationship between their efforts and freedom." Making work work involves getting precise about outcomes and giving freedom about how to get there. Work starts to feel like "a game you want to win instead of a labour camp you've got to survive."

How I work

• 1:1 executive coaching for CEOs and founders. We find what's capping your performance, and you change what your effort is organized around.
• Leadership team sessions, including full-day working sessions with your executive team. We look at the system your plan runs through, and you leave with something to do in your first meeting back.
• CEO peer groups. I chair multiple CEO forums. These are confidential groups of non-competing CEOs, founders and owners. Change the way you spend about 6 days a year. And it changes the range of outcomes that are possible for that year. Each forum meets six times a year, plus a two-day retreat.
• Talks and workshops. Why Plans Fail, my most-requested talk, for leadership teams and business-owner groups.

Outside the work

I'm a father of three and a multiple-time Ironman and ultramarathon athlete. Endurance sport has taught me the same lesson as my research: persistence is just a multiplier. It's worth everything when you're pointed at the right goal, and it costs everything when you're not.

Let's talk

If you lead a team that's capable of more than it's delivering, that's where the real work starts.

I also write weekly on execution, leadership and the work beneath the work: subscribe here.