Workplace and Community Well-Being:
Helping Leaders Make Sense Of What’s Changing - And Decide What To Do Next
Many leaders are working hard, doing the right things, and still feeling a growing sense of friction.
Often, what’s missing is not effort or intent, but clarity about what’s actually changing, and what that means for their decisions.
I help leaders navigate complexity, uncertainty, and change without oversimplifying what’s actually happening.
I work with senior executives, civic leaders, and CHROs who are navigating change that feels harder, thinner, or more fragile than it used to. Together, we build the clarity, trust, and relational capacity required to lead well under modern conditions.
Pre-strategy sensemaking for leaders navigating complex change
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When leaders regain clarity, trust and community become easier to build and sustain..
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Articles for Making Sense of a Changing World
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Did Working From Home Have A Hidden Cost?
Remote work can safer and focused. This piece explores a quieter tradeoff: the slow thinning of trust-building moments and the relational surplus that keeps teams resilient.tion goes here
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Inclusion is Good, Belonging is Better
Belonging and inclusion are often discussed together in workplace culture and community development, but they have distinct impacts. Belonging ensures we feel integral to the community.
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Caring, Careful, Careless - Building Trust
Discover how everyday behaviors quietly build or erode relational trust over time. Explore the difference between caring, careful, and careless actions—and why small, repeated choices matter more than big gestures.
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Trust Continues Its Decline
The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer confirms: trust continues to slip. The deeper story is where exactly it’s tanking and how it’s shaping people’s perceptions, hurting some more than others.
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Sensemaking is About Clarity
When the world is changing around us, it can feel exhausting to keep doing the same work without the clarity needed to move forward with confidence. That is where sensemaking helps.
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Snowstorms, Safety, and Building Trust
“No sweat. Safety always comes first. That’s both a caring and a careful choice—and it avoids a careless outcome. That’s the framework in action.” Prioritizing employee safety proves you care
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The HR / TRUST Dilemna
Understanding how transactional and relational trust work together allows HR to act strategically—protecting sensitive processes while nurturing the deeper, human connections that truly sustain a healthy workplace.
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Languishing vs Flourishing
So many clients and their teams report a sense of stagnation and a life lived in the space between joy and misery. Understanding languishing can clarify our understanding of our emotions and help us find the most appropriate responses.
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Time to (re)Develop our Leaders
Trust, community, and communication are the foundational components of healthy, productive workplace culture. We need our leaders to master these concepts if we want our organizations to thrive and grow.
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The Foundations of Culture
Think of your workplace as a house, and the culture as the foundation. Outlining the importance of the Foundations of Workplace Culture - Community, Trust, and Communication
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Survival Tips For Leaders During Hyper-Stressful Times
We find ourselves in extraordinary times. Leaders are working overtime developing and executing emergency strategies. Here are a few suggestions based on our research and expertise.
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Joining CYPT as Co-Chair
Jim Moss to share leadership of the Children and Youth Planning Table steering committee as Community Co-Chair. He will work alongside of Barb Cardow from the Region of Waterloo and support Alison Pearson the Manager of CYPT Backbone team from 2024-2028.
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100 Healthiest Workplaces Have Higher Stock Earnings
Fresh off the press, the University of Oxford Well-being Research Department has released an update on the most significant and convincing macro business case for the importance of #WorkplaceWellBeing on organizational success.
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Empowered or Compliance Workplace?
Description goes Do your employees look to management for permission to act? Is there a script used to deliver service? Or a set of rules for the one or few ways people are allowed to solve problems? Does your workplace allow people freedom in how they best solve issues
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Managing Workload Stress: Conversations That Matter Podcast
Conversations that Matter Podcast with Kurt Hammond: “A series of virtual one-hour lunchtime conversations held in February 2022. On Monday we talked with Jim Moss, Formerly the Executive Director and Co-Founder of YMCA WorkWell.
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Five Ways You Might Be Screwing Up Employee Surveys
Over the past ten years I have reviewed hundreds of surveys, reports, and thousands of responses. I regularly see organizations who are guilty of five common missteps in the way that they collect data and act on employee insights.
Making Sense of What’s Changing
When the world shifts faster than our language for understanding it, leaders don’t need louder answers. They need clearer ones.
I work with leaders, teams, and systems at moments when things still “function,” but feel harder, thinner, or more fragile than they used to. Often the problem isn’t effort or intent. It’s that the conditions have changed, and the old ways of making sense of them no longer fit.
Leadership Development for Complex Conditions
Despite decades of investment in leadership development, many leaders are still asked to navigate situations they were never taught to see clearly.
Modern leadership isn’t just about motivating people or executing plans. It’s about making good judgments under uncertainty, holding competing truths at once, and responding to pressures that are relational, systemic, and human, not just technical.
I help leaders develop the clarity, language, and relational awareness needed to lead when there is no obvious right answer. Not by adding more frameworks to memorize, but by strengthening how they notice risk, interpret signals, and act with care when the stakes are real.
Sensemaking Before Strategy
Many leadership tensions feel personal, political, or performance-related on the surface, but are actually systemic underneath.
When leaders can’t quite name what they’re sensing, they’re still expected to decide, explain, and justify. In those moments, it’s easy to reach for familiar language like productivity, engagement, or accountability, not because it’s wrong, but because it’s available.
I help leaders and teams slow down just enough to see what’s actually happening before locking in solutions. To distinguish symptoms from causes. To surface hidden tradeoffs. To create shared understanding so strategy is built on clarity rather than pressure or guesswork.
Good strategy starts with seeing the system clearly.
Strengthening Trust and Relational Capacity
Trust doesn’t disappear all at once. It thins.
Systems can stay busy, coordinated, and productive while quietly losing the relational surplus that makes them resilient. Collaboration becomes more cautious. Repair takes longer. People rely more on process and less on judgment. Eventually, things feel more brittle than they should.
I work with leaders and organizations to strengthen the relational foundations that allow care, trust, and resilience to accumulate over time. This isn’t about culture as slogans or well-being as perks. It’s about rebuilding the everyday conditions where people feel safe enough to contribute fully, repair friction early, and carry pressure together when it matters most.
When leaders regain clarity, trust and community become easier to build and sustain.
"Top-Ranked Speaker at Three Separate Sessions of Deloitte's 360° Innovation Conference"
Customer Testimonials
Jim’s sessions with my teams are legendary and are spoken about for years after. More importantly the impact of his work reverberates throughout our teams… I highly recommend him.
Jim was the highest rated speaker at our event… exceeded my expectations with how quickly he learned and incorporated our desired outcomes.
It is an absolute pleasure to work with Jim! He brings his authentic self and provided insightful food-for-thought to our leaders regarding community and trust.
The Conditions Have Changed
The conditions leaders are operating in have changed faster than the tools most organizations use to understand them. Values, expectations, and the boundaries between work and life have shifted. What hasn’t kept pace is the shared language leaders need to navigate these changes well.
Are You Dealing With Any Of These Existing Challenges?
Workload Isn’t the Real Problem
What’s exhausting leaders isn’t volume alone. It’s the constant need to make judgment calls in conditions that are less clear, more interconnected, and faster-moving than before. When everything feels important, leaders default to what’s familiar, even when it no longer fits the moment or the system they’re in.
Acting Without a Shared Language
Many leaders haven’t fallen behind on training — they’ve never been given a usable way to name what they’re sensing. Without shared language for trust, care, risk, and relational strain, teams talk past each other and decisions become harder to explain, align around, or sustain.
Culture That Looks Right on Paper
Values and intentions are often strong. What’s missing is translation. When culture isn’t grounded in everyday behaviors and real tradeoffs, it stays aspirational. Leaders want it to matter, but don’t always know where to intervene without creating resistance, noise, or unintended consequences.
These aren’t isolated issues. They’re signals that the way we make sense of work needs to catch up with the conditions we’re in.