Leading With HEART: Sustaining Business Leadership Through Humor, Engagement, Activation, Resilience, and Trust
Professional Development Workshop
Date: Wednesday 28 October
Time: 1:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.
Cost: $115
Location: The Westin Harbour Castle, Toronto, Room TBD
This event is sponsored by ILA’s Business Leadership member community.
Ticket prices do not include food or beverage. Bring along your favorite beverage and snack to keep you energized throughout the afternoon!
Short Description
Hosted by the Business Leaders Member Community (BLMC), this immersive three-hour pre-conference experience invites participants into a collective exploration of what it means to lead businesses and entrepreneurial ventures through complexity, uncertainty, and sustained change. Guided by the theme “The HEART of Business Leadership: Self-Care, Humor, and Sustaining What Matters Through HEART (Humor, Engagement, Activation, Resilience, Trust),” the session will be emceed by the BLMC Chair, with three BLMC members facilitating each hour of the experience through curated presentations, panel dialogue, and interactive activities.
Grounded in the City of Toronto’s vision to be a caring, clean, green, sustainable, and dynamic city—and its enduring motto, “Diversity Our Strength”—this pre-conference uses Toronto’s commitment to equity, inclusion, sustainability, and quality of life as a foundation for reimagining business and entrepreneurial leadership in today’s environment. Participants will engage in a highly interactive collective immersion that incorporates thoughtful reflection, active discussion, relational dialogue, and light physical movement to embody the principles being explored.
Across three integrated sessions, attendees will examine the changing nature of leadership in complex systems, explore practical leadership models for bridging strategy, execution, and culture in entrepreneurial organizations, and participate in an experiential Caring Sustainability™ activity designed to help leaders sustain themselves while sustaining their businesses. Throughout the event, presenters and panelists will offer a wealth of insights, practical frameworks, and actionable strategies for leading with resilience, fostering trust, adapting purposefully, and maintaining the entrepreneurial spirit amid disruption.
Participants will leave with expanded perspectives, tangible tools, and embodied experiences to immediately apply within their organizations and leadership practice.
Design
I. Introductions and Icebreaker
II. Understanding Complexity and the Changing Nature of Leadership
The first hour establishes the complex challenges facing today’s business leaders. Beginning with an Indigenous reflection honoring Toronto’s traditional territory, participants explore relational leadership as foundational. The session examines how informal peer networks influence organizations beyond formal structures and introduces practices that support engagement, trust, and adaptability within uncertainty and rapid change.
III. Leadership Models that Work for the Complexities of Entrepreneurial Businesses
The second hour explores leadership models that support effectiveness within complex, entrepreneurial environments. From a panel of diverse business leaders, we will examine how leaders navigate strategy, execution, culture, and human connection as they bridge the gap between intent and lived reality. Through interactive dialogue, this session reframes resilience as essential and positions organizations as dynamic, relational systems that foster engagement, alignment, and trust.
IV. Weaving the HEART: Sustaining Leaders Through Connection, Care, and Complexity
The third hour integrates key insights through an embodied, interactive experience grounded in Caring Sustainability™. Participants will engage in a focused collective activity to explore interdependence, trust, humor, and resilience within business leadership systems. This session highlights how care and connection sustain leaders and organizations, reinforcing business leadership as a dynamic, relational, and interconnected process within complex environments.
V. Session Takeaways and Business Networking
- Giving the attendees the opportunities to share what they will take away from the pre-conference event.
- Networking is an essential skill to business leaders so they may share contact information that encourages relationship building far beyond the conference days.
Facilitators
Anurag Saxena, Professor and Associate Dean, Postgraduate Medical Education, University of Saskatchewan
Anurag is a physician (MD), professor and a senior administrator in medical education with a business (MBA), education (Master of Education) and coaching and consulting (certified coach training from Erickson, Bates Communications, EQi2.0 and EQ360, Kouzes and Posner Leadership Institute) background. He has additional qualifications in business analytics, higher education, EDIIAA, and leadership. He brings a combination of academic and real-world experience to this workshop. He has extensive experience in adult education (university teaching, and workshops in private, public and plural sectors, including recognition as a Master Teacher at the University of Saskatchewan) and coaching and organizational consulting internationally. As senior administrator he has collaboratively led change initiatives and facilitated career engagement of a large, distributed unit in medical education. He brings experience from his involvement in steering, strategic and management work in educational reform nationally. He is engaged in leadership research and has many peer-reviewed papers e.g., power and leadership, leading across boundaries, leadership styles, striving for UNSDGs, dyad leadership, transformative learning, social accountability. He has facilitated and co-facilitated national and international workshops on many topics integrated in the proposed workshop; e.g., leading across boundaries, appreciative inquiry, inclusive leadership among others.