Alana Peters, Leadership Coaching and Facilitation

I'm excited to share with you that I'll be facilitating another Dare to Lead™ Training workshop, October 23rd, 24th and 26th in Red Deer. Have questions about what this training is all about? I'd love to discuss that with you!

Reach out to [email protected] and let's connect!

Dare to Lead™ Workshop | Red Deer | October 2026 — Alana Peters A three-day Dare to Lead™ workshop for leaders ready to practice courage, not just understand it. October 23, 24, 26, 2026 in Red Deer. Twelve seats.

Water has been a complicated experience in Alberta. For years we were in drought, hoping for rain. This year it came all at once, two months of it, more than the ground could hold. The same water we needed became the water we were bracing against.

We are a little like that too. We can be depleted and overwhelmed in the same season, and what we need most can arrive faster than we can take it in.

The land knows what to do with water when it comes slowly. It soaks in, reaches the roots, and fills what ran dry. Too much at once just runs off. Rest works the same way. It refills us when we let it come slowly, an afternoon at a time.

So this long weekend, let it come slowly. Rest. Play. Sit by the river, or jump into it. Let an afternoon ask nothing of you and give a little back.

Stay safe, and enjoy these last weeks of summer.

Yellow violets coming up through last year's leaf litter. New growth does not happen separately from what came before it. It happens through it. Good leadership outcomes work the same way.

Good outcomes are rarely the end of anything. A team that has delivered well does not just produce a result. It produces capacity for the next thing. The trust they built carries into the next initiative. The clarity they earned carries into the next decision. The honesty they practiced becomes available for the next hard conversation.

Most leadership development treats outcomes as endpoints, and the work that produced them as something to scale up and replicate. The leaders I trust most see it the other way around. The outcome is the evidence that the underlying conditions are working. The actual work is on the conditions.

Thank you for the depth of attention you have brought to this month.

Apple blossom: open flowers and unopened buds in the same frame. Some of what a leader is building is visible now. Some is still preparing. My practice is built around the work of tending both.

Here is a short note for the leaders who have been reading along this month.

My practice is built around the questions this month has been circling. What conditions actually produce sustainable performance over time? What happens to senior teams when those conditions are not tended? What it takes to lead well in an organization that is asking too much of you?

I coach senior leaders one to one, and I work with leadership teams in mission-driven organizations: municipalities, healthcare systems, post-secondary institutions, non-profits. The work is leadership and team development that takes the human conditions of performance as seriously as the strategic ones.

The conversations that lead to that work tend to start the same way. A senior leader notices that something has thinned in the team they are responsible for. They are not sure what to call it. They are looking for someone who will help them name it accurately rather than sell them a framework.

If that is where you are, the next step is a conversation. I invite you to reach out to me and let's connect. www.alanapeters.com

Thank you for the depth of attention you have brought to this month.

Morning light on dew. Every drop is visible right now. By mid-morning, all of it will be gone and the field will look like any other. The conditions inside an organization are like this. They are visible to leaders who learn when and how to look.

A question worth asking yourself, as a senior leader, every few months. Not about the numbers. About the conditions. How is the trust between the people you work with? What is the quality of the conversations you are having when something is off? Has it become harder or easier in the last six months to raise a difficult truth at the senior table?

Most leaders are deeply trained to read performance and only lightly trained to read conditions. This is a problem, because conditions are leading indicators and performance is a lagging one. The condition shifts six months before the performance does.

Reading conditions is not a soft skill. It is a discipline that takes practice and attention. The leaders who can do it well notice when a quieter colleague has stopped contributing to the harder conversations. They notice when a direct report's edge has sharpened. They notice when a team has gone agreeable in a way that does not match the actual challenges in front of them.
This is the most undertrained capacity in senior leadership and the one with the highest return.

Mid-session with a senior leadership team. The flip chart holds what the team came to after we slowed the room down enough to let them say what was actually happening between them.

Earlier this year I worked with a senior leadership team that had been delivering well for years. The numbers were strong. The board was satisfied. From the outside, the team was performing. From the inside, something had thinned out. People could feel it but no one could quite name it. When we started the work together, the first thing we did was not strategy. It was not a new
framework. We slowed the room down enough to let the team tell each other the truth about what was actually happening between them. Where the trust had been worn down. Where the avoidance had become a habit. Where each of them had been carrying something that belonged on the table.

This is not soft work. It is the most rigorous work a senior team can do together. It cannot be performed. By the end of the session they had not solved their hardest problem. They had become capable of talking about it together. That is the outcome I am most interested in.

Strategy follows from that. Performance follows from that. Almost nothing of lasting value precedes it.

A line I keep coming back to in the work I do with senior leadership teams: you do not kill the fruit tree to get the fruit.
This sounds obvious. It is not how most organizations are designed. The structures most senior leaders are working inside are designed to extract yield from teams in ways that quietly damage what was producing the yield in the first place. The Q3 number gets hit by pushing harder on a team that is already at full capacity. The launch ships by deferring a difficult conversation that needed to happen six months ago. Each one looks like a successful outcome from the outside. Each one is a small withdrawal from the producing capacity of the system.

The leaders I work with most closely have started to notice these withdrawals and to ask different questions because of them. They are not anti-performance.
They are looking for performance that does not cost the team its ability to perform next year. If this is the question you have been sitting with, you are not alone in sitting with it.

It is the question my practice is built around.

Cedar branches grow in patterns. So do the responses I see most often in senior leaders under prolonged organizational pressure.
In my work with senior leadership teams I see three patterns of response when organizational pressure becomes prolonged. I call them the Three F's. They are Fading, Frustrated, and Fawning.

Fading is the quiet shutdown. The leader is still delivering but something has gone out of them. The fight is gone.

Frustrated is the opposite face. The leader who is harder to work with than they used to be. Edges showing. A shorter fuse. Often this leader is the one who cares the most and is the most worn down by caring.

Fawning is the hardest to see because it can look like steadiness. The leader who has become agreeable. Who is quietly working around the real problem because raising it costs more than carrying it.

These are not personality traits. They are responses to conditions. A leader can move between all three in a single quarter depending on what is happening. The leaders I work with start to make different choices when they can name which of the three they are currently in. The naming itself is the beginning of the work.

Lichen on bark. Lichen is two organisms living as one: a fungus and an alga in partnership. Together they pull nitrogen from the air, break bark slowly into soil, and feed the tree they appear to be growing on. None of this work is visible.

Most of what holds an organization together is the same kind of work. It doesn't appear on the report. It produces the conditions that make the report possible. The deliverable gets measured. The launch gets measured. The closed deal gets measured. The capacity that made those possible -t he trust that lets a team move quickly, the manager who quietly held things together through a transition, the patience with the new hire, the hallway conversations that no one billed for - none of it shows up cleanly in any report.

In conventional leadership development this is treated as soft. As intangible. As the thing you get to when the real work is done. In my experience, it is the opposite. The intangible layer is what produces the tangible layer. Cut into it for one quarter and the deliverables still come. Cut into it for four quarters and the team thins out in ways that are very hard to reverse.

The question worth asking quarterly is not just what was delivered. It is what was protected, and what was depleted, in order to deliver it.

A saskatoon branch in full bloom is a real signal of the tree's capacity. It is not a guarantee of yield. Between bloom and fruit, dozens of conditions determine what actually develops - some can be tended, most cannot be controlled. The same is true of senior leaders. Strong performance is a real signal. It is not the whole read.

One of the patterns I see most often in senior leaders right now is what I call Fading. Fading is not burnout. The person is still delivering. They are still in the room, still on the agenda, still hitting the marks.

But something has gone quiet in them. The energy they used to bring to a hard decision has thinned. The colleague who used to push back in the meeting now lets things pass. The leader who used to come back from a weekend with a new idea is no longer doing that.

Fading is one of three responses I see in senior leaders under prolonged organizational pressure. It is the one most often missed, because from the outside it looks like steadiness. From the inside it feels like running on whatever is left. Most performance reviews do not catch it. The numbers do not catch it. What catches it is a colleague who has known the leader for years and notices that something has gone out of the room when they
walk into it.

If you are leading a senior function and something feels off in a way you cannot quite name, pay attention to that signal.