CIFFA Forwarder Magazine

25 THE FORWARDER | WINTER 2025 Dan Pontefract is a Canadian leadership and culture change strategist, best-selling author, and keynote speaker with over two decades of senior executive experience at SAP, TELUS, and Business Objects. He has worked with top organizations like Salesforce, Amgen, Virgin Media O2, and Nestlé to enhance their operations.Dan has written five influential and award-winning books, including “Work-Life Bloom” and “Lead. Care. Win.” CIFFA’s dinner keynote speaker on Day 1 of the conference, Dan’s successful presentation centered in on the multiple pressures in the workplace of today: AI as a transforming technology, demographics, and the increased “busyness”, sadness, worry, stress, and physical pain that are prevalent. Burnout is an “occupational phenomenon”, Dan said. Job burnout is at 66% in 2025, with 68% of employees having trouble falling asleep, 46% having difficulty concentrating in the workplace, with a third of workers often interrupted while they work. Dan pointed out that we do too much “applied thinking” in our life, and this leaves little if no time for “creative and critical thinking”. He suggested creating: “Me Time” Blocks • Protect short windows in your calendar to step back and creatively and critically think, not just do. • Cap your meetings, shorten their duration, clarify the decisions, and consider cancelling some of them. • Before adding to the workload, name upfront what gets eliminated, has been completed, or needs iteration. • Handle email, messages, DMs, etc. within fixed windows; ensure you prevent context switching. Collaboration means that everyone must row in the same direction. This is the responsibility of leaders. Use all three types of empathy, like your (head, heart & hands). Be Relatable! Seek to understand team members before judgement, and don’t just say you care –it has to be actioned. Ask people if they need help. In addition to his presentation Dan did a Q&A with CIFFA’s Julia Kuzeljevich based on his book Work-Life Bloom, examining leadership gaps, purpose, skills and being in a “bloom state” (or not), in your job. Q&A with Dan Pontefract, author of Work-Life Bloom What in your experience and observation is the largest and most consistent disconnect between employers and their employees, and is this specific to a certain demographic? The gap is between what organizations manage and what people actually desire to thrive at work and in life. Leaders tend to manage structures and outputs whereas people need the right conditions. In Work-Life Bloom , those conditions are twelve work-life factors— Trust, Belonging, Valued, Purpose, Strategy, Norms on the work side and Relationships, Skills, Well-being, Meaning, Agency, Respect on the life side. When leaders optimize perks, headcount, and dashboards while neglecting those work-life factors, the culture drifts and team member commitment erodes. It’s not a generational quirk, per se. It’s a work / lifecycle reality. Caregivers—like a new mom— read flexibility differently than someone early in their career. Late-career contributors read respect and impact differently than someone hunting their first promotion. Tune to the work-life factors and the demographic outliers no longer matter. Do you see an issue with one’s sense of purpose being driven by work, especially as people head to their retirement period? What makes for a good or smooth transition, whether it’s from work to retirement, or from different positions in jobs, or transitions to other companies, or from work to layoff? Purpose works best as a work-life through-line, not a job label. The book’s four personas—Renewal, Budding, Stunted, Blooming— show how identity and conditions can shift over time. People wobble when a title becomes the identity and a paycheque stands in for meaning. The practical move is to recalibrate the factors during transitions. Strengthen Relationships and Agency as someone is new to a job, so they have a support circle and some control. Re-surface Skills and Meaning once they become comfortable with their role, so they can carry strengths forward to tackle even greater challenges. Purpose can be the thread through the needle of work’s many and varying stages, including retirement. Whether or not a leader wants to have those important conversations about purpose (and meaning) with a team member is more a question of the leader and how comfortable they are with their emotional intelligence. But the bottom line is a more purpose-aware leader will result in a more purpose-driven employee, one who will be as such across all stages of work and life. Bonus? Write down a purpose statement. Mine is: “We’re not here to see through each other; we’re here to see each other through.” Dan Pontefract, Dinner & Keynote Speaker