Todd Leader

As a multiple-award-winning transformational leader in healthcare and social services, Todd Leader understands the unique challenges that leaders face in managing their own mental health. In his presentations, Todd provides leaders with practical strategies for those in positions or who are do not feel they have an environment where they can be vulnerable to ask for others to help them manage their stress and their own mental health while leading others.

Through his presentations, Todd draws on his extensive experience and expertise to provide leaders with strategies for reducing stress, managing anxiety and depression, and fostering resilience. He emphasizes the importance of self-care and self-awareness, providing tools and techniques for leaders to prioritize their own mental health and well-being.

Todd’s presentations are designed to empower leaders to cultivate a culture of self-care and well-being in their organizations. He emphasizes the importance of setting an example for team members, and he provides leaders with the tools and techniques they need to manage their own mental health in order to lead effectively.

If you’re a leader looking to manage your own mental health and achieve peak performance, Todd Leader’s presentations offer a unique perspective that will help you prioritize your own well-being while leading others. With his practical advice and relatable style, Todd will empower you to take control of your mental health and lead with confidence and resilience.

In today’s fast-paced and demanding work environment, mental health has emerged as a critical priority for employers seeking to foster a resilient and engaged workforce. In this presentation, a renowned expert in leadership and mental health, Todd Leader, explores the importance of prioritizing mental health as a strategic imperative for organizations.

Drawing on his extensive experience as a multiple-award-winning transformational leader in healthcare and social services, Todd provides practical strategies for creating a workplace culture that prioritizes mental health and wellbeing. He emphasizes the importance of reducing stigma, promoting self-care, and creating a supportive environment where team members can thrive.

Through his presentation, Todd empowers leaders to cultivate a resilient and engaged workforce by prioritizing mental health as a strategic imperative. He provides leaders with the tools and techniques they need to create a culture of openness, transparency, and empathy, helping team members to feel supported and valued.

If you’re looking to prioritize mental health as a strategic imperative in your organization and foster a resilient workplace culture, Todd Leader’s presentation offers a unique and practical perspective that will help you achieve your goals. With his engaging style and evidence-based approach, Todd will empower you to drive transformational change in your organization and create a workplace that supports the mental health and well-being of your team members.

In this presentation, Todd Leader explores the importance of empathy and human connection in creating a culture of care and compassion in the workplace. Drawing on his extensive experience in healthcare and social services, Todd provides leaders with practical tools and techniques for using human-centred design to build stronger connections between team members with each other and clients.

Todd emphasizes the importance of human connection in creating a culture of care and compassion. He provides leaders with practical strategies for building empathy and understanding among team members, and for fostering a culture of care and compassion that extends taking a compassionate approach to managing relationships to build trust, synergy and a winning culture. Todd also introduces the concept of human-centred design, which emphasizes the importance of designing systems and processes that prioritize the needs and experiences of people.

Through his engaging and interactive presentation, Todd empowers leaders to transform their workplaces into cultures of care and compassion. He offers practical tools and techniques for building empathy and understanding, fostering strong human connections, and using human-centred design to create systems and processes that prioritize the needs and experiences of the people in and outside of the organization.

Todd Leader’s presentation offers a unique and practical perspective that will help you achieve your goals. With his engaging style and evidence-based approach, Todd will inspire you and your team to build stronger human connections and prioritize the needs and experiences of those you serve.

Todd Leader is a Registered Social Worker, Registered Psychologist, and experienced health and social service leader, with decades of experience running addiction, mental health, medical, and child welfare services. As a university faculty member in psychology for over 32 years, Todd brings both professional and academic perspectives to his approach, grounded in empirical research.

However, Todd’s unique perspective on moral injury extends beyond his professional and academic experience. He also provides a first-hand perspective, having personally experienced a moral injury as a result of a medication’s side effects that caused harm to individuals in his care. This lived experience allows him to offer a well-integrated approach to moral injury, addressing the challenges and emotional impacts from a comprehensive perspective for social workers, families, medical staff and the individual themself.

Through his presentations, Todd provides participants with a complete understanding of moral injury, its effects on individuals and organizations, and how to prevent or manage it. He integrates his professional, academic, and personal experiences to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the issue, including the closely-related concepts of mental illness and stigma. Todd’s interactive style and practical advice have earned him multiple awards for excellence in teaching, and his presentations are known to deeply engage and empower participants, providing them with information and perspectives they can use in their own lives.

If you’re looking for a comprehensive and integrative approach to moral injury, Todd Leader’s presentations offer a unique perspective that will help you overcome the challenges of moral injury and find a path forward.

“Todd Leader is an expert in mental health, with years of experience running addiction, mental health, medical, and child welfare services. As a Registered Social Worker, Registered Psychologist, and health and social service leader, Todd understands the importance of mental health in all aspects of life, from personal relationships to professional success.

Through his presentations, Todd provides participants with practical strategies for managing mental health in challenging times. He draws on his extensive experience and expertise to help individuals identify the signs of mental health challenges and develop a toolbox of strategies for staying mentally healthy and by using the support systems to help them manage their times of crisis.

Todd’s presentations are designed to empower participants to take control of their mental health, by understanding the factors that contribute to mental health challenges and learning techniques to manage stress, anxiety, and depression. His approach is grounded in evidence-based research, and he draws on his personal and professional experience to provide a relatable and engaging presentation.

If you’re looking for practical strategies for managing your mental health, Todd Leader’s presentations offer a unique perspective that will help you thrive in challenging times. With his practical advice and relatable style, Todd will empower you to take control of your mental health and lead a fulfilling life at work and at home.

Todd Leader will help your leadership, project, or team to work to its true potential and achieve its best results yet. Teams at work don’t always function as well as they can to achieve an organization’s results. You may have great people on the team, but their ability to function as a collective is what will distinguish them from being a good team or a great team. This requires specific practices, based on experience and social psychology research on group dynamics, which can be developed through training.

People often think that leadership is the same as management and that being a leader depends on your job title. In this presentation, Todd Leader explains how neither thing is true. Leadership is about becoming the kind of individual whom people will voluntarily follow toward a vision, and inspiring people like that doesn’t rely on knowledge, education, or a title. Managing a budget, supervising staff, adjusting services or products, building strategic plans, etc., are important skill sets. But people don’t follow a person or a leadership team toward a vision because s/he is great at doing those things. They follow because of the skills and characteristics that make you a leader. Todd Leader uses this session to help you turn your entire team into leaders, regardless of their positions. They will see the leader in themselves and be empowered to nurture that skill set to help the organization thrive. Based on decades of real-life leadership experience, Todd Leader’s presentation will help your team increase employees’ loyalty and motivation on the job, thereby helping the organization excel.

The crisis had been here for years, and then COVID put it under a microscope. Since then, all hands have been on deck to fix the system. But has it worked? In this presentation, social worker and community psychologist, Todd Leader, will discuss the kinds of approaches that have dominated our efforts, and help highlight why the problem hasn’t been magically fixed. He will discuss the common, easy, traditional, go-to solutions, and the much harder paradigm shift that is essential if we expect to be successful. He will challenge us to view familiar concepts like ‘client-centered’ in a unique way, and to identify how we can use this new understanding to directly enhance the experience and well-being of the people we serve. Todd’s approach, based on real-life success transforming an addiction and mental health program, is documented in his book It’s Not About Us; The Secret to Transforming the Mental Health and Addiction System in Canada. This presentation is sure to empower people to approach their work with a new sense of creativity, motivation, and hope.

When people go into helping careers like education, justice, health care, social services, child and youth care, long-term care, veterinary care, etc., they do so because they genuinely want to help. Todd Leader has been consulted by hundreds of his students over the years, about career options, and can attest to the fact that they are often altruistically motivated to make a difference. Fast forward and many are working as a nurse, a teacher, a youth worker in a group home, a personal care worker, a correctional guard, etc., and experiencing the challenge of either compassion fatigue or moral injury (or both). In this presentation or workshop, Todd can help management and staff learn ways to prevent and deal with these phenomena, so they can thrive in the work they’ve chosen, and contribute to the effectiveness of the organization.

In health, community, and human service kinds of industries, when we struggle to find people to hire or are challenged to retain those we do hire, everybody loses. The organization fails to thrive or meet its mandate. The resignations tell us that employees are not happy there. Word of mouth from those employees creates a reputation that can keep others from applying to work there. And perhaps most importantly, the people the organization is supposed to be serving are not having their needs met at a level that you or they prefer or expect. What if you could change all this for your organization? In this presentation, Todd Leader provides unique insight and strategies to do just that. You and your leadership team can learn how to transform your organization into a magnet for the best people, and for people who are intrinsically motivated to stay and to provide your clients with the highest quality service. Your organization will be the envy of others in your field, as you move away from those shared recruitment and retention challenges. Trust Todd’s decades of first-hand success, his knowledge of the psychological factors at play, and his inspiring and entertaining presentation style.

All companies and organizations engage in some level of collaborative work…at least in theory. Interagency committees, interdepartmental teams, or interprofessional workgroups, are all established to represent or use collaboration, and much of our work is done in those kinds of meetings. However, when they decline into mere information-sharing, unproductive conflict and tension, or dominance by a few with silence and conformity from the others, then we are wasting valuable time and money. Even worse, the quality of the organization’s work suffers. At some point during his decades as a leader and a social scientist, Todd Leader got tired of these failing dynamics, So, he developed and began using a new practical approach to creating collaborative teams and committees that thrive and achieve great things. This pragmatic workshop can change your collaborative teams or committees! Based on the science of group dynamics and intergroup relations, this is a results-centered approach with simple techniques groups can use to achieve more together than they can apart. Todd Leader, a seasoned social scientist, award-winning university educator, and award-winning leader, makes this workshop enjoyable, engaging, and transformative for your teams and committees, and for your organization’s productivity.

An employee starts limping (unbeknownst to us is developing arthritis), and we easily know how to ask about it and work on accommodations. An employee starts avoiding coworkers and eating lunch alone (unbeknownst to us is developing depression), and while they likely get talked ‘about’, we are unsure what to say or how to talk ‘with’ that person so we can help. Someone returns to work after heart surgery, and we hang a “welcome back” sign, coworkers give cards or bake sweets, and we have no problem asking how they are and what they need. Someone returns to work after what people speculate was a mental health ‘issue’, and that person gets avoided because coworkers are uncomfortable, think negatively of the person, or don’t know what to say or how to interact.
If you want your team to be comfortable and competent in managing mental health in the workplace, Todd Leader can provide you with all three perspectives needed. As an academic and psychologist, he knows the research. As a leader, he has managed this in the workplace many times. As a person with lived experience, he has been the one with the ‘issue’. Let Todd’s unique expertise, and dynamic and practical style, empower your team to master this challenge and create a workplace that easily supports mental health.

Using storytelling as the backdrop, Todd Leader can help your audience to understand mental health stigma in a more real way than ever. Stigma is too commonly thought of as some kind of vague phenomenon out there in society that we need to stop. So, we run mass media campaigns that tell those with mental illness to solve it by talking, and we just tell everyone else that stigma is harmful and needs to stop. Neither of these helps people understand what it really is and what their individual role in it is. Using his own personal and professional stories, combined with his knowledge as a social scientist, Todd will take you or your audience past the jargon and the empty catch phrases. In a dynamic and pragmatic talk, Todd Leader will have you understanding stigma in a way you never have before, and in a way that your audience can use in their own lives. You will gain insight, empowerment, and skills to make a meaningful impact on this phenomenon we call stigma.

Todd Leader’s passion for empowering people to change the world is unparalleled. In this presentation, keynote, or workshop, you and your team or audience can’t help but to be inspired. Decades of practice as a leader of change, as a social scientist, and as an educator and trainer of change agents, all come together into one dynamic experience. Todd will help people re-evaluate the amount of power they have, understand the skills and knowledge they can nurture in themselves, and consider strategic approaches that can make a difference. Whether your audience is passionate about intimate partner violence, homelessness, prejudice and discrimination, global conflict, mental health stigma, climate change, etc., your motivation and ability to make a difference will be changed by Todd’s dynamic messages. Your audience will be inspired, and more able to contribute to literally changing the world.

Many health care and social service providers sometimes feel a disconnect between their training and desire to provide patient/client/person/family-centered care, and the restrictions often imposed by the policies, procedures, and structures of the systems and organizational culture they work in. In this presentation, Psychologist and Social Worker Todd Leader will describe the difference between client-centered ‘care’ and client-centered ‘systems’. He will challenge us to view these concepts in a different way, and to identify how we can use that distinction to directly enhance the experience and well-being of the people we serve. Todd’s approach, based on real-life success transforming an addiction and mental health program, is documented in his book It’s Not About Us; The Secret to Transforming the Mental Health and Addiction System in Canada. This keynote address or workshop, which applies to any area of health or human services, is sure to empower your group to approach their work with a new sense of creativity, optimism, and inspiration.