In an exclusive interview with CanadianSME Small Business Magazine, Myriane Ouellette, Founder and CEO of O Strategies, offers a grounded and deeply human perspective on why change initiatives so often stall and what leaders can do differently. Drawing from her work with leadership teams across sectors, Myriane unpacks the hidden emotional weight inside organizations, the difference between burnout and systemic exhaustion, and the everyday habits that quietly erode resilience.
Interview By Maheen Bari
Myriane Ouellette Myriane Ouellette is an award-winning speaker, strategist, and facilitator who helps leaders and teams navigate change with confidence, build resilience, and align around a shared vision. As the founder and CEO of O Strategies, she has worked with organizations across Canada to turn uncertainty into opportunity, whether in immigration, health, education, or community development. Myriane specializes in supporting leadership teams to get clear on their vision, align their people, and create workplaces where change feels possible, not paralyzing.
Many organizations invest heavily in change initiatives and still see resistance, fatigue, or stalled progress. From your experience, why does change so often fail even when the plan looks solid on paper?
Change often fails because it assumes people have unlimited capacity to absorb disruption. In reality, every change asks people to let go of something, and that triggers a form of grief, even when the change is positive.
The grief cycle helps explain this. When something familiar is replaced, people move through emotions such as denial, frustration, sadness, or fear before they can truly engage again. Their capacity to move through that cycle depends on how much grief they are already carrying in their lives. Personal losses, major transitions like moving homes, or even unresolved stress from outside work all affect how much energy people have available for change at work.
There’s also often unacknowledged “change trauma.” Many teams have lived through past initiatives that were imposed, poorly resourced, or abandoned midway. Each time that happens, it erodes trust and builds change fatigue.
When leaders tell people to “get on board” without acknowledging these realities, resistance increases. Successful change doesn’t start with urgency. It starts with understanding the human complexity behind what change asks people to carry, and creating space for that reality before expecting commitment.
You distinguish between individual burnout and what you call systemic or cultural exhaustion. How can leaders tell the difference, and why does that distinction matter for how they respond inside their organizations?
Individual burnout is usually framed as a personal issue: workload, stress, or boundaries. Systemic exhaustion shows up when capable, motivated people feel drained no matter how resilient or committed they are.
Leaders can spot the difference by looking for patterns. If exhaustion is widespread, recurring, and present even among high performers, it’s rarely an individual problem. It’s often a signal that the system itself is creating constant pressure, ambiguity, or contradiction.
Systemic exhaustion comes from things like unclear priorities, nonstop urgency, decision-making without authority, and cultures where people feel responsible for outcomes they can’t influence. No amount of self-care can offset that.
The distinction matters because the response must be different. Treating systemic exhaustion as individual burnout leads to wellness programs layered on top of broken systems. Addressing it properly requires redesigning how work is structured, how decisions are made, and how trust and clarity are created. That’s where real resilience begins.
You often reference the “invisible weight” leaders carry in complex systems. What does that look like in day-to-day leadership, and why do you think it remains largely unspoken in most workplaces?
The invisible weight leaders carry shows up when human complexity collides with organizational expectations. In day-to-day leadership, this often looks like navigating transitions between people who are each carrying very real, but unspoken, burdens.
I’ve seen situations where one employee returns after caring for a dying parent, carrying grief, fatigue, and the challenge of re-entering a role that no longer feels the same. At the same time, another employee has stepped up in their absence, carrying increased responsibility, decision-making pressure, and unacknowledged exhaustion. Both are committed. Both are doing their best.
Yet the system provides no language, tools, or structure to acknowledge these realities, clarify how roles have shifted, or support the transition.
Because emotion is still treated as something that doesn’t belong at work, leaders and employees alike are left to manage these tensions privately. That silence doesn’t eliminate emotion. It pushes it underground, where it shows up as conflict, disengagement, or turnover. When organizations name and support human complexity, they build cultures that can hold change rather than fracture under it.
For small and mid-sized businesses under constant pressure to grow and adapt, what are one or two everyday leadership or cultural habits that quietly undermine resilience, even when intentions are good?
One of the most common habits that undermines resilience is constant urgency. When everything is framed as critical, people’s nervous systems stay in a state of high alert. They never receive the signal that it’s safe to slow down, reflect, or recover. Over time, urgency becomes the culture, and exhaustion follows.
Another is silence in meetings. When leaders move too quickly to solutions, monitor too closely, or unintentionally dominate conversations, people stop offering ideas or concerns. What looks like alignment is often self-protection.
The irony is that big change rarely comes from big initiatives. It comes from small, repeated habits. How feedback is delivered. Whether questions are welcomed. How mistakes are treated. Whether priorities are clear or constantly shifting.
These everyday signals tell people’s nervous systems whether it’s safe to contribute or safer to stay quiet. When leaders adjust small habits, slowing the pace slightly, inviting dialogue, and making expectations explicit, resilience grows naturally. Small moments compound. And over time, they shape cultures that can adapt to change without breaking the people inside them.
If you could change one common assumption about leadership or change that you see inside organizations, what would it be—and what gives you hope about the future of leadership, even amid ongoing uncertainty and disruption?
I would challenge the assumption that the way we’ve always led organizations is still fit for the world we’re in. Historically, organizations were designed like factories. Born out of the Industrial Revolution and reinforced through the early 20th century, leadership models prioritized hierarchy, control, efficiency, and compliance. That made sense when work was repetitive and stability was the goal.
But most organizations today operate in a knowledge economy defined by complexity, ambiguity, and constant change. That kind of work demands adaptability, emotional intelligence, and co-creation, yet many workplaces still default to control-based leadership, rigid meeting structures, and top-down change approaches that no longer match reality.
Human-centred leadership isn’t about slowing everything down or overanalyzing feelings. It’s about making practical shifts that build trust and agency: rotating leadership in meetings, inviting frontline or administrative staff into strategic conversations, and designing spaces where people can contribute meaningfully.
What gives me hope is that younger generations are actively demanding this shift. They expect coherence between values and practice. Organizations that listen won’t just keep talent, they’ll build resilient teams capable of leading change rather than resisting it.
Disclaimer:
The views and opinions expressed in this interview are those of the interviewee and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of CanadianSME Small Business Magazine. Our platform is dedicated to fostering dialogue and sharing insights that inspire and empower small and medium-sized businesses across Canada.
