Middle managers absorb pressure from both directions — and in 2026, how they hold up under it decides how their teams perform. On the latest episode of the CanadianSME Small Business Podcast, host Kripa Anand sat down with Parm Chohan, Founder of Conquer Leadership Inc., to unpack why values are a performance lever, why the best leaders are rarely the loudest, and what AI will never take off a manager’s plate.
The Same Problems — Just More Expensive
Chohan works with organizations of every size, and he is clear that scale does not introduce new problems. It inflates the ones already there. The challenges “don’t completely change as organizations grow,” he said. “They’re the same challenges, but obviously become that much more complex, sophisticated — and if they’re not dealt with fairly quickly, that much more expensive.”
He names three. Communication, which small teams handle informally and large ones cannot: information dilutes, messages get missed, and teams end up working from different narratives. Role clarity, where the comfortable overlap of a small team becomes work falling through the cracks and people asking who is actually responsible. And leadership capacity — the least discussed of the three.
“It’s a different set of skills required to start up a team and scale it to a larger organization,” Chohan said, and those skills rarely translate on their own. As companies grow, he argued, “leadership is less about doing the work and more about creating a culture and conditions for others to do their best work.”
Return on Values
Every executive knows ROI. Chohan offers a second acronym: ROV — return on values. When leaders and teams understand, communicate and operate from their values consistently, the effect on performance is substantial, and the mechanism is not mysterious. “Values influence behaviour, behaviour shapes culture, culture then impacts performance.”
The payoff shows up in three places: alignment with organizational goals, employee engagement, and collaboration. And Chohan is impatient with anyone who files this under soft skills. “This values work isn’t soft, rainbows, unicorns, fluffy stuff,” he said. “This is peak performance.” When people see the through line from their own work to the organization, they show up authentically, they have the psychological safety to own their mistakes, and results follow.
Pause, Define, Decide
Chohan’s PDD framework emerged mid-conversation in a coaching session — and it addresses the failure mode he sees most often. Senior leaders rarely struggle with competence. They struggle with deciding while overwhelmed, under pressure and short of information. Thinking narrows; the immediate fire crowds out the strategic objective behind it.
The framework is three steps. Pause: slow down, scan the situation, ask what the actual challenge is. “Sometimes the most productive leaders are the ones that can sit back and pause, not jump right into action.” Define: make sure you are solving the right problem — leaders arrive describing a communication or performance issue, and underneath it turns out to be role clarity, or trust and psychological safety. Decide: take action. Imperfect action, but action.
That last step is where the fear lives. One of the most common coaching conversations he has, Chohan said, is helping leaders trust themselves to move forward without a complete set of information. He is candid that he works on it too — comfortable with the next few steps, but anxious the moment he starts worrying about steps five through eight. “Simple doesn’t mean easy.”
Alpha Leadership Isn’t the Loudest Voice
The word “alpha” usually conjures dominance — authority, volume, the person who speaks first. Chohan’s definition is close to the opposite. “Alpha leadership isn’t about power over people,” he said. “It’s about self-regulation and making sure your people are taken care of.”
His image for it comes from wolf packs on the move. The strongest, most experienced animals are not all out front; some travel at the back, where they can see the whole group, watch for threats, and make sure no one is left behind. Whether the science holds perfectly is beside the point, he said — the lesson does. “The best leaders don’t focus on being first. They focus on protecting, supporting, guiding their people.” Confident, not arrogant. Awareness rather than ego.
What AI Will Never Take Off Your Plate
Asked where leadership lands as AI reshapes work, Chohan is firm: AI will not replace leadership capability, because people remain in the loop. Empathy, kindness, situational awareness, change fatigue, the difficult conversation about reporting lines — none of that gets automated.
Which produces the paradox at the centre of his practice. “The competitive advantage, ironically, is being more human,” he said: clear values, real emotional intelligence — self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, reality testing — and the ability to trust yourself. Machine learning, in his phrase, will only take us so far.
The Bottom Line: Connection
Asked for one piece of advice for managers who feel stuck, Chohan did not reach for a framework. “Connection,” he said. “Connection with your people.”
At its most powerful it is a one-to-one exercise, and it gets harder the higher you climb. Without it, he argued, influence is only positional — people follow the title, and the moment the title changes they follow someone else. With it, they follow the person. And connection, he noted, is not something you can outsource to an AI.
To learn more, visit canadiansme.ca, and visit the CanadianSME Small Business Foundation at smbfoundation.ca. A special thank-you to podcast partners UPS and ADP for their ongoing commitment to empowering small businesses across Canada.
Disclaimer: This article is based on publicly available information intended only for informational purposes. CanadianSME Small Business Magazine does not endorse or guarantee any products or services mentioned. Readers are advised to conduct their research and due diligence before making business decisions.
