The Ground I Stand On

We rarely know the whole story of what someone is carrying. We see a reaction, a decision, a silence, a moment of withdrawal or frustration, and it is easy to make meaning of it from the outside. I have learned to leave more room than that: room for context I cannot see, for experiences I have not lived, for the possibility that someone may be doing the best they can with something I know nothing about.

That has made generosity of thought important to me. I try to meet people with curiosity before judgment, and with kindness toward however they arrive. Not because behaviour is without consequence, or because accountability matters less, but because dignity and compassion can coexist with honesty, boundaries and high expectations.

Over time, I have come to understand equity in much the same way: as a practice of looking beyond what is immediately visible, noticing the different conditions people are navigating, and resisting the temptation to assume that the same path, expectation or response will serve everyone equally. It also asks us to look beyond the individual, at the systems, histories and conditions that shape what becomes possible for different people.

This commitment is also rooted in where I come from. I was born in Punjab and raised in the Sikh faith, where seva (service), equality and the dignity of every human being are ways of living.

My understanding of equity continues to be shaped by those roots, my own experiences of belonging and difference, and what I continue to learn from people whose histories and experiences differ from mine.

I live and work in Brampton, on the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, Haudenosaunee and Wendat Nations, and on lands covered by Treaty 19, the Ajetance Purchase of 1818.

There is a place on this land that I return to often: Gitigaan Mashkiki, the Medicine Wheel Garden at Heart Lake. The garden grew from the vision of an Anishnawbe Elder as a place for healing, reflection and peace. Long before the garden was created, people had been gathering on these lands for millennia.

Perhaps this place has my heart because something in its teachings feels both new and deeply familiar. Guru Nanak, the first Guru in the Sikh faith, taught, Pavan Guru Pani Pita Mata Dharat Mahat: air is the teacher, water the father, and earth the great mother. I was raised with the understanding that the natural world is not simply around us. We live in relationship with it.

Acknowledging this land therefore means more to me than naming where I live and work. It asks me to remember that I arrived in a story already underway: to learn whose footsteps preceded mine, to receive the land with gratitude rather than entitlement, and to consider what responsibility comes with being held by a place that I, too, now call home.

That same sense of relationship and responsibility shapes how I work as an executive and team coach.

I enter coaching spaces knowing that I am stepping into stories already underway. Leaders and teams come with histories, identities, loyalties, pressures, power dynamics and experiences that are not always visible at first. They also work within systems that shape behaviour in powerful ways: structures, incentives, norms, relationships, routines and accumulated decisions that can make some behaviours easier and others much harder. I try not to rush to interpretation. I listen for what is being said, what may be difficult to say, what else might be true, and what in the surrounding system may be contributing to what we are seeing.

That matters particularly in leadership, because the meaning we make of another person’s behaviour shapes how we respond. A leader who interprets hesitation as resistance will act differently from one who wonders what may be underneath it. A team that reads silence as disengagement may miss fear, uncertainty, exclusion or simply a perspective that has not yet found room to enter. And sometimes what appears to be an individual problem makes much more sense when we look at the conditions in which it keeps occurring.

This does not mean lowering expectations. In my work, compassion and accountability belong together. Leaders still need to make hard decisions, address impact, hold boundaries and ask for more. But accountability also invites a wider question: what are we asking individuals to own, and what must leaders and organizations take responsibility for changing in the system around them? We can hold people accountable without reducing them to a single behaviour, a difficult moment or the story we have formed about them.

It also shapes how I understand power. The conditions a leader creates matter. Whose voice is heard matters. Who has to work harder to be taken seriously matters. The structures, routines and informal norms that determine who gets access, information, opportunity and influence matter too. So does the capacity to remain curious when certainty would be easier, to examine the impact of our choices alongside our intentions, and to ask how our own actions may be reinforcing the very patterns we hope to change.

I do not expect to arrive at a finished understanding of any of this. I hope instead to remain coachable.

For me, equity lives there: in attention, humility, compassion and responsibility; in the willingness to keep noticing what we may not yet understand, including the systems we have become so accustomed to that we no longer see them; and in the choices we make, again and again, about how we use our influence to create the conditions for people to contribute, belong and thrive.