You started your career in broadcasting at a young age. How did your career evolve over your time in the industry, and what eventually drew you into leadership?
I was on television by the time I was 21, and at that stage of my life, I felt tremendous pressure to make the career work. I wanted to keep moving forward, take on bigger assignments, and continue building toward whatever came next.
Looking back, my career can probably appear more planned than it actually was. I was curious, and that curiosity led me through more than 30 years on camera, covering everything from political campaigns and elections to Olympic Games, natural disasters, and major investigations.
Throughout that time, I was also drawn to leadership. I wanted to be involved in the decisions behind the journalism because I felt answerable for what we were putting into the world. I used to think about someone stopping me in the grocery store and asking, “Why did you cover that story that way?” I didn’t want to have to say, “I don’t know, that wasn’t my call.” I was the person the public saw delivering the news, so I felt accountable for those decisions.
Eventually, I became increasingly interested in how those decisions were made: what we chose to cover, when we covered it and what emphasis we gave it. Moving into management was unusual for someone with an established on-air career, but it gave me the opportunity to experience another side of the industry and have a greater role in shaping the journalism itself.
Once you moved into management, what changed in the way you thought about your role and your responsibility to the people around you?
One of the biggest lessons was that leadership changes how people experience you, even when you don’t feel any different yourself.
When I first moved into management, I still thought of myself as the same person who had worked alongside everyone for years. But suddenly I was the boss, and people responded to me differently.
It was a small realization, but an important one. As a leader, your behaviour carries more weight than you may realize. People notice your mood, your body language, and how you respond under pressure, and they can read meaning into things you may not even be conscious of.
I also learned that leadership requires you to think differently about communication. You may believe you’ve been clear, but that doesn’t necessarily mean people have heard or understood what you intended. I became much more conscious of explaining the “why” behind decisions and recognizing that, as a leader, you often need to communicate something more than once and in more than one way.
Journalism asks you to make sense of a tremendous amount of information very quickly. How did that experience shape the way you think about strategy and communication?
I remember working on a major investigation when an associate producer came into my office and dropped these enormous black legal binders on my desk. A whole team had spent weeks pulling together the research, and now my job was to absorb all of it and turn it into a story that someone without any expertise in the subject could understand.
For me, that really captures strategic thinking. You take in the information, prioritize it, and understand it well enough to bring somebody else along.
We are surrounded by so much information all the time, and the best strategic thinkers understand what needs to rise to the top, what is critical to know, and what needs to be communicated to everyone else.
Journalism also taught me to read people. For much of my career, I would meet someone for the first time at the exact moment the microphone went on, so I had to quickly understand who was sitting across from me. Are they nervous? Are they confident? Are they trying to intimidate me? You learn to pay attention to energy, word choice, and behaviour, not just what someone is saying.
Both skills translate directly to leadership communication. You need to understand both what matters and the people you are trying to bring with you. I often tell people that you’re not communicating simply because you said something. You’re only communicating if the other person understood you. Otherwise, you were just making noise.
After nearly four decades in journalism, what gave you the confidence to start your own business at 58?
One of the advantages of starting at that stage of my life was having so much experience behind me. I had spent years interviewing people in business, watching how organizations operated and becoming curious about what it might be like to build something myself. By the time I was ready to make the leap, I also had a personal and professional network I could draw on to help me think through what I wanted to offer and how to build it.
But the biggest difference was in the pressure I put on myself. When I was 21 and starting out in television, I felt enormous pressure to succeed. Starting a business at 58 felt very different. I didn’t need it to set the world on fire.
Taking away that pressure actually made me more courageous. This time, I could give myself more freedom to learn, make mistakes and trust that the experience and wisdom I had accumulated would help me figure things out as I went.
What surprised you about entrepreneurship, and how did you figure out where your experience could be most useful?
One thing I hadn’t fully appreciated was how collaborative journalism had always been. Whether I was reporting or anchoring, there was always a team behind the work. Then I started my own business and suddenly it was just me. I remember sitting at my desk with my dogs thinking, “Okay, now what, Diana? What exactly do you do for a living now?” I quickly realized I needed to intentionally build a community of people in consulting who I could learn from, brainstorm with, or simply talk things through with.
I also had to figure out how nearly four decades in journalism could be useful to other people. Crisis communications was an obvious direction, but it didn’t interest me. What stayed with me instead were all the interviews I had done with people who had something valuable to say but struggled to articulate it. Sometimes they were nervous or overcoached, or so focused on trying to outsmart the journalist that they lost the straight line of what they wanted to say.
That made me think more broadly about how leaders communicate. Whether you’re speaking to your board, employees, shareholders, clients or the media, you need to understand what matters and communicate it in a way that connects with the person in front of you. That was the niche I realized I could work on, and where the skills I had developed in journalism could translate into something useful for leaders.
You now work with senior leaders on high-stakes communication. What have you learned about what makes someone truly effective in those moments?
One of the most important things is understanding that communication isn’t about performing. It’s about connecting with the person in front of you.
I learned that through interviewing some very difficult people. There were CEOs who came in clearly expecting a fight, sometimes because their communications team had prepared them for one. My instinct could have been to match that energy, but I learned to do the opposite. I would lower my voice, slow things down and create a different dynamic. Often, you could actually see the tension leave their body.
That experience shapes how I work with leaders today. You have to understand your audience and adapt to what the moment requires. The way you communicate with a board may be different from how you speak with employees, investors, or the media, even when the underlying message is the same.
I also think authenticity matters, although I’m careful with that word because it can become an excuse for saying, “This is just who I am.” Effective leaders understand that different situations require different things from them. You can adapt your approach without becoming inauthentic. In fact, I think the strongest communicators are often the ones who can read the room, understand what people need from them and adjust while still remaining grounded in who they are.
You work with leaders who are already highly accomplished. Where do you most often see communication become a barrier, particularly when it comes to clarity and personal brand?
For a long time, communication was treated as a soft skill. You could look at the path someone was expected to follow through a large organization and see the roles they needed to hold, the KPIs they needed to hit and the results they needed to deliver, while communication wasn’t necessarily treated as fundamental to becoming a successful leader.
I think that is changing because leaders recognize that people need to understand what you’re asking them to do, why it matters, how they contribute and what value there is for them. If you can articulate those things clearly, people are much more likely to understand where you’re going and want to come with you.
I see something similar with personal brand. Sometimes, people can be uncomfortable with the term because they associate it with self-promotion, but your brand is really who you are, what you stand for, what you’re known for, the expertise you’ve developed, and what you bring to the table.
There is nothing inauthentic about accurately communicating the expertise you’ve earned or the person you’ve become. When someone eventually meets you or works with you, their experience of you should match what you’ve communicated about yourself. You have to be able to walk the talk. Otherwise, the brand is meaningless.
You’ve seen the workplace evolve significantly over the course of your career. What progress have you seen for women in leadership, and where do you think there is still work to do?
We’ve made tremendous progress. When I became the first woman in Canada to win Best News Anchor, there were still relatively few women in those high-profile roles. I’m proud to have been part of that progress while also recognizing the women who came before me and helped create those opportunities.
It’s remarkable how recent some of that history is. About 20 years ago, a Toronto newspaper actually debated whether it was appropriate for women anchors to wear sleeveless dresses on television. Today, that conversation sounds absurd, but it’s a reminder of the scrutiny women faced around how they looked and showed up professionally.
There is still work to do. As long as we find it remarkable that a woman has been appointed to a particular leadership role, we’re not at the finish line. We’ll know we’re there when it’s no longer noteworthy.
I see another challenge through my coaching work. This is a generalization based on my own observations, but women can sometimes move very quickly from the strategic question to figuring out how everything will get done. Many women become exceptional fixers because they’ve spent so much of their lives coordinating multiple responsibilities.
There is real skill in that, but as you move into senior leadership, your role increasingly requires you to stay with the strategic question rather than personally solving every part of the “how.” Learning to let go of some of that instinct to immediately fix and execute can be an important part of making that transition.
You’ve received significant recognition throughout your career. As you’ve moved through different stages of your life, how has your definition of success changed?
I won my first major award relatively early in my career, and I remember being rattled by the attention it brought. Suddenly, I felt pressure to make the most of the moment and prove why I had won it.
Years later, while covering the Olympics, I heard a ski coach use an expression that stayed with me: “Pressure is a privilege.” You only feel pressure because you have the privilege of being in a high-consequence moment or position. That helped me reframe it. Pressure became less something to fear and more a signal that something meaningful was on the line. If I stopped feeling any pressure, maybe I was coasting and it was time to reach for something more challenging.
My relationship with recognition has changed too. I can point to the trophies behind me, but unless you’re another journalist, you probably have no idea what they are. They could be bowling trophies. Recognition has value within your community or industry, but outside of it, it may not mean very much.
I’m proud of what I accomplished, but I’m also more conscious now of giving myself appropriate credit for it. I once described part of my career as luck, and a woman corrected me. She said women too often credit luck instead of acknowledging their hard work. That stayed with me. Yes, there were opportunities that felt lucky, but I also brought talent and hard work to them. Mostly, I feel grateful for the career I had and the opportunities that came with it.
Looking back on a career that hasn’t followed a straight line, what advice would you give young women who are still figuring out who they want to become and how to make their voices heard?
I think the first thing is to be thoughtful about who you want to become. That doesn’t mean you need to have your entire career mapped out. Mine certainly wasn’t. I probably had every kind of job you could have inside the CBC because I was curious and interested in trying different things.
What I did have was a sense of who I was and who I wanted to become, and that gave me something to come back to when opportunities presented themselves. Does this feel like me? Is this moving me toward the person I want to be?
There is real value in taking ownership of that. Show people who you want them to see rather than allowing other people to define you.
The other thing I would say, particularly to young women, is that when you genuinely have something to contribute, be brave enough to contribute it. I sometimes ask people to imagine the worst possible outcome if they speak up in a room. Usually, when you actually talk through the possibilities, the odds of something truly terrible happening are incredibly small. They shouldn’t stop you from saying what you have to say. So, take the risk!
