Fostering a Stronger Culture at CFN

The Centre for Newcomers has launched a sustained, organization-wide leadership development initiative facilitated by Dr. Randy Poon of the Purpose + Performance Project. This is culture work, not management training, and it includes every team from frontline staff to senior leaders. Leading From Alignment strengthens personal steadiness under pressure; Strategic Alignment hones shared focus and the practices that maintain it; Grounded Leadership equips managers to stabilize their teams and shape daily work. The goal is a stronger culture that preserves the care CFN is known for in every newcomer’s experience, even as demand grows. Dr. Poon shares his reflections on the process below.

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Walk past a CFN meeting room this past year and you might have found a group of staff standing at a wall of chart paper, working through honest questions: amid deadlines and demand — where do we lose our way, and how do we come back?

These questions sit at the centre of an organization-wide leadership development program now underway at the Centre for Newcomers, facilitated by Dr. Randy Poon of the Purpose + Performance Project. It is a deliberate investment in the culture of this organization — in how we work together, and in what newcomers meet when they arrive.

The program reaches every team, frontline to leadership, on the premise that we all lead in some context. A settlement worker helping someone through a hard moment, a teacher holding a classroom, a manager setting the tone for a department — each is leading. The work moves through three stages.

Leading From Alignment builds personal steadiness under pressure. Each of us has a familiar way of protecting ourselves when demands pile up — pushing harder, smoothing things over, going quiet. The session gives people plain language for that pattern, a clear sense of how they want to show up, and a practical way back when they drift from it.

Strategic Alignment sharpens shared focus and the practices that hold it. Teams take CFN’s three organizational objectives — moving forward together as one team, focusing on what matters most, and leading with openness and resilience — and describe honestly what those look like at their best, where they slip, and what that costs. Each team then builds its own practices: small, repeatable habits that make returning to what matters routine rather than heroic.

Grounded Leadership prepares managers to steady their teams and shape how they work day to day. It asks four things: hold steady, starting with yourself; notice when a team is drifting, without turning it into a verdict; shape the rhythms and practices that steady people; and keep everyone oriented toward what the work is actually for.

What surfaced across very different teams was strikingly consistent. As demand rises, people tend to take more on alone rather than together, and focus fragments. This is not unique to CFN — it is what happens in organizations that care deeply and are asked to do a great deal. Naming it plainly, without blame, is what makes it workable.

The commitments run both ways. Teams own the practices they built and have already begun using them. Leadership owns what shapes the work for everyone: clear direction, real support for people’s growth, and stronger connections across teams. That work is underway now in a redesign of how CFN develops and recognizes its people, so that conversations about growth become a regular rhythm rather than an annual event.

More than 175 staff have taken part, and many have asked for more sessions. What has stayed with them is a shared vocabulary now in use across the organization, and permission to say out loud that we’ve drifted — and to return.

Newcomers arriving at CFN are navigating a great deal — a new country, a new language, a new start. What they meet here shapes how that goes. A connected, focused organization gives them a steadier start. It also shapes the working life of the people who serve them: a place where people are well supported, well connected to one another, and clear about the purpose their work serves. Culture and service are not separate things here — one carries the other. That is what this work is finally for.

- Dr. Randy Poon