The Virtuosity Podcast

Mission Critical Leadership Imperative with Phil Desmarais

• Virtuosity Character • Season 1 • Episode 14

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What does character have to do with military leadership and operational readiness?

Lieutenant-Colonel Phil Desmarais—Commanding Officer of the Canadian NORAD Space Detachment—joins us for a pioneering conversation on why character is mission critical in today’s CAF. Drawing on 25+ years in air and space operations, he shares how his team is implementing daily character development across a dispersed unit, what this work demands of leaders, and why what got you here won’t get you there.

🧠 What you’ll hear:
🔥 Why people who rely on you “deserve a better version of you”—and why Phil refuses to stay static as a leader
🧭 “Who are you becoming while you’re busy doing?” — the guiding question anchoring his leadership
⚔️ Why character is an operational advantage, not a soft skill—especially in a world of global instability
🧩 The pioneering initiative: a train-the-trainer model + Virtuosity’s daily development + defence-specific application
🛠️ How behavioral forecasting became rocket fuel for his team—especially when preparing senior leaders for high-stakes strategic engagements

Resources
 •  Canadian Armed Forces Ethos : Trusted to Serve (https://www.canada.ca/en/department-national-defence/corporate/reports-publications/canadian-armed-forces-ethos-trusted-to-serve.html)
•  Fighting Spirit: The Profession of Arms in Canada (https://www.canada.ca/en/department-national-defence/corporate/reports-publications/fighting-spirit.html)
•  Behavioural Forecasting in Forbes (https://www.forbes.com/sites/marycrossan/2025/06/25/behavioral-forecasting-a-foundational-practice-to-navigate-the-world/)
•  Leader Character Framework with Culture, Virtues, and Vices (https://virtuositycharacter.ca/organization/storage_production_6e2934b8-3e20-47a7-aa79-59a612f967be/990340a0-9980-4919-9456-ab5640b405a0.pdf)

About Virtuosity

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Host, Dr Corey Crossan (https://www.linkedin.com/in/coreycrossan/), is a research and teaching fellow at The Oxford Character Project where she develops and facilitates character development programs for students, industry, and university partners. Corey’s love for elite performance developed as she competed in top-level athletics for most of her life, highlighted by competing as a NCAA Division 1 athlete. Corey translated her understanding of elite performance into a passion for helping individuals and organizations develop sustained excellence. She is also the co-founder of Virtuosity Character, a mobile software application created to support the daily, deliberate practice of character-based leadership development.

Corey Crossan [00.00.08]
Every choice builds character. On the Virtuosity podcast, we explore how to make every day a step toward excellence. I'm Corey, your host and co-founder of Virtuosity. My journey into character development began in sport, where I discovered that strengthening my character didn't just improve my performance — it transformed my entire life. Since then, I've been gripped by understanding how we can intentionally build character to fuel both personal and professional success.

At Virtuosity, we believe character is like a muscle. It needs consistent training. That's why we've built a research-based system that acts as your character gym, making character development practical, scalable, and accessible, even within the largest organizations.

On this podcast, we sit down with participants from our flagship Virtuosity program, where individuals commit to a full year of daily character development powered by Virtuosity. Our guests will share why character matters to them, how they're applying it in their personal and professional lives, and the insights they've gained along the way. We hope these conversations challenge, inspire, and equip you with new ways to integrate character into your own journey.

Subscribe to stay up to date with our weekly episodes, and if something resonates, share it with your friends and colleagues. Ready to start your own Virtuosity journey? Download the Virtuosity Character app or visit Virtuosity Character to learn more.

Now, let's dive into today’s episode. Hello everyone, and welcome to the 14th episode of the Virtuosity Podcast. If you're new, I encourage you to check out our launch episode with Mary Crossan for a powerful introduction to the series.

Today, we're thrilled to welcome Lieutenant-Colonel Phil Desmarais as our guest. Phil serves as the commanding officer of the Canadian North American Aerospace Defense Command Space Detachment. With over 25 years of experience in air and space operations, command and control, and military instruction, he brings a wealth of expertise to the evolving domain of space defence. A graduate of the Royal Military College and the Canadian Forces College, Phil holds a Master of Defence Studies and has held key positions across North America, including the Canadian Air Defense Sector, Cavalier AFS and Vandenberg AFB, and 1 Canadian Air Division Headquarters in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

He is a proponent of productive disruption, advocating for self-awareness and leadership development. He is also a musician, outdoor enthusiast, and lifelong learner who strives to balance his professional life with a rich family life.

Well, welcome, Phil, to the Virtuosity podcast. I’m super excited to unpack all of the pioneering efforts you're doing with your team. I’m really excited for that. But the question that I always start by asking all of our guests is: why does character matter to you?

Phil Desmarais [00.03.05]
Thanks, Corey. It’s awesome to be here. I’ve had the benefit — and I guess the downside — of having listened to the podcast all year so far, and knowing this question was coming, and thinking and obsessing over how I would answer it, because there have been a lot of great answers to that question.

The succinct answer I’ve come up with is this: people who rely on me deserve a better version of me — an ever-evolving version of me. Through my character journey over the last couple of years, and more specifically with an accelerated time frame doing Virtuosity this year, I’ve realized that hasn’t always been the case over my years in both my personal and professional life.

So this has become really meaningful to me — to make sure I’m always doing something to be better than I was before, for the people who depend on me and rely on me. That obviously transfers across personal life and professional life; it doesn’t matter which context. There are a lot of people who depend on me, and if I’m not doing my best to be better than I was, then I’m letting them down. And I definitely think that in the past I have let people down.

Through going through this, and having the benefit of retrospect — and retrospect through the lens of the leader character framework — I definitely see areas where I can continue to do better. That’s the short answer, but I have so many thoughts on why this is important and how it’s important that I’m sure we’ll get to.

Corey Crossan [00.04.48]
Mhm, yeah. So why don’t we start by exploring what it is that you’re doing, because there’s a lot going on here.

Of course, you’re a participant in the Virtuosity program this year, but you’re not just doing it for your own personal development. You’ve brought in a few people on your team to really take this and then bring it to the rest of your larger team. For those listening, we’ve actually found this to be a really effective model in general — when you invest in development and learning for yourself, but you’re tasked with then training other people, it really deepens your commitment to what you’re doing.

You’re also doing some really pioneering work. This is the first time that people are training on Virtuosity and then bringing it to the rest of their team. So why don’t you walk us through what your aspirations were around that, why you think it’s important, and how you’re actually doing it?

Phil Desmarais [00.05.41]
It’s been a busy year. It’s been an exciting year, for sure. Starting in January, we weren’t really sure where it was going to go. It was not unlike jumping into character development itself — you’re taking a leap of faith and trusting that it will go somewhere positive. That’s similar to what we did with the team as well.

There were a few things I heard throughout the year, in our sessions and in conversations with you and Mary, that really stuck. One of Mary’s go-to questions — “Who are you becoming while you’re busy doing?” — is such an anchor point for me. It reminds me why it’s important for me to do this for myself, and why it’s important for us to bring this into the team.

Across the Canadian Armed Forces, it is just insanely busy — and I know everybody’s busy everywhere — but that really hits home when you consider, as we’ve discussed many times, that your character is changing one way or the other, whether you develop it intentionally or not. That’s a powerful reminder to keep going.

Another idea I go back to, which has become part of my own philosophy for continuing to pursue self-development, is “What got you here won’t get you there.” It’s a book by Marshall Goldsmith, which I haven’t actually read, but I’ve heard the phrase in different ways. The idea of evolution is so important — to keep up to date with the security and defence environment we deal with today, and I can apply it to so many parts of my life: what got me here as a husband, a father, a CAF member, an officer, and now a commanding officer will not get me to whatever comes next.

So I keep that front of mind. And to tack onto that, in our humility session earlier this year we talked about the idea that “certainty ends growth.” As soon as I feel certain about something, that’s a cue to re-evaluate and remember that what got me here won’t get me there.

All of that fell into the cauldron of my brain that’s often thinking of way too many things at once. The circumstances that led me to where I am in my position and role — being here, at this moment, in this job, with everything that’s going on — led me to conclude that we needed to do something, and that something was developing character.

We’re very lucky within the Canadian Armed Forces to have a high-level ethos and leadership doctrine that specifically includes the Ivey leader character framework. I didn’t have to dig or invent anything, or turn over too many stones, to find what would help me embark on this journey.

And again, the idea that those in the military are in service of Canada — that’s part of our indoctrination into the CAF from very early on: service before self. Being in service of something isn’t unique to the military, but it’s a core value for us. People who are in service of Canada are owed the highest level of leadership they can get. We’ve all signed on the dotted line, and ultimately we could be putting our lives on the line for our country. So anything less than world-class leadership is, I think, unacceptable.

We’re not immune to falling short of that, but we can deliberately do things now to make sure we have that level of leadership. That’s why this is so important — we now have a roadmap to develop leadership in a way that allows us to become better leaders and build a better armed forces overall.

Where the rubber meets the road for the military today, there’s global instability, conflicts around the world — no shortage of bad news. When you add that to what our ethos and leadership doctrine says, where we talk about competence and commitment along with character, as the research from Ivey shows, you see the gap. We’re really good at competence. We absolutely have a commitment to lead. But we have not had deliberate, intentional character development. That was a huge gap between where we were and where we needed to be to have a modern, competitive — or in our case, operational — advantage over adversaries.

Our adversaries are out there. We can’t just rely on our three oceans to protect us anymore. In Canada, we talk a lot now about Arctic sovereignty, for example. We have to be dynamic, make quick decisions, and operate under the highest levels of stress — that’s what the military is there for and what we’re expected to do.

If you walk that back, you end up at judgment — making better decisions. Walk it back again and you arrive at the remaining ten dimensions. Then we have a way to develop those, with associated behaviours we can practise and get better at.

So here we are. I’d thought through this in my head, and I’m in a position where I’m the commanding officer of a unit. I’ve thought it through enough, I have the authority, and I believed I had the influence — the authority is non-negotiable; the influence remains to be seen — and we were able to put in place a unit development program that encompassed character, competence, and commitment.

A big thing I liked about the three-C’s framework is that it allows you to contextualize things you’re perhaps already doing. In many sectors that Ivey has studied, competence is typically not the gap. The military is no different. We have excellent training and excellent courses, and we train people well to do their assigned tasks and duties.

So we captured things we were already doing — the ways we train people formally for operational jobs and tasks — and bucketed that under competence. Under character, though, we had nothing. That was not acceptable, as I’d already described. We needed to put something there.

With my limited familiarity with the leader character framework at the time, a little over a year ago, I brought in a colleague and leader character practitioner to our unit for our annual get-together to give an introduction — “spread the good word,” tell us what leader character is all about. That precipitated a bit of an eye-opening. Once you see this, you can’t unsee it. Once you’re aware of the gaps, you can’t not do anything about it. There’s a clear call to action in our ethos and leadership doctrine, and this is explicitly stated as one of the ways we’ll live up to that.

For me — and I’m not a math person — it was a simple equation: gap plus leader character equals do something.

So we stepped forward. We got in touch with Mary, and very shortly after, with you, to talk through how we would implement something for leader character. I brought my leadership team in on this. They were incredibly supportive. Once I “walked the dog” a little bit, they saw what I was seeing and acknowledged I was only a little bit crazy.

We came up with a unit-level game plan, supported by you and Mary, to intentionally develop character. The initial piece was courseware — content available through our online learning platform based on the character framework that folks could access. We’d have monthly conversations around that. The expectation was that you’d complete a module of online learning corresponding to one of the dimensions, and then we’d use an “observe and identify” approach to discuss that dimension.

All the while, since January, as you mentioned earlier, there were myself and five other members of our unit registered for your Virtuosity program, so we could be slightly — ever so slightly — ahead of what we’d turn around and share with the team. It was a train-the-trainer approach, which I think has been working well. We probably meet the minimum threshold for how much needs to be in our brains before we start sharing it. We’re far from experts, but we had the commitment and knew enough to be dangerous, and anything was better than what we were doing.

From there, we moved out — starting with Virtuosity for the leadership team, then moving into a “gap program” using existing content in our defence learning environment. Considering the regular annual attrition through our posting cycle, we decided to take the next step — a fairly significant one — from zero to monthly, to full Virtuosity daily.

We took that leap in August. We’ve now had the unit as an organizational account, and as an integral unit everybody is using Virtuosity as the tool. Our “tool” evolved from a couple of PowerPoints a year ago, to our defence learning environment with some asynchronous material, to the app on the phone and daily character development.

As I knew I would do, that was a really long answer to your question, but I think it brings us to where we are today. From August till now — and we’re talking in November — that’s how long we’ve been onboarding and using Virtuosity as the means to do our intentional character development, to close the gap between competence and character, with the aim of having an operational advantage through the leadership of everyone on the team. We consider everybody to be a leader in their own capacity, and ultimately we want world-class leadership across the CAF.

That’s what I think about that.

Corey Crossan [00.17.52]
That’s a great overview. It gives a lot of background. And the pioneering piece of this is that you’ve been met with a lot of challenges that I think have actually led to a lot of innovative solutions.

I’m going to get to that in a second, but I wanted to go back to one of the first things you said when I asked the question — Mary’s question: “Who are you becoming while you’re busy doing?” I just want to flag for listeners who can’t see you that you’re doing this podcast episode while walking on a treadmill, which I absolutely love. You and your team are always walking on treadmills when you’re doing these calls. I think that’s a perfect example of: how can you activate character while you’re doing the things you’re already doing? How can you make the most of your time? I just thought that was such a perfect example.

Phil Desmarais [00.18.40]
That’s hilarious. But yeah — I’m sauntering through hyperspace, because you also can’t see the lightspeed spaceship that’s my team’s default background.

Corey Crossan [00.18.48]
Yeah. Okay, so: challenges.

You were saying something at the end there about just barely being in front of what you were learning. One of the great innovations that’s come out of the work you’re doing is that we’ve now created introductory videos to help with the train-the-trainer model. Before your team started, we were trying to equip you to bring all of the theory — the complex theory — to your teams. But seeing that that could be challenging, and thinking about how to use the limited time in your sessions, we’ve now created introductory videos that help with that.

That’s just one example of how we’ve seen the challenges you’ve been facing and then tried to be innovative in solving them.

So let’s start with the challenges — and you can move into solutions if you want. What are some of the challenges you’ve been facing in bringing this to your team?

Phil Desmarais [00.19.58]
It’s definitely not been without its challenges.

Most people — except for my leadership team who are on Virtuosity with us this year — probably don’t know how we’re set up as a unit. It’s arguably one of the more challenging configurations in which you could try to implement a leader character development initiative like we’re doing. It’s not unique or special, but it is different from many Canadian Armed Forces units.

When I thought about it, we’re actually not that different from how you’re running your Virtuosity program. We’re a geographically distributed team, with a couple of concentrations where there are a few more folks, and then another half-dozen locations with twos and threes spread across the continental U.S., Alaska, and Greenland.

So we have the tyranny of time zones. We have the tyranny of shift work. We have geographical separation that, for anything, makes it harder to communicate with people, deliver intent, and deliver support, especially when we’re trying to onboard ambitious new initiatives. That’s something we wrestle with every single day, whether it’s leader character development or just helping someone with an administrative issue at their location.

That adds a lot of complexity to what we’re trying to do, and it’s closely connected to the communication piece, which we talk about a lot. We’re pretty sensitive to the volume and way we communicate with our team. There are only so many emails people can receive and absorb in a day. There are only so many Teams messages or posts we can push. There are only so many opportunities to connect over the phone or on a Teams call, because schedules often don’t overlap.

So it wasn’t surprising — or maybe “unsurprising” — that it’s taking longer than might be optimal to get to the point where everything is clicking and rolling, but the reasons are valid. We’ve really tried to come up with different ways to present information, deliver intent, and support people as they try to get on board with this.

The videos were a great innovation that helped with that. Not only did they alleviate us from trying to sound as smart as you and Mary on this stuff — we can only fake it until we make it so much — but without them it would quickly become apparent that we didn’t really know what we were talking about yet. There’s a cost to that; we don’t want to come across as pretending to be experts when we’re essentially just as new to this as everyone else in our unit.

At the time we didn’t fully realize it, but we were activating some humility with the team — making sure we weren’t presenting this as “the answer” or ourselves as experts. We’re decidedly not. We’re students of this as much as anyone else in the unit.

You can bucket a lot of that under communication, and the volume, cadence, and variety required to manage change. Through some change-management training I’ve done, there’s an adage that it takes seven different ways, seven times, for someone to really start to “hoist aboard” the change you’re trying to implement. The more you’re distributed and your schedules are out of sync, the harder that becomes. So we struggle with that.

The big one — the elephant in the room — is habit change in general. Habit change is hard. It’s even harder when you layer it onto a geographically dispersed team. We only get to be in person with each other once a year, and even then the best we can hope for is maybe 90% of our folks in the same room for a few days. We just had that a couple of weeks back.

When we’re all together, along with the other things we need to do, we really try to support the team in solving issues and working through challenges, including collaborating with you and Mary on some of the barriers, so we can get more people into a more regular engagement pattern. Because, as your research shows, the best-case scenario for success is daily development. Anything else is still valuable, but if we really want to meaningfully, sustainably, and permanently move the needle on character, daily development is the gold standard.

For the reasons I described earlier, you can see why I wanted to go for the gold standard and not just incrementally creep forward. It was a big jump and a difficult one. We’re still living through the challenges ourselves, those of us on Virtuosity who are slightly ahead of the team. I don’t have it figured out either in terms of having the full habit change under wraps.

There’s a lot of habit change. There’s only so much habit change one person can realistically do. For me, this has been a year of habit change largely under “vigour” — I’ve worked hard on my nutrition, exercise, and sleep. There’s only so much capacity in the day for habit change when you consider everything else you’re doing. So with what I had left in the tank for habit change around character — across all the behaviours we’re looking at throughout the year — there’s only so much I can do.

But I have noticed, through my own journey this year with heavy emphasis on vigour, that once you see the shift in your well-being — your health, fitness level, quality of sleep — it opens up the ability to do more of the rest. Just as we talked about temperance as a portal through which you can access the remaining dimensions, in my experience that’s been closely connected to vigour. It’s physiologically hard to get to temperance if you don’t have vigour under control.

That’s been huge for me. For everyone else on the team, whatever they’re trying to manage personally and professionally — families, responsibilities — there’s only so much habit change you can realistically expect. That remains a huge challenge.

We chatted a bit the other day about how there’s no silver bullet. I don’t know that there’s one perfect answer out there. We’re just trying to keep leaning forward, keep at it, and support the team whenever they need it as they strive toward this model of daily character development.

So that’s where we’re at in terms of the main challenges. It’s been exciting, too. We didn’t set out to be pioneers or to do “pioneering work.” In my head it started as a basic math problem: there’s a gap, we need to close it, this is the thing that closes it — so let’s do the thing.

It’s been exciting to learn that it is considered pioneering, and that it’s helping the broader vision of bringing character leadership to the world. We’re super excited to be part of that and to work with you, Mary, and the broader team on these efforts. It’s been fun.

Corey Crossan [00.28.13]
Yeah, it’s very pioneering. And I’m glad you started talking about your own character, because in a minute I’ll ask you to think about the character required of you to pioneer something like this.

Before we get to that, I want to explore some of the strategies you’ve used to address these challenges. The biggest one I’ve loved coming out of this — especially in our last session when we were thinking about what was next for your team — is the phrase you keep coming back to: How do we make character mission critical?

I love that term, and we’ve started taking it to our other programs. We’ve always known we’re doing character development for something. While it’s wonderful to develop your character for its own sake, how can we link it to something concrete?

Mary often talks about pairing character and competence together. This “mission critical” link is about pairing character with the competence of your organization.

You’ve talked about similarities between your program and the Virtuosity program — for example, geographical dispersion. But one big difference is that people joining the Virtuosity program self-select into it, whereas in your program you decided to mandate it, which I think is always a challenging decision: do you make something mandatory or not?

We’ve gone back and forth on that, but if you think of character as mission critical — which it is — and you talk about world-class leadership, and how character is often the root issue in poor judgment and decision-making, we feel more confident making it mandatory.

This twinning of character and competence — making character mission critical — really showed up in a specific scenario. You had everyone together and used behavioural forecasting in a way that made it very mission critical. You said it landed really well, even though your team had already been doing daily practice with Virtuosity for months. This really hit home.

We do want character development to be daily, but just doing it on your own, isolated, chipping away at habits can be less rewarding. So what other support systems can we create to make it mission critical?

Can you walk us through how you decided to do this behavioural forecasting piece — maybe briefly describe what behavioural forecasting is and how you brought it to your team — because it sounds like it went really well.

Phil Desmarais [00.30.40]
Yeah, it was super interesting — both how we got there and how it connects to the seven specific strategies you use in Virtuosity that we’ve been learning throughout the year.

The idea really came from Mary continuing to collaborate with us on ideas she had for her Forbes articles. She shared an early draft of the “Cognitive Warfare” article with me and a couple of others. By that point, we had already learned behavioural forecasting through Virtuosity.

That sparked a few dots to connect in my brain. If we’re talking about cognitive warfare — which obviously resonates with me — how can we use the leader character framework as an external tool, not just for self-development but for something else?

Instead of using it only for difficult conversations — the classic supervisor–subordinate context, which is still valid and useful — we thought, “How could we use this as a way to shape strategic engagement between senior military leaders?”

At the same time, as a leadership team we’d been talking about shifting the focus of our annual get-together. Historically, it’s been anchored in administrative and national requirements we have to accomplish every year. That’s important: it helps us build connection as a distributed group, reinforce our Canadian identity, and connect person-to-person at least once a year. We also visit folks at their locations, but that group time is precious.

I wanted to bring more rigour and structure to that event. All of that kind of smashed together and we realized: what we’re actually designing is an exercise — almost a command-post exercise, where we do a thinking exercise rather than move physical equipment around. We gather around the proverbial table and tackle problems together in the context of a scenario.

As we brought the team into the planning, that evolved further. In our real work, everyone in our team is embedded with the US Space Force and US Space Command. Our chosen domain is the space domain, which is a challenging operating domain in itself. We wanted to use that context — coalition operations in space — because it’s actually what we’re doing. We wanted realism, not a fantasy scenario with pixie dust. We wanted a realistic way coalition operations could play out.

So we layered a notional but realistic structure over our exercise for the week. Because we’re Canadians in America, and we get together once a year, we dubbed the exercise Maple Recharge, so we could assert our “Canadianness” as part of a coalition. That’s why you have coalitions: to bring different perspectives, streams of thought, and diversity of military culture.

In order to tie in the leader character work we were doing, we leveraged the fact that we had access to a Canadian senior leader on the West Coast, who is also an exchange officer like we are. We had this context we’d created, so we said: let’s use behavioural forecasting to prepare our senior leader — a Brigadier-General — for an engagement with his superior.

We used the different-sized bubbles in behavioural forecasting for the two counterparts. As the exercise controllers, we decided to provide the leader character assessments in bubble-chart format to the team; we didn’t want them to have to generate those from scratch because of time constraints. That would have been too much, too soon. So we gave them the assessments.

Then we brought you in to teach behavioural forecasting to the team. It wasn’t ideal to have you speaking into a screen with no camera on the other side, but you came through like a champ and delivered it.

We also wanted to apply some additional analysis tools, so we brought in another colleague in the defence team and Virtuosity cohort — Christian Breed, who was the very first guest on this podcast — to help us learn the SWOT-analysis method. We coupled those two tools together to give a strategic engagement preparation brief to our senior leader at the end of the week.

People were freaking out a bit — I was freaking out a bit — because we were asking ourselves to do something we’d never done before. We pushed everyone, including me, outside of their comfort zone. But I was so impressed and proud of the team with what they came up with by the end of Thursday.

It led to a couple of unexpected — but maybe not surprising — outcomes at the end of the week.

First, it provided a very rich, useful conversation with our senior leader. He found it super helpful and said he would have loved to have had more of this throughout his career as a way to prepare for the barrage of engagements senior leaders have. I’m sure that’s not unique to the military — many senior leaders have very full engagement schedules — and this would have helped.

The second thing it did, which connects directly to the strategies, is that it was like rocket fuel for the language strategy. When you actually have to use the language, it changes everything.

We also provided the team with the Virtues and Vices Index — basically, the tools you have to solve the problem. So they had: the behavioural forecasting bubble chart, the Virtues and Vices Index, and SWOT analysis. It was like: here’s everything on the table — go build the air filter in the Apollo capsule.

Using that activity as an external way to access leader character content was incredibly helpful in building familiarity with the language. When you’re doing this on your own, there are only so many conversations you can have with yourself or a partner. There are only so many times you’ll say the 62 words — or 62 times 3 if you include excess and deficient vices — before you stall.

But when you’re using the language to solve a real problem, you’re saying those words a lot. Over the sessions — the dedicated times we had to get together in syndicates and solve the problem — it was an incredible boost to our language strategy. It really accelerated everyone’s familiarity with the terminology.

As we talk about often, once you have the words to describe what you’re trying to describe, it gets so much easier. You can actually talk about what you mean.

So that’s probably the strategy we’ve had the most success with so far through using the behavioural forecasting activity. We didn’t set out explicitly to do it that way, but in hindsight we realized: holy smokes, that was an awesome way to activate the language strategy.

Corey Crossan [00.38.58]
Yeah, that’s awesome. It’s such a perfect example of how the language strategy can be used effectively. If you’re just memorizing terms, it’s not going to be very motivating — why would you? But when you’re using those terms in a mission-critical context, to solve real problems that matter to your team, it’s a completely different experience.

We often think about the broader ideas around developing character — understanding yourself, understanding other people — but you’re elevating it to another level when you use a phrase like mission critical and anchor it in your shared operational context. It’s brilliant. We’re going to keep bringing that to other contexts and programs.

Are there any other strategies that you’ve found really useful that you’d like to share?

Phil Desmarais [00.39.39]
Whether it’s “useful” or not remains to be seen, but one that jumps to mind is the exemplar strategy.

As a staple of military leadership, we try to lead by example. We’re not just standing on our perch as the leadership team, or me as the commanding officer, and saying, “Do this.” We’re doing it ourselves.

It was super important for me to be with the team and doing this for the team and with the team, and as I described earlier, for myself as well. We’ve tried to offer an exemplar aspect to our approach — we’re not asking anybody to do something we’re not prepared to do.

I don’t necessarily expect that everyone will find that equally meaningful, but the fact that we’re doing it just as much as everyone else is very much aligned with leading by example. And we continue to work hard at that.

Corey Crossan [00.40.41]
Yeah, absolutely. And for anyone listening who isn’t familiar with these strategies, we’re talking about the seven strategies for character development, based on research from the Oxford Character Project and Wake Forest University. I’ll link those in the show notes.

The exemplar strategy can show up in many ways, but I think this idea of it coming from the leadership team — top-down — is powerful. It shows that this isn’t something that applies to “everyone else but me.” You’re investing in it yourself, and that creates language continuity and cultural continuity across the organization.

Before we press on, any other strategies you want to highlight, or should we move into talking more about the character required of you to lead this?

Phil Desmarais [00.41.25]
The language and exemplar strategies are the two we’ve had the most reps with so far.

Looking ahead, as we approach the new year and the halfway point of our affiliate Virtuosity program, the systems strategy, reminders strategy, and habituation are the three that come to mind as ones we really want to crack the nut on.

We’ve had a good boost on language, as we talked about. We’re going to continue trying to be exemplars ourselves, but I also think we can bring in external exemplars. Our brains were spinning on that after the Leader Character Conference a couple of days ago, when we got to hear from other sectors and individuals who are in the trenches on this in their own contexts. Exemplars from other areas would be really beneficial for the team.

Habituation, which I carried on about earlier, is going to remain front of mind. And then reminders — I’ve personally been experimenting with different ways to have things “jump out of the bushes” at me to remind me to do Virtuosity at the end of the day. We’ll share tips and tricks among ourselves.

So that’s how I see it moving forward: carry the successes we’ve had with some strategies, and look to expand and grow into others.

Corey Crossan [00.43.01]
Yeah, and that systems one is such an interesting one to explore. I love James Clear’s quote from Atomic Habits: You don’t rise to the level of your goals; you fall to the level of your systems. What are some of the group-level practices you can put in place that make the habit piece easier and more supported?

It’ll be fun to co-design some of those ideas with you later.

So, thinking now about you — and perhaps your team — as you’ve tried to pioneer this effort: Mary often talks about things in terms of their degree of difficulty, like a dive. You can cannonball into the water — low degree of difficulty — or you can do an elaborate dive — very high degree of difficulty.

What you’re doing is high degree of difficulty in many ways. The paradigm shift of elevating character alongside competence is challenging enough. Going beyond a temporary bump — not just a workshop, but making this a daily practice — adds another layer. Making it mission critical by mandating the program adds yet another. And then the fact that it’s pioneering work adds more complexity.

As you’ve invested in your own character development over the last year, what has this initiative demanded from you, in terms of your character, to be able to do it well?

Phil Desmarais [00.44.24]
That’s a really good question. Whether this ends up as a belly-flop or a “rip entry” — we’ll see. In some ways it feels like we’re on the thousand-metre platform, spinning and twisting; the landing is still to be determined. That uncertainty is part of the trick — and ties back to habituation and habit change in general.

Trusting the process is difficult because the results you expect to see are so far down the line. We talked about this on our panel at the conference a couple of days ago: this is a long-term investment. We’re expecting to see results over years, not weeks or months.

With that in mind, I’ve had to lean heavily on transcendence. When you don’t get immediate results or instant gratification, you need to be future-oriented, optimistic, and creative. We’ve definitely come at this with a sense of purpose, and we’ve really had to lean on that to stick with it.

Drive has also been huge — we’re striving for excellence here, especially excellence in leadership. It’s what we’ve always needed, but it’s needed now more than ever for Canada and the Canadian Armed Forces. Striving for excellence has been a big banner for us.

We’ve also had to bring a lot of initiative. There are many layers in the organization between where we sit and where the high-level direction to do this — in our ethos and doctrine — sits. There’s no one telling me exactly what to do or how to do it. We have broad intent laid out in foundational documents, and we’re using that to close gaps in what we see as mission-critical ways to increase operational advantage. We have to be driven, or it wouldn’t happen.

Honestly, I could talk for an hour going around the entire character wheel, because so many dimensions have been relevant. Over the last five or so years, through other development initiatives, I’ve also done a lot to build collaboration, humanity, and humility. We needed to do this collaboratively, which is always interesting in the context of a hierarchy, chain of command, and org chart.

In my head, I want hyper-collaboration. But I also recognize that, because of the positional baggage that comes with my role and rank, there are impediments to collaboration you have to work through. That’s forced me to think carefully, be creative (back to transcendence), and be flexible in how we collaborate to achieve the goal.

We’ve already talked about humility — we’re as much on the journey with the team as they are. And my humanity has had to be present too: considering the challenges I’m asking people to take on, being aware of their situations, and being empathetic so we can support them through the change, even as I’m working on myself.

None of that would be possible without temperance — the calm, patience, and composure that allow you to access those other dimensions. For me, the keyhole to the portal of temperance is vigour. I won’t be able to access patience and calm — cognitively and physiologically — if I don’t have vigorous behaviours under control.

So, thinking through what we’ve done in my role and how we’ve led this as a team, that’s my initial walk through the park of the character wheel and what we’ve had to access to do it.

Corey Crossan [00.49.39]
Yeah, that all resonates. I love how you pretty much just went around the wheel. All of these character dimensions are so important, and vigour is a portal for me too. If you don’t have sleep, nutrition, exercise — it’s hard to imagine anything else.

I’ve also found, being in a pioneering role myself, that I’m continually surprised by how much more transcendence is possible — and needed — to paint a compelling vision and get people inspired by it. That muscle keeps getting challenged.

You said earlier that you’re committed to this for the long term, and that it’ll be a while before you see some results. But at the same time, there are small and significant results that show up quite quickly. Because the habits are small, it can take reflection to notice the changes.

So, thinking about your personal experience in the Virtuosity program: are there one or two insights that stand out for you that have been impactful in the immediate term?

Phil Desmarais [00.50.46]
Yeah, that’s a great point. In terms of transcendence and shifting an organization to have stronger and more balanced character, that’s definitely on the scale of years rather than days or weeks.

But I agree there are smaller wins we experience personally as we do the daily development.

That’s where this framework — once you have it — really comes alive. Using the glasses analogy from earlier in the program: I’m now looking at my life and leadership through “character goggles.” I can see, for example, why I have a collaborative nature: I’ve been a musician my whole life and played in bands. When we talked about collaboration and even judgment using the orchestra analogy — if everyone just played their part without listening, it would be noise. That’s not how you play in a band. I didn’t know it at 14, but I was learning collaboration from an early age.

So that’s one area where, looking back through this lens, I can see how I ended up here. And looking forward, I can see that continuing to play music in bands, for fun, is also legitimately supporting my character development because it fosters collaboration and connection.

Thinking about this conversation — which I’ve probably been thinking about all year since we signed up — I do think there’s been an increase in temperance, though there’s still work to do. When we talked about temperance as a portal to the other dimensions, that really stuck with me. I think I’ve moved the needle a bit there, personally.

It’s also connected to judgment. I don’t always have the patience I’d like in the moment, but I’ve become more quickly situationally aware of what I’ve just done, so I can resolve it more quickly instead of being oblivious and wondering why everything’s on fire behind me.

There’s definitely a connection between patience, calm, and situational awareness for me — I aspire to be more proactive, but at least on the back end I can more quickly recognize what I did, why it wasn’t helpful, and adjust.

Being able to think through leadership challenges this year — and the ones I’m dealing with currently — using this framework has been invaluable. These positions are challenging for a reason: we’re given tough problems to solve and not many clear answers. I’m very thankful to have this rubric to think through and prepare for conversations, to develop myself, and to help develop my team.

As we approach Thanksgiving in the U.S., where we’re all living, I’ve been very thankful for this work this year. It’s truly been a pleasure to work with the framework and with you and Mary on it.

Corey Crossan [00.54.44]
That’s awesome.

As we wind down, I want to ask you about your Character Quotient. This is something Mary and I put together to reflect the degree to which you’re bringing character into everything you do. It’s broken into three categories:

  1. Your character awareness
  2. How much you’re developing your character
  3. The degree to which you’re applying it in your organization or place of work

Did you get a chance to take that Character Quotient? And if you did, do you want to walk us through your score and what you’re happy with or want to work on?

Phil Desmarais [00.55.34]
Yeah, I did have a crack at it. I suspect I did it wrong because it’s a lot higher than it probably should be — maybe I was in a good mood or super stoked on character after the conference.

The overall total score came out to 89%. That broke down as:

  • Awareness: 92.5
  • Development: 85
  • Application: 90

I think that generally makes sense. Initially starting with Virtuosity, and then layering on top of that our own affiliate Virtuosity work, I’ve had “double time” this year in terms of awareness.

But awareness doesn’t mean I’m doing it right; it just means I’m admiring the problem more acutely than I would have last year. What I do about it is more compelling than saying I’m 92.5% aware. Being situationally aware of the times I lack temperance is cool, but I’d rather have enough temperance that I don’t have to fix as many problems afterward — I’d prefer to respond more productively in the first place.

So the high awareness score isn’t surprising given how deeply we’ve dived into this.

Development at 85% also makes sense. I’m actively participating in Virtuosity, developing myself, and we’re also working on developing the team. I’ve also noticed opportunities in other areas of my responsibilities — not just in my unit CO role — where I can dabble in character development and application.

Application at 90% tracks with that. I can’t unsee what I’ve seen about character now. The more I look at different areas, the more I see them through the lens of character: “That would be useful over here,” or “We could try this over there.” It’s been a snowball effect across the areas where I have responsibility and influence — I’m introducing leader character into processes and development efforts in different corners of the Armed Forces.

All the while, it’s incredibly helpful to have that high-level guidance and intent from our ethos and leadership doctrine. It’s literally written in there. We don’t have to decide at my level whether we’re choosing character; higher headquarters has already chosen it for us. Now it’s about taking that and running with it, closing gaps as quickly as we can. That’s definitely kept me occupied, and it’s probably why my application score is relatively high.

There’s still lots of work to do. The 89% score doesn’t capture what’s beyond awareness. That’s just the first step. I’d say I’m at the start line for this leader character journey. Where we go from here remains to be seen as we continue down the path.

Corey Crossan [00.59.47]
Well, it’s a very strong start line, and I think that number is spot on. It’s incredible what you and your team are doing.

I also want to pick up on something you’ve said a few times: having character in your ethos is helpful, over and over again. When you think about that, it’s really the systems strategy — putting things in place that make everything else easier. For listeners who don’t have character in their ethos, it’s worth thinking about how you might bake it into your systems so that it makes everyone’s job easier when it comes to leveraging and advancing character.

Is there anything we haven’t talked about that’s been on your mind — anything you wanted to share before we close?

Phil Desmarais [01.00.39]
Oh my gosh, yeah, we’ve covered a lot.

A couple of other guideposts I’ve used throughout the year — resources I’ve collected through Virtuosity and through trying to lead Virtuosity with our team — are some banner quotes that have been really helpful.

One of my favourite stages is activation, when you get to pick music, quotes, stories, and places to activate character. These are things that were already in our lives, but now we’re collecting them within the character-development universe. You already listen to music, read books, and go to meaningful places; now you’re just seeing them through this lens.

One of the quotes I’ve carried with me — and started collecting throughout the year — is Viktor Frankl’s: Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. Trying to build that space is what excites me — what’s in that space, and what can we do once we have it?

We’ve already talked about What got me here won’t get me there, and I keep that front of mind as well.

Specific to some dimensions that are perhaps stereotypically lower in military organizations — humanity and humility — I think a lot about Maya Angelou’s idea that people don’t care what you know until they know how much you care. It may not be popularly associated with the military, but we do talk a lot about how much we care for people and how we can care for people. I keep that front of mind.

Under humility, another quote that hits hard for me is G.K. Chesterton’s: How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it. That was a lightning-bolt moment — a reminder not to get too big for your britches.

People far smarter and more insightful than me came up with these, but using what’s been laid in front of us — through Virtuosity and other sources — and collecting these meaningful quotes gives me guideposts along the journey. They bring me back to why this is important and help me see that reflecting on them is itself part of developing character.

Corey Crossan [1.03.46]
Oh, I love that. While we have so much science baked into the process, we really do draw on the arts — music, quotes, stories — and they can be so powerful. I love that you brought us back to that really inspirational place to land this.

It’s a great way to wrap everything up. Phil, thank you so much — not just for joining us today on the podcast, but for all of the pioneering efforts you’ve been brave enough to lead, bringing your team along with such a collaborative spirit. You haven’t done this alone, and it’s truly inspiring for us as we continue the work we’re doing too. We’re really thankful for all your efforts. Thanks for everything you’re doing.

Phil Desmarais [1.04.23]
And thanks to you too, Corey. It’s been fun, and it will continue to be fun. Thanks for the opportunity to chat with you today.

Corey Crossan [1.04.29]
You’ve just finished another episode of the Virtuosity podcast. If you have any questions and want to connect, please reach out to me at corey@virtuositycharacter.ca. I’m also on LinkedIn, so let’s connect there.

As always, thank you so much for listening. Bye for now.

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Phil Desmarais

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