Introduction
She thought of herself as an Energizer Bunny. Endless energy, endless capacity, done this kind of travel before. Then she got to August and September and couldn't fully form a thought. Cloudy. Irritable. Tired in a way she hadn't been tired before.
That is where this conversation on the Everyday Leadership Podcast lands, but it is not where it starts. Host Sope Agbelusi sits down with a leader who spent six years building the commercial engine behind Shopify Plus, from teaching twenty one year olds how to sell, to running Shopify Plus across EMEA, to finally stepping away to figure out what her life's work actually is. In between is a story about choosing the hard path on purpose, hiring for the right reasons, breaking under the weight of proving she could do anything, and learning what it actually costs to lead well.
This is not a highlight reel. It is what building something real, at speed, with people, actually requires.
Building It the Hard Way, On Purpose
When Shopify Plus first tried to sell its new commercial product, it became obvious that the sales team, mostly new graduates with no prior sales experience, did not actually know how to sell. The easy fix was to bring in an outside training organisation. None of them were rooted in the principles the team had built the business on, so the leader and her boss made a different call. They wrote an entire sales curriculum themselves, taught it themselves, in person, in two cities, every week, for an entire quarter.
They wrote next week's material while running this week's course. They dry ran it with each other every Sunday night. One of them caught an early flight to Ottawa most Mondays so both teams got the same lesson, live, at the same time. It was exhausting to build and it worked. The team hit their numbers that quarter, then nearly hit the full year target after having lowered expectations to make room for the training in the first place.
The line that came out of that quarter has stuck ever since: if it's the hard thing to do, it's probably the right thing to do. Not because difficulty is a virtue in itself, but because the easy option, buying in a generic programme that did not match what the business actually believed, would have built the wrong foundation faster.
Hiring for Why, Not Just What
Asked what she looks for when hiring, the answer was not a checklist of skills. It was motive. She wants to know whether someone is running towards something or running away from something. Candidates who lead with stock price, growth trajectory or a good line for LinkedIn get a yellow flag, not because ambition is wrong, but because it says nothing about whether they are prepared for what a hyper growth environment actually demands.
Three things mattered more: a real, personal reason for wanting to be there, a growth mindset because roles get outgrown fast in a business scaling forty, fifty, eighty per cent a year, and a preference for working as a team rather than as a lone operator. She would tell candidates plainly that the company was brilliant and also chaotic, and watch how their eyes reacted. Some lit up. Some visibly recoiled. Both answers were useful. Hyper growth is not the right environment for everyone, and pretending otherwise sets people up to fail.
The Cost of Being the Energizer Bunny
When the EMEA leadership opportunity finally came together, a visa delay meant a planned February move slipped to November. Rather than wait it out from Toronto, she chose to fly back and forth to London roughly every other week for six or seven months, determined to be present for a team she felt responsible for.
By late summer, it had broken her. She could not fully form thoughts. She was irritable, exhausted, disconnected from friends. Her own boss asked her directly why she was doing this to herself. When she finally relocated that November, it took two full months of essentially lying flat before she felt like herself again.
She calls it a total low light and also one of the best lessons of her life, because it arrived right before COVID, and it left her with a hard won understanding of self-care that she would not have had otherwise. Burn yourself out and you become useless to the very team you were trying to serve.
Leading Through a Global Crisis
When the pandemic hit, growth stopped being the priority overnight. The first question was simply whether everyone was safe, whether people were in an environment where they could stay healthy, and whether anyone was in a vulnerable position that needed attention. Only after that came the work of protecting income for a sales team that lived off variable commission, and later, once e-commerce began to boom, managing exponential growth while trying to stop people burning themselves out chasing it.
She describes that period as the point where something finally clicked between accountability and empathy. Before it, she swung too hard one way or the other, either too empathetic to hold people to a standard, or too focused on delivery to notice what people were carrying. COVID forced both to sit in the same room at once.
Building a Team by Design, Not by Accident
Building the EMEA leadership team from nothing meant she got to design it deliberately rather than inherit it. Working with a talent partner, she was explicit about what she wanted: a genuinely international team, multiple languages and backgrounds, people who would have to work across a communication divide themselves, because a team that has already learned to do that builds better systems for everyone else.
She was equally deliberate about complementary strengths, bringing in people who could cover operational execution she was not naturally strong in, and people who would challenge her thinking rather than simply agree with it. Assembling the right pieces, she says plainly, is one of the things she is genuinely good at.
The Armour, and Where the Energy Actually Goes
A conversation with the executive Bozoma Saint John \[CHECK: confirm spelling\] reframed something for her early in her time at Shopify. The effort that goes into managing how you show up, dressing a certain way, speaking a certain way, performing competence in every room, is effort that is not available for the actual work. Once that energy is redirected, it goes into being creative, innovative and genuinely good at the job instead.
Her advice to anyone still carrying that weight, particularly women and people of colour navigating rooms that were not built with them in mind, is to lower the armour further than feels comfortable. Not because vulnerability is the goal in itself, but because of what it frees up. She learned that same lesson watching her own leaders, Mark Bergen \[CHECK: confirm spelling\] and Loren Padelford \[CHECK: confirm spelling\], walk into rooms and say plainly that they did not have all the answers either. That permission travelled downward through the whole organisation.
Knowing When to Step Away
The decision to leave Shopify after six years did not arrive as a single moment. It grew out of roughly a year of coaching conversations exploring what she calls her life's work: demonstrating what empathetic, people-focused leadership can actually build, and widening the road for other women trying to reach the table. For a long time, staying at Shopify still served that mission directly. Eventually it stopped being the widest possible platform for it, and stretching further meant stepping into discomfort again.
Her advice to anyone facing the same fork is not to wait for a fully formed plan. She never had one. What she had, at every stage of a career that moved through five or six different roles in six years, was the next right, intentional decision. Nothing in a career is irreversible. You can try the next thing and pivot if it does not work.
What Leadership Actually Means
Asked to define leadership in a sentence, her answer was simple: it is the opportunity to help other people realise their potential, and through that, to help an organisation, a business, or a country realise its own. Everything else in this conversation, the curriculum built from scratch, the hiring philosophy, the burnout, the armour, the decision to leave, is what that definition actually costs and actually requires in practice.
