What if becoming a better leader has less to do with learning new management techniques and more to do with becoming more yourself?

In this episode, former RBC executive and HomeEquity Bank CEO Katherine Dudtschak shares a deeply personal journey that transformed not only her life, but also her philosophy of leadership. After publicly affirming her gender while leading thousands of employees, Katherine discovered that vulnerability, compassion, and authenticity weren’t leadership liabilities. In fact, they became her greatest strengths.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why success and fulfillment aren’t always the same thing
• How fear-based leadership limits both people and performance
• Why vulnerability builds trust faster than authority
• How curiosity and compassion can outperform command-and-control management
• Why doing the inner work is one of the most important responsibilities of a leader
• Practical ways to lead with greater authenticity without sacrificing results

Whether you’re leading a team, navigating your own career, or simply questioning whether the life you’ve built truly reflects who you are, this conversation will challenge the way you think about leadership and yourself.

If you’re interested in the impact of capitalism on leadership and innovation, make sure you tune in.

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Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcasts/katherine-dudtschak/

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The Leadership Lesson I Learned By Becoming My True Self, With Katherine Dudtschak

The Success Gap

This conversation is about something that a lot of people spend their entire lives or much of their lives awaiting, the gap between success and truth. My guess is Katherine Dudtschak, a former Senior Executive at RBC, former CEO of HomeEquity Bank, one of Canada’s most accomplished business leaders and now the author of Sincerely, Katherine. At age 50, while leading thousands of employees and one of the country’s most visible corporate roles, Katherine publicly affirmed her gender identity.

In doing so, she triggered a question that goes beyond gender or identity politics. How many people are living lives built around expectations that they never consciously chose? We live in a world that is very focused on achievement, productivity and image. What does that cost us if it’s not true to who we are? Why does reinvention, particularly midlife, feel so threatening? We’re going to be talking about leadership and conformity and the tension that exists often between success and internal alignment. I’m J.R. Lawry. This is Career Sessions.

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Katherine, thank you for being with me.

It’s wonderful to be here with you and all of your guests.

I appreciate your joining. You’ve got a new book out. It’s been a few weeks. Thanks for putting it up there for those who are watching on video, it’s Sincerely, Katherine. You describe what many people would consider to be a successful life before you realize that something was missing. Something very important was missing for you and you made it a very visible, personal transition while in a big leadership executive role. How did that change the way that you view authenticity and people? Particularly those who are in an executive leadership role.

Defining Masculine And Feminine

It changed a lot. I’ll give you some backstory. I was known as a fairly empathic leader before June 17th, 2019. The reason I share that is, it was around the year 2000 that I definitively cried at work the first time. I think of human behavior as either masculine behavior or feminine behavior. There are feminine and masculine attributes in every human being. There’s a unique mixture in each of us. We would describe/showing sensitivity or emotion at work as a feminine behavior. Not female, but feminine.

If you look at my essence in childhood before my parents, community, and school tried to shape me into behaving a certain way, or performing a certain way. I would have been a fiercely curious human being. I would have been a sense-making systems thinking human being, which are more mechanical or masculine characteristics. I would have equally been highly emotive, highly sensitive and expressive. I started to embrace my more sensitive side in around the year 2000. I got to be known as a fairly empathic leader.

When I affirmed my gender in 2019, I had come through a 24-month period of deep heavy mental health challenges. I was suicidal the year before I came out. I thought it would have been better for my life to be over. I built the perfect career. I had four beautiful children and got married. It was the perfect life in materialistic terms, yet I was complete. I went through a dark period, then a friend pulled me aside who could see my symptoms. She’s a psychologist or psychiatric nurse and she said, “Do you want me to send you research on the intergenerational trauma caused by suicide?”

The Dark Period

She literally walked me off the cliff. I ultimately made a pledge to myself to come out in my job leading 25,000 people at Canada’s largest company. I was in one of the most senior executive jobs in the country. I didn’t come out of that job because it was going to be popular. I came out in that job in order to keep my job and be able to finish putting my children through school. Right up until my coming out, I expected to be homeless. I expected the worst. Partly, because I had childhood trauma associated with fears of abandonment and fears of rejection.

Everyone was saying, “You’re going to be met with such love and such embrace,” yet I feared the worst. What happened in that moment of my coming out or of the video going out to the world is I started to receive hundreds and eventually thousands of emails from people about bravery and courage. Neither of those are sexy words. Bravery or courage is about moving forward with something to be true yet fearing the worst. You’re in the presence of fear but you’re moving forward because you feel you need to survive.

I expected the worst, yet I got all these emails about bravery and courage and people started volunteering their own life stories to me. Aspects of identity that they had hidden from the world. Aspects of hurt and hardship that they had never told anybody about. Yet they are writing to me and they are from all walks of life. A gentleman from the East Indian Community talking about ostracizing his best friend in India who had told him he was gay. Who later took his life because he was put into an arranged marriage. He carried that guilt forever.

There was a woman talking about emotional and physical abuse from a former spouse. The stories were countless. The fact that I was fairly empathic before and trusted, then I showed high vulnerability in my coming out. It resulted in me being met with a level of trust that humbled me to the core and because of the kindness, the empathy and the embrace that I received and because of the trust I received from others telling me their stories. This gets to the root of your question. I was forever changed as a human being.

Redefining Leadership

When you get to see into the soul of others, and they trust you with such vulnerability and to be embraced the way that I was. It’s pretty damn hard to go and be a command and control manager after that. It’s pretty hard to be a dictator after that. I was immediately changed. I could no longer be directive in the way that I might have been in the past. I learned how to suspend my own anxiety and my own fear of meeting targets and expectations as a manager. I learned how to suspend that and shift my manager’s approach or leadership approach to kindness and curiosity.

Kindness and curiosity that would lead to empathy for what people are sharing with me. I became a much flatter leader. My executive team would tell me they knew what the root cause of a problem was of what we were trying to solve. It didn’t feel right intuitively to me, so I would go to the front line employees and say, “Tell me what’s going on here.” The front line employee goes, “It’s this, this and this.” I go, “What should we do about it?” They’d go, “We should do this, this and this.”

I go back to my executive team and I go, “We’re not listening. We’re not showing empathy and listening effectively to the people that know the best.” Everything got turned upside down for me because I saw a side of the human condition that I didn’t see at scale before. There’s so much hurt or conditioning that occurs that causes people to not share. I became so much more compassionate, empathic and curious that my leadership style changed forever to being much more human-centered and much more heart-centered. The funny thing is, our business performance was record-breaking through the entire period of that.

It’s a significant personal change for you and in what you revealed that day, but also in what happened afterwards. Having now reflected on that, do you feel like the corporate world is evolving or are they still stuck in the mode where leaders need to be these personas and can’t be their authentic selves?

Yes and yes. Both are true. There are pockets of light everywhere of humble, selfless, heart-centered leaders that lead with kindness and curiosity, show empathy and compassion. Take input from all levels. All corners of the organization. That’s what inclusivity is. It isn’t fancy. It takes psychological safety and belonging, but it’s about getting everybody’s input to come up with more holistic solutions. There are leaders like that everywhere. Many of them are flying beneath the radar. Not because they’re shunned necessarily, but because the organization and senior management is under so much pressure to perform.

Nobody takes enough time out to see and understand what makes this more human-centered, heart-centered inclusive and compassionate leader effective. There are bright lights everywhere. There are also and I saw it, at the most senior levels, there are very human-centered, planet centered senior executives and CEOs. The challenge we’re dealing with, and it’s a Western world, if not global societal issue. For a long period of time, we have built a world that is extractive and performative. We’ve been on a path for several thousand years that have created this consumerism, capitalistic, extractive and performative world that we live in.

The Performative Treadmill

It’s not good or bad. It just is. That extractive world has quarterly performance targets, quarterly reporting, risk management, board governance, a set of linear, logical, mechanical practices that keep CEOs and senior executives on this performative treadmill in order to keep the governance, the risk management and the production of the organization moving. It takes a lot for a senior executive to be able to pause that and embrace more regenerative and more coherent ways of leading and running a business.

Even the attempts of ESG have been pushed backwards. It’s hard. There’s great people everywhere, and great intentions everywhere. Yet they often get masked by the performance pressures within an organization from the top down, to perform and to deliver. It takes a very conscious leader or a very aware leader who is conscious of their own behavior and their own tendencies to create enough space to pause the anxiety associated with that performative way and create enough space in their day and in the way that they lead to be more human-centered and heart-centered.

It’s why I speak at Sincerely about the pathway to a regenerative world and a coherent world. It starts within the leader himself in order to create calm and peace within ourselves so that we can shift from anxiety or fear-based ways of being to kinder, more curious and inclusive ways of being. Both are true. Is it shifting? Yes. Is that at the pace it needs to? In order to save humanity and our relationship with nature and the planet, I don’t think it’s moving fast enough.

A lot and what you just said, both the notion that the way that we approach leadership has flaws but also the broader environmental consequences of it. Talk a little bit more about what that journey was like for you as you evolved your own leadership style and discovered that you could lead people in a very different way than perhaps you would have been leading up until that point.

I’ll give you 3 or 4 data points. The first time I cried at work was around the year 2000. A gentleman that was reporting to me, who I idolized, who I was junior to at one point. Now, I am a senior too. We were doing their leadership review, and it called out that they were risk adverse and they were pensive as a manager. I said to him, “You’re called out as risk adverse. Where does that come from?” He trusted me and he started to cry. He said, “Every time my parents made a risky decision, they failed. As a child I promised myself I would not take risks that would result in failure.”

He’s bawling his eyes out and I started to cry because I felt his pain. I also felt that he trusted me with a side of himself that he had not shared before at work. That moment for me was the beginning of learning to slow down and get to know the whole human being that you work with. That it’s okay to cry at work. It’s okay to be sensitive and to be vulnerable. That went on. I led the restructuring of a bank across nineteen countries in the Caribbean. I was the CEO. The restructuring by the board was seen as wildly successful.

The company went from losing money to back to sustainable profitability in less than 24 months. The board was blown away, yet I was heartbroken because in these small countries of the Caribbean, we reduced 40% of the workforce during that period as part of the restructuring. Employees didn’t trust management anymore. They were going to the media. I said to somebody, “We need to tell them the truth that we’re losing money. We need to tell them the plan to restructure the company.” The person says, “We’ll tell them when we’re done,” and I go, “They’re adults. They deserve to know.”

Every six weeks, I’d have a call with 6,000 employees. Eventually 5,000 and eventually 4,000 and I would cry with them because I got questions and I didn’t have answers. I said, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry this is hard and I’m sorry this is heavy. I promise you I will do everything in my power to save this company and as many jobs as humanly possible.” As soon as I was honest and vulnerable, I would cry alongside the employees, not out of weakness but just out of feeling. They stopped going to the media and employee engagement on the team over that 24 month period went up over 20% at the same time we restructured.

Again, I learned that it was okay to be human. It was okay to be vulnerable. Everybody deserves to be brought on the journey, then I came out. I went through my own personal transformation. Now, it’s not a corporate transformation. I was met with the level of love, kindness and trust that I shared with you earlier and it changed me. I had to lead in an inclusive way with compassion and less command and control. I focused more on inputs or activities and behaviors. Less on financial outcomes as a leader. Again, we went on to achieve record performance and this was the turning point.

I’m now living in a woman’s world. Not a man’s world. I’m worried about being judged for being too feminine and too sensitive. I was carrying that, yet I became an enigma. I was in my mid-50s and at that point, I made a decision to leave. Amazing company that I spent 37 and a half years at. Yet I had grown so much as a human being, neurodiverse, lived in a man’s world, lived in a woman’s world, and grew up as a poor farmer to war surviving immigrant parents.

I had made sense of all of this stuff but I got to a point where I said, “I need to leave. I needed to leave,” because so much had changed for me that I needed another chance to meet new people where they’re at and have them meet me where I’m at and move forward from there. In that case, I chose to leave a company I had spent many years at in order to not start over but start clean. Start from a clean place. I wanted to prove to myself, myself as a woman, and also as a heart-centered leader, that it wasn’t a fluke.

I became a CEO of another bank and within 60 days or 90 days, we were achieving record performance just by showing compassion and sensitivity to employees and giving them permission to come together and work side by side with their peers to come up with creative solutions. The company’s mission was all about approving the quality of life of aging people, people 55 years of age and older. We started to achieve record performance. Again, this more compassionate heart centered leadership worked and I just needed another chance.

I wanted another opportunity to prove it. As you know, I’ve since moved on from that and now, I’ve set up my own company called Sincerely. There’s 3 or 4 events in my career that groomed me, that opened my heart and opened my mind to a more compassionate inclusive way of leading where I learned to suspend fear and anxiety, but it didn’t happen overnight. It’s about going on a journey of inner discovery and self-discovery as a manager that brought me through that fifteen-year period to the point that I’m at.

Listening to everything you’re saying and thinking about what you said earlier in the conversation, Katherine, about the fact that we’re in a culture where there’s all this constant quarterly pressure to deliver. In the scheme of things, if I think about the way that most leaders need to perform as a piece of advice. A bigger piece of it is the lack of willingness to do the inner work. We end up with these cultures.

I’d love to get your view of having observed things from multiple lenses, living as a man, living as a woman, being able to see how a change in leadership style played out in your case at least. It feels to me like we’re living in this regime of command and control, top down and managing through fear and all those things that you’ve mentioned and threatened in through what you brought up so far. A lot of that persists because people just aren’t as willing to look within themselves and find a better, deeper, richer way to lead.

It starts with looking within. It’s also important to be kind enough to ourselves and realize that this extractive and performative world is all around us. It’s been built over several thousand years and it’s been intensified in the last 50 years in a way that’s become almost unimaginable and would appear to be unsustainable. In the world we’re living in, the level of social fracture and the level of economic divide between countries or people and the level of planet degradation and the level of over-information and disinformation. Those four forces combined, social economic, planet, and volume of disinformation and information is unmanageable for any human being, I believe.

I don’t think we were built to deal with that much anxiety and pressure from the outside world. It doesn’t just exist at work. I have four children. If there’s one thing that my former spouse and I did well, it’s that we did not jam our children into an excruciating schedule of extracurricular activities. We would go visit family in the country on most weekends or go to a family cottage where we would hang out in the wilderness and the outdoors as a family.

Since I have four kids within four years, they became best friends with each other, but we did not have this performance intensity day and night. We had some relief in our life. This idea of an extractive and performative world is all around us, consumerism is a byproduct of it. The way companies run is a byproduct of it. This going inward is more than being a manager or a leader. It’s a human journey. It’s a human journey to say, “I am not at peace with the level of pressure and anxiety that exists in my life because of family, spouse or my job. I want to go on a journey to calm my nervous system and find some peace within me.”

Taking the time and space to go Inward and be reflective is more than management. It is about life. It is about going back, finding your way back to your true essence as a person, and finding a level of inner common, inner peace within you. At Sincerely, I describe the world we live in as extractive and performative. I describe the world we have the potential to move towards, which is regenerative and coherent. What I mean by coherent is a world where the human being lives from their essence, their essential self through their physical and inherited self, genetics outward through our lived experience.

Back to performative. Most human beings are taught from a very young age to suppress parts of our identity to fit in. It’s like, “Don’t be too expressive, Katie. Don’t be too sensitive, Katie. Learn to talk with a deep voice. Don’t be creative. Perform.” Most of us have aspects of identity we suppress throughout our life. That creates a level of anxiety within our nervous system because it’s not natural. What we have is a society that values education or a job resume. It might value whether you’re male or female, but it doesn’t value what are the unique human traits of J.R.

Moving to a world that is regenerative and where you as a human being are more aligned and coherent, involves going inward to revisit that inner child and learn to love and like the parts of yourself that your parents might have told you were not appropriate or your teachers might have told you weren’t appropriate. To heal that, and to ultimately create habits in your life that calm your nervous system like meditation.

I meditate now twice a day. I lead a very quiet life. I used to go from 6:00 in the morning till 11:00 at night every day. As an executive, that doesn’t happen anymore. Making conscious choices to go inward and learn to love yourself and to create peace and calm within yourself is a human journey that leads to coherence that allows you to become a better leader and also a more whole and complete human being.

Now that you’re doing what you’re doing with Sincerely and have shifted out of the corporate world. You’re out speaking and writing on this. What are you hearing from people about how to practically incorporate some of the things that you’re talking about into the way that we run our world day?

A few things and I’ll be tight. One is it’s never too early to go on an inner journey to start. Whether it’s learning to meditate or hiring professional help. I’m a strategic advisor to leaders and businesses. I’m a storyteller. I’m not a therapist. Surround yourself with the right professional help or healers or mediums, surround yourself with two or three people that you admire, see the best in you, and you can confide in those who are friends. Not going to take you into pity city and create some habits around wellness. Whether it’s yoga, Pilates or meditation.

Creating some of those habits in your life that help you calm your nervous system and tune into yourself is step one and you can never start too early. The second point is it takes time. Since the complexity of my journey was at least a decade long. I said back in 2020, “If you put a performance expectation on your inner journey, you’re going to just exacerbate what already exists in your life. Don’t do that.” Start now and build the community, build the professional support, and build the practices. Be kind to yourself.

Be kind to yourself that it’s a journey. It’s part of your lifetime. It’s not something that you deal with overnight. The third thing that I would say. At Sincerely, I am launching my own show. I’m the host of a global podcast called the Sincerely Show and everyone that I’m interviewing is living a life of service or contribution. They’re all doing interesting things for their local community, for humanity and for our planet.

Every one of them has been through an awakening of sorts. Every one of them has been through deep darkness. It’s mind-blowing that as humans, so many of us have to go through deep mental health challenges and what I call collapses of our ego, our fabricated identity in order to awaken into something that is more whole and more complete in order to feel spared and to dedicate your life to contribution, to service to humanity and to our planet.

The Life Of Service

The reason I share that as a common arc of the people that I’m meeting and interviewing is it’s a metaphor. It is Joseph Campbell’s Heroes Journey, but it is a metaphor for the human journey. An inner journey can be hard. It can involve collapses. Sometimes, it involves divorce or other forms of upset. It doesn’t need to be about affirming your gender. It can be heavy. The sooner we build mental health practices and wellness practices and the sooner we learn to love and live in a line with that inner child, the less harsh that upset is going to be because they can be hard. They can be heavy. That would be my advice for people. Those would be my lessons I would share with people.

Overall, you are saying that if you have conviction, that this is about who you are and what you believe in. Going through whatever upheaval that it causes will be easier. I use that word with a lot of trepidation that it will at least be easier for you to feel that you are doing what was necessary and right for you. If you don’t necessarily build that conviction, I’m sure it’s much harder.

In every human being, again, it depends how spiritual you are. Love is real. I know it in the core of my being. Human beings’ innate ability from our essence or our soul outward is love. It’s innate. Fear is the opposite. It’s a conditioned human trait. We needed fear, survival instincts to put food on the table and to defend against the saber-toothed tiger. Yet the extractive and performative world has fed off of anxiety and fear of being good enough to perform to appoint that it’s dominated our life. It’s almost become fabricated and embedded within the human psyche to a point that we’ve lost the ability to create commoner life and space in our life to be coherent to realign.

I’m saying this from the standpoint of your word conviction. Anybody reading that is on a journey to be a better manager or better leader is because something in you knows that you’re not operating from a place of balance or from a place of wholeness. Somewhere in you, you want to be loved just as much as your employees want to be loved or cared for or nurtured. That’s the right place for conviction to come from. Conviction from ego will be met with some form of a human breakdown or collapse.

Conviction from this place of a deeper calling that you want a world that is more inclusive. You want a world that is kinder. You want a world where we live harmoniously with self, each other and nature. You believe deep within you, to your point about conviction. It’s worth going on that journey, because if not us, then it’s going to be up to our children or the next generation. If that’s where the conviction comes from, which is what you meant, then I say yes. That is the right conviction because it’s from a place of service. It’s from a place of wanting to leave the sandbox better than it was when we took it over.

You’ve left us with a lot to think about. I sincerely appreciate your candor, your authenticity and what you are now turning to do in service with Sincerely. Thank you.

Thank you for the invite. Thank you for what you’re doing because it matters. We’re human beings and there’s an opportunity to be the most full and authentic version of human beings possible. That’s what you’re pursuing and I applaud you for it.

Thank you.

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What would I like you to take away from the discussion with Katherine? Probably, most importantly, is its success and alignment aren’t necessarily the same thing. One of the most powerful ideas from everything that Katherine said and there was so much there is that success often coexists with internal misalignment. She reached a point in her life prompted by depression and suicidal thoughts were she realized that she needed to reveal who she was to the world.

She did it in a very brave fashion through thousands of employees across the company that she was working for at the time. She heard back from people things that they’d never revealed to anybody else. People were willing to share with her in a very vulnerable way because she was vulnerable with them. It begs the question of, how many people are out there living lives that weren’t the lives that they’d intended? Living identities that aren’t who they are, or who they want to be. That, to me, is one very powerful idea from the episode.

The second thing is this idea of how leadership can be very different than the way we often perceive it. Katherine, by virtue of now living a woman’s life, had to adopt what she felt like was a more feminine way of leading. In doing so, she realized that command and control fear-based approach, not that she necessarily would have had that in the past. That approach was even more different from what she wanted to be than perhaps it had been in the past. She started to lead more through compassion and that’s been a revelation for her as you heard her describe.

Again, it raises a question of, can we bring more of this into our leadership approach in a way that will be better for our employees and a way that will help them connect to themselves and to us as leaders and to the organizations that we represent without sacrificing performance? As she said, these things are not necessarily at odds with each other. Finally, just as this idea about the extractive performative world that we live in, and the notion that we should slow down live more as we were meant to be, live a more regenerative life, both for our own mental health, but also for the broader collective health of the human population and the planet that we live on.

This ultimately is playing a big role in what Katherine is now doing with Sincerely. As she says, living a life of service at that point and trying to deliver this message again and again. There is a different way of thinking about the way that we act, the way that we lead, the way that we interact with each other and the way that we live on our planet. I hope you all took away some other lessons from the conversation. I invite you as always to subscribe to Career Sessions on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube. If you found this discussion enlightening, sign up for my membership community, PathWise and subscribe to our newsletter PathWisdom. Thanks.

Important Links

• Katherine Dudtschak on LinkedIn
• Katherine Dudtschak on Instagram
• Sincerely, Katherine
• RBC
• HomeEquity Bank
• Sincerely
• Heroes Journey
• Sincerely Show on Apple Podcast
• The Sincerely Show on Youtube
• PathWise on LinkedIn
• PathWise on Facebook
• PathWise on YouTube
• PathWise on Instagram
• PathWise on TikTok
• PathWise on Twitter

About Katherine Dudtschak

Katherine Dudtschak is a former banking CEO turned conscious leadership advisor and creator of the Sincerely framework. After more than 30 years in senior executive leadership, including serving as President and CEO of HomeEquity Bank and Executive Vice President for Personal and Commercial Banking at RBC, she now helps leaders move from survival‑based identity to authentic, essence‑led leadership.

Katherine is widely respected for bridging elite corporate performance with deep human integration. She publicly came out as a woman in front of 80,000 people while still in executive leadership, marking the beginning of a new chapter focused on psychological safety, identity integration, and sustainable leadership from within.

Her work supports executives, founders, and high‑performing leaders who have mastered the external game of success but seek wholeness, clarity, and purpose.