// ON THE RECORD
Fairwinds Training and Development Inc.
Atlantic Canadian leadership-development, HR and management-consulting firm that delivers customized training, 1:1 leadership coaching, talent acquisition/retention support and strategy/governance consulting to leaders, managers and business owners. It positions itself as an outsourced or extended HR function and runs flagship programs such as the 'From Insight to Impact' leadership program.
📍 Windsor, Nova Scotia, CanadaEst. 1995✓ 100% first-party verified
// CLIPS FROM Fairwinds Training and Development Inc.
“That's not just about bringing them to the door”
“We can teach someone how to be an electrician”
“There's strategies, there's techniques, things you can practice”
“One thing that always stood out to me, I remember playing hockey as an 11 year old”
“As you're telling me that story I can think of buddies, people I know”
“A lot of these high-end restaurants, what they'll do is have the individual come in”
“It doesn't surprise me you know he struck up a conversation when she was at NSCC”
“There's a reason when you look at professional sports you don't really see the Mike Keenans anymore”
“I always tell one story, a year or so ago I was going through a drive-through in Bayers Lake”
// LESSONS FROM Fairwinds Training and Development Inc.
Contractors are turning down bids because they can't confidently staff the work — the labour shortage has become a risk-management problem, not just an HR inconvenience.
Your best recruitment strategy is a retention strategy — people quit bosses, not jobs, so investing in frontline-manager quality directly reduces turnover costs.
Promoting your best tradesperson into supervision without management training is a predictable failure mode in construction — technical skill and people skill are completely different competencies.
Small-to-medium construction firms that haven't done succession planning are at real risk of being absorbed or disappearing when founders exit — the complexity is proportional to how dependent the business is on a few people.
A four-step scripted feedback process — state what you observed, the expectation, ask for their perspective, then build a joint plan — makes difficult conversations manageable even for people who naturally avoid them.
Emotional intelligence is a stronger predictor of leadership effectiveness than IQ — and unlike IQ, EI is trainable with the right tools and practice.
// KEY PEOPLE
// NOTABLE
Has operated for ~27 years 'working and living in Atlantic Canada with some of its biggest and best companies', with a team carrying 100+ years of combined training/consulting experience.
SOURCE ▸Built a free leadership mini-course whose content is 'based on interviewing over 200 Atlantic Canadian Leaders' — a direct Atlantic Canada anchor.
SOURCE ▸Produces its own leadership podcast, 'Leading Edge with John & Alain', co-hosted by John Zettler and Alain Lefebvre, with new episodes roughly monthly/bi-weekly (also distributed on Apple Podcasts and Audible).
SOURCE ▸Legal entity 'FAIRWINDS TRAINING AND DEVELOPMENT INC.' is a registered Nova Scotia company (appears in the Nova Scotia Royal Gazette Part I).
SOURCE ▸Building like this in Atlantic Canada?
Be a guest ▸