What makes a good leader? Authors Jody Wilson-Raybould and Roshan Danesh can explain

With their new book, The Inbetween Leader: Cultivating Courage and Unity in a Complex World, authors Jody Wilson-Raybould and Roshan Danesh are looking to foster a new way of leading, at a time where leadership is being questioned around the globe and cynicism around leadership is commonplace.

“Leaders, political leaders in this day and age often prey on cynicism. They encourage cynicism because it paralyzes the people. It paralyzes and freezes them in the idea of nothing can change,” said Danesh, a lawyer and educator who has worked internationally in peace building and conflict resolution. “I think the book, and this is where it ends in the closing with kind of a call to arms and a call to hope, is trying to act as an antidote to that cynicism and counter some of that.”

A member of B.C.’s We Wai Kai Nation Wilson-Raybould, the former Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada from 2015 to 2019, understands disillusionment all too well. If you recall, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau expelled her from the Liberal caucus on April 2, 2019, during the SNC-Lavalin affair.

Trudeau made this move after Wilson-Raybould secretly recorded a phone conversation with the Clerk of the Privy Council, Michael Wernick, after she alleged she faced intense and improper pressure from the Prime Minister’s Office to override a criminal prosecution of the engineering firm via a remediation agreement.

“We talk a little bit about it in the book when we reflect on specific people like Donald Trump and indirectly other politicians,” says the Cape Mudge, B.C. resident when asked about the cynicism epidemic.

“I think it’s really hard for, myself included, to look at politicians, people in elected office, and be inspired by their leadership because those environments are so rife with partisanship, polarization, people seeking leadership offices not necessarily to do good things, but to acquire or maintain office … that creates a disillusionment within the electorate.”

Danesh, who lives in Nanaimo, B.C., says that people responded positively to Wilson-Raybould’s SNC Lavalin stance because “she didn’t act like how they expected a politician to act,” and added: “I think this book then becomes a bit of an explanation of why she acted the way that she did.”

In The Inbetween Leader, out Sept. 29, the B.C. pair says effective leaders need to create interconnectedness through environments where people feel valued and are engaged.

“An in-between leader is somebody that can bridge between divides. Somebody that recognizes the visible and invisible silos that exist between and among us,” said Wilson-Raybould. “An inbetweener is somebody that is courageous that stands up against societal norms and seeks to break down those silos and transcend them to bring people together to learn from each other and understand each other’s experiences, different world views.”

Wilson-Raybould and Danesh draw on their personal experiences as well as expert advice from 85 different voices to offer a tool box of actionable steps to help people become better leaders. And help them to decide what kind of leaders they want to support.

“It crystallized a lot when I was sitting around the Cabinet table and recognized the exact same dynamics and that huge gulf between understanding from where I came from and from where other non-Indigenous people around that table were coming from, trying to bridge between that huge divide, and it was in true reconciliation, which is the book,” said Wilson-Raybould whose 2021 memoir Indian in the Cabinet: Speaking Truth to Power was a bestseller.

Wilson-Raybould and Danesh first began working together 15 years ago when she was regional chief of the B.C. Assembly of First Nations and asked him to provide her with a legal opinion to, “try and develop consensus among First Nations in British Columbia around principles to engage with governments on.” The pair would go on to co-author the 2024 book Reconciling History: A Story of Canada.

“I dragged him, probably kicking and screaming, to Ottawa to work with me when I was the Attorney General,” said Wilson-Raybould. “We started from that point, after I left politics, to work together in mediation and reconciliation and decided to continue to write together and write books … the Inbetween Leader comes out of a lot of the work that both Roshan and I have done around reconciliation and trying to bring together Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples.”

Wilson-Raybould opens The Inbetween Leader writing how it almost didn’t happen because of a breast cancer diagnosis in late 2025. But then a guy behind a shop counter in Seattle got to chatting with her and told her he “loved,” Canada but he hadn’t seen so many Canadians around recently.

“I don’t really understand what is going on. It makes no sense. Our leaders don’t make sense,” the shop guy told Wilson-Raybould. This was the nudge she needed to commit to the book.

“People feel disorientated, frustrated, sometimes have fear, and are scared about the realities of what’s happening in our world, and feel a little bit out of control in terms of looking at the so-called leaders — those ones that are elected to office to make decisions that impact all of us,” said Wilson-Raybould.

One of those things that Wilson-Raybould, a descendant of the Musgamgw Tsawataineuk and Laich-kwil-tach people who carries the Kwak’wala name Puglaas, draws on deeply for this book is her Indigenous culture. The daughter of the late Bill Wilson, a First Nations hereditary chief, politician and lawyer, Wilson-Raybould has been tutored in leadership and community her whole life.

“In my tradition, like many others, the word leader is defined by values, characteristics, responsibilities and actions,” Wilson-Raybould writes. “Being a leader means something specific, and if one is not exemplifying those values, fulfilling those responsibilities, and taking those, then one is not a leader. In other words, being in a certain role does not a leader make.”

Wilson-Raybould, who doesn’t discount a return to politics, says if others in government at any level took up her Danesh’s Inbetween Leader approach, the world would look different.

“Can you imagine if we had, based on our book, if we had MPs and MLAs and elected leaders who were all in-between leaders. We’d live in a very different place,” said Wilson-Raybould. “Where I find hope and inspiration, and what we were trying to do, I believe, with this book is to create that sense of inspiration and hope, even with the reality that we have LINOS, leaders in name only among us, particularly in the political class.

“There is hope that individuals in their own environments can overcome that cynicism and realize their collective strength, as well as their individual strength.”

Dgee@postmedia.com