The Canadian music industry doesn’t have a talent problem. It has a pipeline problem.
Three out of four people working in the Canadian music industry have never received leadership training of any kind.
That number comes from Soundcheck, our national study of more than 1,200 Canadian music industry workers. When we set out to research mental health in this industry, we expected to find burnout, instability, and toxic culture. We found all of that. And we wanted to know how workplace culture and leader behaviours impact mental health, good or bad. What we heard is the same thing I keep hearing outside the survey data too, in focus groups, in one-on-one interviews, in coaching and mentoring sessions, in the rooms where I teach. Different format, same input, over and over.
Nobody had taught these people how to lead.
A large share of what makes up the Canadian music industry runs on nonprofit infrastructure: festivals, presenters, service organizations, unions, artist collectives. So when I say the industry has a leadership gap, I’m also, in large part, describing the nonprofit sector. That’s not a stat Soundcheck was designed to isolate. It’s something I see constantly in the field, across the boards I sit with, the leaders I coach, and the organizations I’ve spent years working alongside.
We asked Soundcheck respondents who they thought was responsible for building leadership and mental health literacy skills in this industry. The answer is split four ways. Eighty percent said industry associations and unions. Seventy-seven percent said employers. Sixty-nine percent said government. Sixty-one percent said educational institutions. When we asked the people who hadn’t taken leadership training why not, only a small fraction said they weren’t interested. Sixty-one percent said the training was simply never made available to them.
Read those two findings together and you get the real story. It’s not that people in this industry don’t want to lead well. It’s that no one in the ecosystem has claimed responsibility for teaching them how. When accountability is spread that thin, it isn’t accountability at all. It’s a gap everyone can see and no one has to own.
I wrote about this exact pattern in Leading in Stereo, built on my recent research and decades of studying, teaching, and applying human-centred leadership capabilities. The Soundcheck report confirms that the pattern isn’t isolated to a few organizations. It’s the norm across the industry: seventy-four percent, not a handful of unlucky teams.
And it isn’t unique to music. Nonprofits broadly report wanting to measure their own impact and struggling to do it, not because they don’t care but because they don’t have the resources. A widely cited 2016 EveryAction survey put it bluntly: 90% of nonprofits say they’re collecting data, but 49% admit they don’t fully know how it’s being collected or used. In the arts specifically, Americans for the Arts reached a similar conclusion in a national study of arts leadership succession: most executive directors in the field lack formal management training, not for lack of trying, but because it was never built into how they got the job. And in Canada, a national study of 1,251 executive directors found leadership skills are the single attribute both EDs and their boards rank as most essential to the role, ahead of sector experience, fundraising skill, or management background. The gap hasn’t closed since. Carleton University’s Charity Insights Canada Project has tracked succession readiness across Canadian charities every year since 2023, and the picture hasn’t moved: as of 2026, only 13% have a well-defined succession plan, and just 5% feel genuinely prepared for a leadership transition, even though a fifth expect one within the year. Forty-two percent say the reason isn’t that they don’t see the value. It’s that they don’t have the time or capacity to build one. The same gap was already documented in 2013, when a Mowat Centre and Ontario Nonprofit Network survey found two-thirds of Ontario nonprofits had no succession plan at all. Over a decade later, the number has barely moved. The sector already knows leadership is the thing that matters most. It just hasn’t built a way to develop it, or keep it, once someone has it.
DeAnna Cummings, CEO of Juxtaposition Arts, calls herself an “accidental CEO.” She stepped into the business management side of the organization early on, while her co-founders focused on artistic direction, and only got formal leadership training years later, through Propel Nonprofits and a fellowship at the DeVos Institute of Arts Management. She’s far from alone. It’s one of the clearest examples of a pattern I see constantly in Canadian music nonprofits too: someone steps up because the organization needs it, not because they were trained to run one, and the training comes after, if it comes at all.
And the Soundcheck data shows exactly where the absence of training shows up day to day. Seventy-five percent of respondents named lack of communication as the most harmful trait in a leader. Seventy-five percent named unethical behaviour. Sixty-six percent said poor communication actively hurts their wellbeing at work. Fifty-eight percent said the same about micromanagement. These aren’t personality flaws. Communication, boundaries, and self-awareness under pressure are learnable skills. They’re just not being taught, because nobody has decided it’s their job to teach them.
Part of the confusion is definitional. Leadership, management, coaching, and mentoring get used interchangeably in this industry, and they’re not the same thing. Management keeps a project or a budget on track. Coaching draws out someone else’s own answers. Mentoring passes down what you’ve already learned. Leadership is something else: setting direction and holding people accountable to it, in a way that doesn’t cost anyone their wellbeing along the way. When we asked Soundcheck respondents what actually makes a leader effective, the answers were specific, not abstract. Ninety-one percent said being an effective communicator. Eighty-two percent said empathy. Seventy-one percent said integrity. And when we asked what makes a leader harmful, the list was almost a mirror image: lack of communication, unethical behaviour, blame-shifting, lack of empathy, micromanagement. People in this industry can describe good and bad leadership in detail. Nobody has connected that description to a skill set anyone’s actually being taught.
In my own work, one of the most consistent gaps I see is clarity. Role clarity: what am I actually responsible for, and where does that end and someone else’s job begin. Goal clarity: what does success look like, and who decided what. Clarity on how performance will actually be measured, not vaguely implied. And underneath all of it, the ability to have a clear, unambiguous conversation, especially the difficult ones, without softening it into something nobody can act on. Most people avoid that kind of clarity because it feels harsh. It isn’t. Ambiguity is what’s actually harsh. It just does its damage more slowly.
I think about this constantly in the coaching and mentoring work I do with nonprofit and arts leaders specifically. An artist becomes an executive director because someone had to step up, not because they were trained to run an organization. A talented program manager becomes a people leader because they were the obvious next choice, not because anyone checked whether they were ready. Few new leaders are provided an investment in tangible leadership development. A nonprofit lifer takes a new exec role because they’re good at fundraising and PR but haven’t honed their people leadership skills. These skills are critical to working within the organization and with the board. The org survives on their talent for a while. Then it doesn’t. I hear the same story in almost every coaching relationship I start: nobody sat this person down and taught them how to lead before they needed to.
This isn’t a talent problem. The Canadian music industry, and the nonprofit organizations that make up so much of it, have no shortage of talented, committed people who care deeply about the work and the communities they serve. Most of them mean well. The gap is rarely intent. It is practice. Intention doesn’t teach anyone to communicate clearly, set boundaries, or manage change without causing harm. It’s a pipeline problem. Nobody is building leaders before they hand them the responsibility of leading.
I built a framework around what I believe actually closes this gap, six specific capacities, and it’s the core of Leading in Stereo. That’s a piece I’ll write on its own, because it deserves more than a paragraph here.
If you’re an executive director, a board chair, or anyone else responsible for how your organization is run, I’d ask you the same question we asked music workers across this industry: who, in your organization, actually owns building that skill in the people you’re promoting, and how will success be measured? If the honest answer is nobody, you’re not alone. You’re the majority. But it’s worth naming, because you can’t fix a gap you haven’t decided is yours to fix.
References
- Soundcheck: Mental Health in the Canadian Music Industry — Revelios, 2026. Primary research, n=1,216.
- Leading in Stereo — Catherine Harrison, 2026.
- EveryAction, “The State of Nonprofit Data” — 2016 survey. Closest available primary confirmation: https://nonprofithub.org/the-data-every-nonprofit-should-be-tracking/
- Americans for the Arts, “Succession: Arts Leadership for the 21st Century” — https://www.americansforthearts.org/by-program/reports-and-data/legislation-policy/naappd/succession-arts-leadership-for-the-21st-century-0
- HR Council for the Nonprofit Sector, “Driving Change: A National Study of Canadian Nonprofit Executive Leaders” — GlobeScan survey, 2012, n=1,251. https://capacitycanada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Driving-Change-A-National-Study-of-Canadian-Nonprofit-Executive-Leaders.pdf
- Charity Insights Canada Project (CICP), Carleton University, “Planning for Tomorrow: Why Succession Planning Still Lags Behind” — annual tracking survey, 2023–2026. https://carleton.ca/cicp-pcpob/2026/planning-for-tomorrow-why-succession-planning-still-lags-behind/
- Mowat Centre & Ontario Nonprofit Network, “Shaping the Future” — 2013 survey, cited within source 6. https://theonn.ca/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/ONN-Mowat-Shaping-the-Future-Final-Report.October2013.pdf
- Propel Nonprofits, Juxtaposition Arts case study — https://propelnonprofits.org/case-studies/juxtaposition-arts/