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Newmarket, Ontario appointed a Chief Positivity Officer. Jamie Boyle took the title after the town tried out a group of positivity ambassadors, and when the pandemic hit, his role became one of the most serious in the building.
Newmarket, Ontario appointed a Chief Positivity Officer. Jamie Boyle took the title after the town tried out a group of positivity ambassadors, and when the pandemic hit, his role became one of the most serious in the building.
I've spent decades inside operations. I recognized the move immediately.
Newmarket treated positivity as infrastructure. That one decision separates the organizations that hold together under pressure from the ones that quietly fall apart.
Boyle used social media to share stories of resilience, happiness, and humor across the community. He worked with HR and other departments to build wellness programs, activities, and communication strategies for the town's 400 full-time staff.
Read that list again. Programs. Activities. Communication strategies. Cross-department collaboration.
That's an operations job.
I've watched executives dismiss this kind of work for years. I've also watched what happens on the floor when nobody does it. Teams split into silos. Disengagement spreads faster than any memo catches it. People show up physically and check out mentally, and the numbers eventually tell the story leadership refused to hear early on.
"Positive culture is not an outcome. It's the input that determines all outcomes." That's the operating principle I built my career on, and Newmarket ran the same play at a municipal level.
Early in my career, I learned something that reshaped everything I did afterward: climbing matters less than developing. Results matter less than the people who create them.
I learned it the hard way, in rooms where front-line workers had stopped believing anything leadership said. Fixing teams that had been managed into disengagement by people who thought culture was a poster in the break room. That was my education.
Here's what I found, over and over, across operational and athletic environments:
Disengagement is a systems problem. Blaming personalities feels satisfying and fixes nothing.
People need tools and clarity. Motivation without a practical next step evaporates by Tuesday.
Connection precedes correction. Truth delivered without relationship lands as criticism, and criticism changes nothing.
Boyle's role in Newmarket checks all three boxes. It gave the town a system for positivity instead of hoping it'd happen on its own. It gave staff concrete programs instead of pep talks. And it built connection first, through stories and humor, before asking anyone to push through a pandemic.
That sequence matters more than most leaders realize.
Crisis shows you what an organization is actually built on.
I've led teams through downturns, restructures, and stretches where nobody knew what next quarter looked like. In every one of those situations, the technical systems held. Payroll ran. Logistics moved.
The human systems were the ones at risk.
Newmarket faced the same exposure in 2020. Four hundred full-time staff serving a community under lockdown, absorbing fear and uncertainty every single day. The town needed someone whose entire job was keeping the human side of the organization intact.
💡 The insight worth stealing: Newmarket funded the role before the crisis peaked. Culture built during calm carries you through chaos. Culture improvised during chaos arrives too late.
This gets overlooked constantly. Organizations treat morale as something to fix after the numbers slip. By then the disengagement has already compounded, and you're paying interest on a debt you never tracked.
I'm careful here, because I've watched this go wrong.
Plenty of companies have put someone in a "culture champion" role who ended up organizing pizza days while the actual operating environment stayed toxic. Those roles fail, and that failure gets used as proof that culture work is a waste of money.
The Newmarket model worked for specific, observable reasons:
Boyle collaborated with HR and other departments. His work touched wellness programs, staff activities, and communication strategy. He was connected to how the organization actually functions, not sitting off to the side of it.
Stories of community resilience went out on social media where everyone could see them. I call this making culture tangible. People rally around something they can point to.
The programs served the town's 400 full-time staff, the people doing the daily work. I've spent my career translating executive strategy into front-line action, and that translation only works when the front line feels served rather than managed.
Remove any one of those three and the role becomes decoration.
You can name a role anything you want. Chief Positivity Officer, culture lead, engagement director. The title matters far less than the mandate behind it.
What I've installed with teams comes down to a few practical moves you can start this quarter:
Assign ownership. Culture without a named owner becomes everyone's aspiration and no one's job. Newmarket named an owner. Do the same.
Wire the role into operations. Give it standing collaboration with HR, communications, and department leads. Isolated culture roles wither.
Make the output visible. Share the stories, the wins, the small acts of resilience. Visibility turns culture from a feeling into a shared record.
Measure engagement like you measure output. You track revenue weekly. Track the human system with the same discipline.
Give people a next step. Every program, every message, every initiative should leave someone holding something they can use today. I treat this as a hard rule. Help without a practical next step is noise.
Notice what's missing from that list. No new theory. No framework pulled from a book.
My whole body of work rests on old truths applied with discipline, and Newmarket proved the same thing at the scale of a town.
This is where I want to push past the feel-good version of this story.
Newmarket's story spread well beyond southern Ontario. One role, in one town, generated attention and goodwill that most municipal marketing budgets couldn't touch. The town became known for how it treated its people during the hardest stretch in recent memory.
That reputation is an asset. It attracts talent. It builds trust with residents. It compounds.
I describe my own work in one line: I turn culture into infrastructure, and infrastructure into advantage. Newmarket ran that same equation. Positivity became a system, the system became a story, and the story became reach the town never had before.
Any organization can run the same equation. It takes a leader willing to treat the human side as seriously as the financial side, and someone on the ground with the mandate to build it.
A town of modest size, with 400 full-time staff, decided someone should own positivity as a real job. Then a global crisis stress-tested that decision, and it held.
I spent 30 years learning what Newmarket showed in one appointment: engagement is a systems problem, culture is the input that determines outcomes, and the organizations that build these systems before they need them are the ones still standing when the pressure arrives.
Look at your own organization this week. Find the person who owns your culture. If no name comes to mind, you've found your next hire, or your next mandate.
Start there. Build the system. The advantage follows.
Want to apply this with your team?