“Success gave me a lot of answers. Stepping away from it gave me better questions.”

Christopher Gillis has spent much of his career inside the worlds of leadership, strategy and organizational transformation. Across the public, private and not-for-profit sectors, he has built a career helping people and organizations navigate complexity, lead through change and perform at their best.

A soon-to-be Certified Metronomics Coach, Christopher works with CEOs and executive teams on strategy, organizational performance, transformation and building high-performing teams. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of Prince Edward Island and a Master of Public Administration from Queen’s University, and has also taught political science and sustainable tourism development at UPEI. He is also a Certified Professional in Human Resources (CPHR), a Project Mangaement Professional (PMP) and a certified organizational change practitioner (PMI). 

But after years spent in highly structured, achievement-driven environments, Christopher has become increasingly interested in a different set of questions: Who are we without the titles? How much of our ambition is actually ours? And what happens when the version of success we worked so hard to build no longer fits?

Beyond the Applause is part of Christopher’s own exploration of those questions. It gives him space to move beyond the buttoned-up corporate identity that defined much of his professional life and lean more fully into curiosity, creativity, youthfulness, queerness and taking up a little more space.

These days, he’s less interested in collecting titles and much more interested in the person underneath them.