Name: Cindy Bush
Job title: Chief Human Resources Officer
Organisation: TMX Group
1. Brief description of nominee’s role & job.
Cindy Bush is Chief Human Resources Officer at TMX Group, responsible for leading all aspects of TMX’s Human Resources function in support of the Company’s corporate objectives, including strategy development and execution, workplace culture, total rewards, employee communications, performance management, and talent development and acquisition. She is also responsible for leading TMX’s marketing function, and the delivery of integrated marketing programmes in support of the Company’s global brand objectives, and enterprise growth strategy.
2. Short bio (career highlights, education, interests/hobbies).
Cindy joined TMX in December 2020, after more than 25 years of international experience in human resources, talent strategies and culture transformation. Most recently, she served as Chief Human Resources Officer at Cineplex and had previously held leadership roles at companies ranging in size from 30 to 100,000 employees, including Foresters Financial, OMERS, and CIBC. In 2008, she authored Project Managing Change: Practical Tools and Techniques to Make Change Happen, a global bestseller published by Financial Times Business Enterprises. Cindy holds a Bachelor of Journalism from Carleton University and a Masters of Education from the University of Toronto. She serves on the board of Evergreen Canada, an organisation dedicated to transforming public spaces to build a healthier future.
3. What were your professional highlights and challenges of 2025?
Managing TMX Group’s rapid evolution has been an exhilarating challenge for our people strategy. Over the past five years, as our revenue nearly doubled and our workforce grew by 44 percent, we have transformed into a truly global organisation with eight offices across four countries. In 2025, we continued to grow both organically and through strategic acquisitions, and we expanded and cemented our presence in the U.S. by opening our new headquarters in New York City. While scaling at this pace creates natural pressures, the high-performing culture we’ve designed is built for this.
A 2025 achievement I am incredibly proud of is that for the first time, TMX Group earned a spot among Canada’s Top 100 Employers – a meaningful recognition of our culture and employee experience. To sustain and support growth and change, a supportive, high-performing culture in which employees can take risks and try new things, knowing that effort will be rewarded, is absolutely essential. This award is a testament to the level of commitment our team brings to delivering on our strategy and serving our clients around the world every day.
4. Tell us about a few of your key achievements throughout your career?
In 2008, a colleague and I co-authored Project Managing Change: Practical Tools and Techniques to Make Change Happen, a global bestseller published by Financial Times Business Enterprises. The book is about how to transform organisations to actually achieve outcomes, while keeping the culture high-performing and positive. Business culture has evolved, amazing ideas come from everywhere, and successful organisations unleash that from within their people. I’ve always been focused on transforming organisations and creating high performing cultures by engaging and involving people at every level.
An achievement I’m proud of has been my ability to successfully transition across a wide range of sectors — including banking, insurance, media, and real estate. By working in such diverse environments, I’ve had the opportunity to take learnings and best practices from one industry and adapt them to another.
I’ve also had the opportunity to work globally, including five years in London, as well as time on projects in China and South Africa. This experience taught me a lot about how cultural differences show up in a business environment, and inform the decisions I make as a CHRO of a company with a large, global, diverse workforce.
5. What and who inspires, and has inspired, you to achieve your professional success?
My professional drive and success have always been profoundly shaped by both my earliest inspirations and the mentors who challenged me to think bigger and embrace my strengths, not hide them.
Growing up, my very first inspirations were my older brother and sister. They were the first in our family to go to university. I watched their academic success, and it inspired me to look beyond the world of my family’s small business. While I deeply appreciated and learned the value of hard work, grit, and persistence from my parents and their machine shop business — I grew up around the smell of grease and oil, hand writing invoices at age 14 — it was my siblings’ path that ultimately inspired me to explore a different trajectory.
Beyond my family, I have been fortunate to have incredible people invest in me throughout my career — various bosses, colleagues, CEOs, and board members. The most valuable are the mentors I have intentionally sought out who are very different from me, who have distinct backgrounds and experiences. That’s when I find I learn the most: when my viewpoints are truly challenged and my mind is opened.
6. How have you overcome setbacks, and what advice would you give to others dealing with setbacks?
When you ask about overcoming setbacks, I want to challenge a common piece of corporate wisdom: that it’s "just business." It is never just business. It is always personal. You bring your full self to work, you build relationships — some of which last decades — and your reputation is defined by how people speak about you when you're not in the room. A professional setback, whether it’s a missed promotion or layoff, is deeply personal.
The single most important word for navigating these moments is resiliency — the ability to bounce back quickly. When a setback hits, your natural human instinct is "fight or flight," your brain trying to protect and keep you safe. You have to take control back from that pounding, "woe is me" feeling.
Here is my approach, which I find to be an immediate way to re-centre: I get intensely, intellectually organised. I'm a colour-coded, alphabetised kind of person, so I find a way to park my emotions for a moment and focus on a three-step action plan:
This process allows you to get on top of it, gain a sense of control, and move forward. You must then look for the lessons learned. Things happen for a reason, and if you can find the growth in that moment, you become stronger, smarter, and more capable of seeing and avoiding pitfalls in the future.
Finally, you simply must try to see the world positively. If you can’t see the sunshine, the great people around you, and the opportunities, it's difficult to be resilient. I am a huge practitioner of gratitude. If one thing is going wrong, step back and look at the 50 other things in your life that are amazing. At the time, setbacks feel devastating, but after time passes, you realise how much you have grown from them. You emerge better, more resilient, and ultimately, far more confident in who you are and what you can accomplish.
7. What advice do you have for other women who aspire to be in leadership positions? What is the biggest takeaway you want to leave with the reader?
My advice to anyone comes down to two core principles: absolute self-awareness and accountability. Be ruthlessly honest with yourself. Know your strengths and weaknesses, and pull from your own unique experiences. This foundational self-awareness enables total accountability, which is essential to move through your career quickly and confidently.
We all make mistakes and the crushing feeling of failure is something you need to move past quickly: own it, apologise and make amends. Do those three things within three sentences or less, and that feeling of failure will pass by much more quickly. Learn from it, fix it, and move on — grant yourself the grace to keep going.
Second, for women especially: keep raising your hand. We often don't see ourselves operating at the level that others see us. You are more capable than you think. Take on the opportunities, even if you’re certain you can’t do it — because you can, you will, and you will be amazing.