Robert Buckingham: the one thing I always try and do, and I, I just say, go and ask the frontline what their mission is. And figure out whether that mission is actually what. The organization mission is, and then you really understand if there's a disconnect between the frontline and the leadership group.
Bart Egnal: Welcome to the Inspire Podcast, where we examine what it takes to intentionally inspire. I'm your host, Bart Egnal, president and CEO of the Humphrey Group, and if you've ever asked yourself, how can you develop an authentic leadership presence, or how can you tell stories that. Have people hanging off every word.
Then this podcast is for you, and it's not just for executives. This is a podcast for anyone who wants to influence and inspire others in their work, but also in their life.
So my guest on today's episode of the Inspire Podcast is Robert Buckingham. And Robert is, you've got many credentials, Robert. So I feel like I need to do justice to you. Today your kind of day job, your executive vice president at Quest Windows, which I know is a leading North American glass manufacturer and is owned by EIC, which is a publicly.
Trade listed fund on the TSX. That's just your current day job. You're also in, in your past life, and we'll dive into this. You were ca infantry captain, the Canadian forces. I know you deployed to Afghanistan. You brought a real passion for leading people, and you serve as the. Chapter Lead is it?
Yes, it is Chapter Lead. Yep. For Treble Victor which is an organization that brings together the military veteran community with business to, to tap into that incredible talent base. And we've had one of your members, Paul Carroll, on this podcast before. Great
Robert Buckingham: fellow hard man to follow. I'm sure he is gonna be listening to every word.
Bart Egnal: He'll come and hunch you down if you're, yeah. But I really am excited to have you here and for those listening, Robert has joined me in person. We're recording this here, but most of all. I have to say that as you're a great cyclist. I am. I like it. And fellow lover of coffee and so I'm glad to to welcome you to the Inspire Podcast.
Robert Buckingham: Thank you very much. It came with a very good espresso, so well done. Thank you very much. Rob. The espresso was not free.
Bart Egnal: The espresso is not free. You're gonna pay for that now. Yeah, just to set the stage, why I thought. We should have you on you, you're someone who has had these two careers the career in the forces where you really developed a deep passion for leadership. And I know you, you miss it every day as you tell me. Absolutely. Do. Absolutely do. Yeah. And then now in leadership, you went from, working as a management consultant to now taking on a real line leadership role and.
You're someone who just brings a deep passion for the development of foundational leadership of kind of entry I don't wanna say entry level, but the early stage of leadership. Yes. And it's shaping culture. And I think it's an important conversation for us to have, for anyone listening who needs to and wants to develop leaders.
Robert Buckingham: Thank you very much. But it's a pleasure to be here. I've, known you for a long time and I'm really love following your career and what Humphrey Group does, so thanks very much for having me.
Bart Egnal: Yeah. So let's just start. At a high level, we'll get into your first career in the military, but yeah, just at a high level for people listening.
What is fundamental or foundational leadership, and why is it important?
Robert Buckingham: So I think leadership is a culture that any business needs to, foster. So you need to identify your good leaders early in a business, you need to enable your junior leaders because they're the people you trust to run your business.
You can't be there micromanaging from the top. You have to devolve. Responsibility down to the lower levels, and you have to trust that your leaders are gonna achieve the objectives you set for them. So I think whenever you go into an organization, big or small, it's really important that. The junior leaders are empowered.
They're given the confidence to succeed, given the leeway to succeed. And that will raise from the top, the bottom to the top of the organization succeeding and transforming itself into a high performing organization. And so you've operated in two worlds where that kind of foundational leadership is important.
Bart Egnal: Yes. The military and now the business world. Yeah. What are your observations about what organizations get right and wrong about developing this level of leadership?
Robert Buckingham: Oh that's a, it's a great one. I, I usually observe and something I'll just say from the military side, leadership is something you get taught right away.
When you go in as a junior second left tenant and you are going into military selection in any trade, you do a few leadership activities and you identify your capability as a leader early on, and they go, okay. You are more of a leader, you are more of a follower. You get your career selected for you in that sense.
You're told you're a follower. You basically, you go through Office of selection, right? Okay. So if you fail your office of selection, you don't show those sort of behaviors you need to be a leader, then you are given a path in a very useful, but you go as an NCM or a just a normal rank and file private, and you learn your career and you build your leadership skills.
Over time. The unique thing about the military is an officer's put in leadership right away. Your first job is you walk into, you go through your training and as soon as you're done your training, you go into, your battalion or your troop or wherever you are going into, and you are given a leadership role right away is your first day.
And, one of the biggest leadership challenge and cliches of being a, I was an infantry officer, and the first thing you do is you go and sit down with your warrant officer, who's been in the Army for 20 years and he goes, all right, you are the boss now. What are we doing? And you're a 22-year-old kid coming out of whatever educational background you are, and you've got to build trust.
As Paul Carroll always talks about building trust and sharing vulnerability, as he said. You've got to help that team be a high functioning team, achieve their mission, and gain credibility with 30 soldiers. Who, in my personal experience, they were just came off a fighting tour in Afghanistan the year before and you've gotta build credibility with that.
So what? That's what a junior leader in the military has to do. A junior leader in the corporate world, a lot of the time, those junior leaders, they get really good at what they do. They get really good at their transactional activity, they solve pRobertlems, they're a go-to person to get things done in the organization. And they say, oh, can you lead this team now please? When have we ever set them up for success to lead. And when are we ever given the tools to lead? And I think that's one thing an organization and a mature organization really will succeed if you give your junior leaders the tools to lead early on.
And you can trust them to lead their teams and develop their teams succeed.
Bart Egnal: So that's a good segment. I think, people listening, we're in the time where, we're talking about flattening organizations. Yes. Huge managing 20 people. I just talked to one client yesterday and he said, I'm leaving, he one of the Canada's major banks.
Yeah. I have 25 direct reports. Yes. And I don't feel I have the support to enable me to be successful. So it's a time, it's a challenging time for those junior leaders. Yeah. So we'll come. So I think, the point you're making is. It's critical to develop them. Yeah. The best organizations and leaders do it intentionally.
So let's look at your first kind of life.
Robert Buckingham: Yes.
Bart Egnal: What led you to enlist in the, do you enlist when you become an officer? Is that
Robert Buckingham: yeah, absolutely. You do. So I wasn't a very confident teenager, but I was a young spectacle wearing lad from Liverpool and. It was, I, when I went to university, I joined something called the University Officer Training Corps, which is basically when you're a university, you become a reservist soldier.
I went to Lancaster University in England, did a degree in international relations, strategic studies, very interesting stuff. But on the weekends I would go away and put on, a British uniform and run around in the woods and pretend to be a soldier on the weekends. And you learn. How to be a leader, plan activities, execute complex tasks, lead small party tasks, and all that sort of stuff.
And I really thrived in that environment. At the end of university my, I moved to Canada. And when I came to Canada, I applied to join the army here. 'cause for those
Bart Egnal: listening, Robert has a British accent. Yeah. And I, this may surprise you, it may surprise me. Yeah. I heard he's in the Canadian forces today.
Yeah. That's, he's not faking this accent. It's real. He really does sound this deaf iner.
Robert Buckingham: Thank you very much. I didn't sound this when I was born in new and you're bear dressed
Bart Egnal: than me too. Here you come to this. Studio, we're off camera. You still look the part
Robert Buckingham: they're, we're part of the Red Trouser brigade.
So the, the one thing that I really wanted to achieve when I came to is I wanted to, join the Canadian forces. I have my family has a massive background in the military. I had uncles who fought in the Afghan wars in the 1870s Wow. With the Canadians, we've got a military history in my family, so I really aspired to be that role.
So I joined, I applied to join the Canadian Infantry as a reservist when I came here, and then. After three and a half years of a lot of documentation mishaps. And did you
Bart Egnal: Three and a half years. Three and a half years,
Robert Buckingham: absolutely. So they must have been desperate. They, some discharge papers didn't work out from the UOTC.
But anyway, I got a phone call and they said we don't have a reserve spot, but John had joined the regular army. Oh. And this was the early Afghan years. And I wanted to experience that and I went. Absolutely, let's do it. So I joined the regular Army and I didn't know much about what I was gonna do.
And I just shipped off to Quebec to do basic training and my career started from there and 10 years later I left. So tell me about your experience here. You were, you'd had some interests, now you're in, and you joined as an officer? I
did, yes. Yeah. And
Bart Egnal: so what was the training we're you're talking about foundational leadership and intention?
Yeah. What was the training? On the leadership side that you got.
Robert Buckingham: So what you are given is, I think one thing that I really want to brought up in this process, some point in my notes is what's mission command? So the principle, what you learn as a junior leader in the military is you are given.
Your situation, you have to work within. Okay. You're given your mission, you're given the intent of your commander. You're given how your commander wants you to roughly do the task. You're given an end state of what it should look like when you're finished. And you receive a set of instructions that are very, a very structural SM system, the NATO system of the orders you would receive.
You make your plan and you get assessed on how you make your plan and you execute it. And you basically go through iterations of continuous. Complexity of tasks. Given a structure of planning, giving instructions to your people, executing that task and then marked on how you would execute that task, it's like
Bart Egnal: a system then.
Robert Buckingham: It's very much a system and I think the one thing that the military gets really, does really well, is it develops the sort of culture of planning and measuring success of execution of those tasks. And, maybe to get a slightly military nerdy on your butt, the, go for it.
If you think of, the 18th century and you had leadership was based on you've got line guys in big lines, you can see your whole army on a field. So leadership can be up here. Because they can control, 'cause they can see everything goes on. They're on the
Bart Egnal: horse,
Robert Buckingham: they're on a horse on the hill with their binoculars like Marlborough, at the Battle of Lenni.
And they're controlling things around them. And you can have leadership at a high level 'cause they can see everything that's going on. When you get to mechanized warfare in the 20th century, that wasn't possible because armies are spread out. In the first world war, you've got guys in trenches and machine guns and bombs going off, so you can't control those troops. A soldier's responsibility is to shoot, move and communicate, and you can't do those things, and you can't control that in large teams in an environment where the threat is so high. So they developed a structure where junior leaders have to perform the mission.
Without higher leadership direct control. So it's a trust is built in. So they built a structure of mission command where a junior leader of a man, a team of 10 people, understands what they have to do. They understand what the end state is, and they're given the flexibility to succeed.
You know the lesson I take from that, and there's something that, you develop throughout your military career is. The trust you get from your leaders. They give you enough instruction to succeed. You give, you dealt your plan. You then tell your boss what your plan is, right? The boss approves that plan and then you go and execute it.
And then you do a review of how you did afterwards and you continuously improve what those SOPs are.
Bart Egnal: So you're, it's really the, the first thing I hear that they gave you and that it sounds and I know knowing you, I know it's you still use today, and I know we didn't even mention that.
You're also an entrepreneur, Greek coffee truck business. Thank you. But I really hear that you took away and what was valuable was this systemic approach to planning, executing, and managing, and then reviewing Absolutely. What you were trying to do.
Robert Buckingham: I, going into sort of, the transition after my years in the military, I went into p WC and their operational excellence division, which was what an experience that was.
And they basically codified all the things that I've learned in the behaviors in the military, and it put a civilian slant on it and how actually it becomes how you. Enable behaviors within an organization and what the PWC world called that was, they had the forecast work plan, what you're gonna do.
Control that, and then review, and you have that continuous cycle of forecast plan, control review, and it's the leader's responsibility to be. Looking at the next thing you need to do. And then let your people execute what needs to be done right now.
Bart Egnal: Okay. So that's one thing you got, yeah.
That was valuable. And still today, what else did they give you as a young developing officer?
Robert Buckingham: It's the buzzword of today, isn't it? But resiliency. So you have loyalty, integrity. And mission first. Okay. As a junior officer, you've gotta be loyal to your soldiers. You've gotta achieve your mission.
And that really gets in, ingrained in you as a junior officer.
Bart Egnal: How do they teach those things? You would say quality's like loyalty mission first. Aren't those innate? Can you really teach and foster those?
Robert Buckingham: I think I'll give you a statistic that you know.
Yeah, not everybody passes training.
Bart Egnal: Okay. What's the washout rate?
Robert Buckingham: It depends on the time and it depends on the military's needs. And it, yeah, you made it through. There must have been,
Bart Egnal: they were desperate. But yeah.
Robert Buckingham: I think of, if you look at the people who joined in, in, in my class, they.
The people who joined in my class in 2007 pRobertably around 30% of those actually ended up going to battalion.
Bart Egnal: Very low in that period. I'm surprised it's that low.
Robert Buckingham: And they go through, you go through very intense selection and training and when you come out of it. The people who are, you've got a very structured training organization, right?
It's a very structured process. It's been developed over many years. Again, as I say, army nerdy guy. But from training in the first World War, you've got those structures in place. You weed out the people who can't achieve those things. I could give you many stories over a beer of how people just, failed at achieving those basic missions in the middle of the night in Gagetown, where they just couldn't achieve it.
And they failed out.
Bart Egnal: And do they then. Did they quit or did the Army tap them on the shoulder and say, you don't have what it takes?
Robert Buckingham: It's a mix. It's a mix of physically. 'cause the only stress the military can put on you in training is sleep deprivation and physical strain.
So sleep deprivation does terrible things to your mind. You've had children, whether that's my three children. Yes, I know. But then you know, you go with that. You do have the fact that they put physical stress on you as well. So how do you take a very complex task? And achieve it without any sleep.
With a big old rock stack on your back in the middle of the woods. And then you have someone following you, marking a little sheet saying, did he achieve that? Did you achieve that? And that is a lot of pressure. And you've got your peers around you. And you're doing it, you are commanding your friends in a structure of their sail, like a platoon, patrol like that.
People either, they just, the mental strain, they, they just can't cope with the mental strain and they they fall out. And they don't achieve their assessments. Or people just get physically injured and fall out too. That's, that's also a very regular thing. But what comes out of it is to the point before when you get put in front of your warrant office, right?
And when you go to your first platoon, you can't give them a person who isn't ready to succeed or run a platoon. Because you've got to get that instantaneous buy-in from your platoon that you can lead them. There's many stories. There's a guy called Derek Dobson who was a British officer, and he works at Microsoft now.
He used to work at Microsoft. Anyway, he gave us a very good story of how, in the Iraq war out of training, he was doing a, a company attack in Basra and in Iraq in, in 2003, and one of his platoon commanders came outta battle. And he had to replace it. And he had a fresh young platoon officer come from Sanders the military school in the uk.
And he had to be on the ground ready to go right away. And he was, he see he was very successful. That's the pressure you get put under as a junior officer in the infantry. You have to go in and succeed right away. So the two years of training needs to set you up for that. And
Bart Egnal: so the stress and the pressure and then the selection that comes from that is another important takeaway in that. It weeds out Yes. Simulates. It does what you're gonna experience ab
Robert Buckingham: Absolutely. Absolutely. And that isn't very applicable to the corporate world. Yes, that's right. And I think one of the, one of the lessons I learned transferring the corporate world at
Bart Egnal: pwc we're gonna have you do a march with a rock sack and then have to build a financial model.
Robert Buckingham: Absolutely. Start doing that PowerPoint, guys. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Maybe the sleep deprivation during the PowerPoint was a real thing, but the, I, so how'd you actually. Achieve the same junior leadership results without that sort of stress and strain. And I think that's one thing that was a real transition in my leadership sort of experiences.
When you go to the corporate world, you can't go there and shout and scream and say go left. Like it's, and
Bart Egnal: people don't enlist in the corporate
Robert Buckingham: world. No, absolutely. You can lead. Yeah. And you know those, you've gotta create a culture where they wanna stay. It's a different thing.
It's like you. You are attracting people to work at your organization. It's very different in that it's a very different case, but it, but that's situational leadership. You have to lead in a different way. And you have, okay, so
Bart Egnal: this, you put the organization put you through strain and you pass, and then let's look at this last step.
Robert Buckingham: Yeah.
Bart Egnal: When you're actually in the field. Yes. You're now leading. It's not training anymore. How did the military continue to support your development? 'cause you be, you started as second lieutenant and then became lieutenant first, and then a captain. Yeah.
Robert Buckingham: Pretty well. Yeah.
Bart Egnal: So what is the development path that supports this kind of foundational leadership in the field?
Robert Buckingham: Continuous training.
Bart Egnal: So you're training, so you're in the field, but you're still training all the time. Everything you do is training. What percent of, as an officer and you're a combat deploy officer. What percent of the time are you training? Which percent of the time are you like.
I dunno whether you call it deploying.
Robert Buckingham: Yeah I, so maybe people ask you all the time, the idea of what a army officer does. I spent nine months on deployment. My, my deployment wasn't a kinetic warfare deployment. I was training the afg, national Army and, we had our incidents.
It was a very interesting conflict zone, but I did nine months of deployment and nine years of a career. And every part of my career was, I had different tasks, but you were continuously trained and you have career stage gates you need to go through. Where you go through training, you continuously be assessed by your boss.
Your company commander as a platoon commander is continuously assessing you and training you and giving you real time feedback. I think, another thing going to the corporate world is I would, after I do something in the training environment in the military, I would stand there and people would judge me and we'd have an open conversation of what went well and what could be improved.
That instantaneous coaching feedback. Which is something which I'm sure we, you teach and I try and advocate for,
Bart Egnal: it's very rare in the corporate world
Robert Buckingham: it is very rare. Rare. But you need to really get that out 'cause you have that impact, right away you can drive change right away.
If you have that little bit of conflict and actually drive that right. Conversation. Yeah. So you're getting that real time feedback. I think that is very And how did that. Accelerate or support your development.
I think you, you grow a, it's a culture of feedback, right? So again, it goes to how do you create that culture in an organization?
You accept it, you have to accept it amongst your peers.
Bart Egnal: Is it pretty give me, tell me the story. Gimme a story of the toughest feedback you got. In your career?
Robert Buckingham: I think during training, I did some I took my career in a path where I did more of some of the extreme courses in the Green Army.
I, I did some advanced reconnaissance and other stuff and you get put in front of really complex challenges and very aggressive leaders. And they sit there and, you do, I've done a patrol as you always do, and they just stand there and go, your orders were awful.
Like what you didn't give your soldiers good direction. You didn't execute. You got lost and you didn't achieve your mission. Wow. So why did that go wrong? And but that's, I suppose that's maybe some of the worst. I think maybe the worst feedback I got was from my writing skills from my company too.
YC but the you accept that feedback 'cause it's the culture. 'cause your peers will do it in the officer's mess, huh? You'll police each other. It's a sports team. And you look at how high performing sports teams work. And the best sports teams work when you have a team that criticize each other and grows.
And has a culture where, the team captain or the coach have honest conversations at place to improve them. Because if you have an A, a, the worst thing is complacency. If you are complacent with your culture, if you are complacent with how your organization is performing and you haven't got that continuous improvement mentality, you'll get complacent.
And you'll make mistakes. And I think that, the best performing teams. Are open to criticism and open to improving.
Bart Egnal: There's, you've pRobertably heard of this I think it's called Project Aristotle, where Google looked at, what makes the, its highest performing teams most successful. And they, the number of hypotheses, is it team composition? Is it experience levels? Is it, whatever. And the number one thing was psychological safety. Yes. And that freedom to challenge each other, which is exactly what you're describing.
Robert Buckingham: Yeah. And, you get it from the very beginning.
The most harsh feedback you'll get is in a training environment where, you've got to be direct. You've gotta say, I, now, and again, you sit down with, I, one of my proudest achievements in the military was I was a instructor at the infantry school where my job was to train and develop junior leaders to go to their battalions.
So it was like the final phase of training. And, you sit there and you look at those junior leaders and you go, I don't think you've got it. I think you need to really consider where your career's going. 'cause I don't trust that I'm gonna put you in front of my troops to go overseas.
And you have that conversation. You have to. And what did they say?
Bart Egnal: What did the best one say to that?
Robert Buckingham: The best ones say to that. They take the feedback and go, why? Can you explain to me why? How can I improve? Other ones get really angry. You validating what you were saying.
Validating what you're saying. You have the, PWC taught me this sort of the Sarah model, surprise, anger, realization, acceptance. The sooner you give feedback, that curve of anger and realization symptoms, it happens shorter. And I think, people choose a different career in a different path in the military, something, there may be, people here who weren't infantry guys or here this podcast or logisticians, I don't mean any offense by this, but there are less physically challenging career paths in the military.
Robert,
Bart Egnal: when you tell me what you do for your weekends and you're like going on these crazy winter camping, I'm like. I would not be an infantry officer. Oh, it's the best. I would not be the guy,
Robert Buckingham: but I, there is paths where their skills are useful. Yeah. So you need to, there's a place
Bart Egnal: for me in the forces.
Yeah.
Robert Buckingham: There's a place for everybody in the forces, I would always say so you've got to give them guidance and where they need to go in that. And, I've toot my own horn here, but one of the proudest moments I had in my military career was I got in, I was given the.
Instructor of the year award. At the infantry school. And that was the, whatever applauded you get for other things and badges you wear, that, recognizing that you could coach and develop good leaders was the most joyful thing I got out the forces.
Bart Egnal: Okay. So you had this formative career.
You went through training, you got this, the process, the systems, they stress you and you roast the challenge. They equipped you to give and receive feedback and then you put it all into practice as an instructor. And then you left. Yes. Yes. And now you go to the corporate world. And was it a shock to the system in how they approach leadership development?
And if so, how?
Robert Buckingham: Okay, great. I think I was more prepared the most in my transition away from the forces. 'cause in my three and a half year wait to join the forces, I worked in commercial finance.
Bart Egnal: Ah, okay. So
Robert Buckingham: you'd had a taste of the real world, a little bit of a taste of the real world. And I understood what it was about, I worked in the bar industry for two years as a bar manager. You learned some real leadership skills there. And we can talk about that over a beer, but, then you go into sort of the banking sector and you, and I was a junior sales guy and I, I worked for a wonderful guy called Don Miller and I dunno where he is now.
I haven't gone on a LinkedIn. He was a really interesting fella and he really taught me how to work within the corporate environment and that was a okay, it was a soft landing going into that and I got. We'll talk about three V and trouble Victor later on. I was, became a member of that group and I was mentored by some veterans who work in the corporate sphere and I got put in contact with some key people, the key leaders at pwc, and they said, it would be great if you came into our operational excellence.
Area. And I think the first thing I worked with a few really intelligent and really smart individuals at pwc who. Understood the skills I had, but they trained me to codify civilian speak. And deescalate the more aggressive tendencies of a military sort of culture and say, how'd you.
And I basically I sat down and looked through all their programs and their offerings. Oh, that means that
Bart Egnal: oh,
Robert Buckingham: that's that. And you to
Bart Egnal: learn to translate to the civilian. Exactly.
Robert Buckingham: You get a civilian speak to it. And, but the behavioral pieces are the same. And it's, it's really, I spent, two and a half, three, oh, maybe, sorry, four years with pwc where I was working with clients and really working with their junior leaders. Putting in place what we would call the operational excellence.
Bart Egnal: Product. So you're essentially doing a leadership development program in operation again. Exactly. And what was different? You have the systems, you have the stress, you have the psychological safety.
Did those three things map?
Robert Buckingham: I think that, the corporate world. Yeah, absolutely. I think stress is it's situational. Like people get stressed for many different things. And, some people find, doing a transactional finance activity very stressful. And it has the same sort of impact on people as it would, hanging out in the woods with a hundred pounds on your back being told to hurry up and run, the people, this level of stress is, it's nothing that can be judged upon.
People have different capacity for stress. You and what your job, when we were looking at pwc was we, we would offer sort of productivity increase. Say we would give you. Leadership behavioral traits, which would increase your human capacity of the organization.
And that would really help the organization, develop. What we're looking at there is how do you help an organization achieve the goals? By, giving them the tools they need to succeed with a corporate. Speak to the same way that in the military we gave people the, in the military we gave people the structures and SOPs to succeed in a military environment.
It's just,
Bart Egnal: and did it work? Did it map where you're like, all these things that learn, which were this leadership incubator. Did they map? And where or not?
Robert Buckingham: I think they absolutely did map. They absolutely did map. And I think, we talked earlier about how you give mission command and structure and you give them your mission and you give them goals, you give them stretch goals, always push the team to, to improve. And a lot of the offerings we trained in that in, in PWC with our clients was exactly that. The example I would give. Which are really correlated.
In, in the consulting world was I worked with a forestry organization. They named the brand name the corporate brand, nameless. But they had a task, they had to remove a lot of trees and they had to do on a very tight timeline. Okay. And they were small remote teams around the province.
So it almost mapped one to one of doing dispersed operations in the military. And this organization didn't have structured vision. Tier targets junior leaders enabled with knowing what they need to do on a daily basis, being measured, being held accountable to those results. When you put things in, like vision of the organization, team missions, KPIs, measuring performance continuous feedback and coaching, pRobertlem solving, understanding and coaching your individuals to succeed. We put these things in place. It's like you now know you can forecast your workload, you can plan how you're gonna achieve it. You're gonna KPI and how you're gonna achieve it. And then we'll review that performance. And we applied that across a, a large organization in Ontario and they really sped up their performance. You enabled those junior leaders, the people who were succeeding as junior leaders popped up and you could identify the high performers. And you would move those people up through the organization and reshape the culture of focusing on productivity and productivity not being a dirty word.
Bart Egnal: So being able to map, I like the way you said it, that kind of organization. It mapped perfectly. And you were able to the same. From a civilian lens, apply the same property. Yeah. But you worked with all other organizations. Yeah. Who were not like that. I think about, some of the, like in our world, large financial service institute.
Yeah. They're not this kinda decentralized command.
Robert Buckingham: No.
Bart Egnal: Did you find that you had to adopt a different approach? Operational? If so, why or why not?
Robert Buckingham: I think the, your comment you made earlier about span of control is really important. The, you talk about a client you had earlier, you had 25 direct reports.
It's too wide,
Bart Egnal: it's wild. I can't believe it. Can't and can't. This is the way it's going. This is the way it's going.
Robert Buckingham: And you can't manage that. A flat organization isn't, in my opinion, a flexible organization because you don't have those key supervisors you can manage. We always talked about, the optimal span of control.
And I don't know if you know you teach this in the Humphrey group, but. I want a supervisor to have a 10 to 15 person span of control. Any more than that. You can't really give them enough time to enable them to succeed. And a leader to a leader ratio should be three to five. You need to understand the complexity of what you have in front of you to give detailed instruction to your team.
And that's one thing the military had very well structured as your, a section commander has 10 troops. A platoon commander has three section commanders in the war and a company commander has three platoon commanders and his other commanders. The span of control is really well delineated.
And you're enabled to succeed if you have it too widespread. You don't have enough direction to give to your individuals, so what operation, and especially in the remote world where you don't even have face-to-face conversations. So how do you have a conversation on a daily basis or a, on a weekly basis, or a cadence where you do your plan?
You give them what you want them to achieve. And again, it could be in a transactional financial environment, you understand what the team structure is, you understand what that team's goal is, and you set tangible, achieve, or achievement gateways for them to go through. And say, I expect you to do this and this.
You give them enough information to succeed independently, and that's your responsibility as a leader.
Bart Egnal: So what you're saying is that regardless of the organization, people listening say, oh, I'm in a 50 person organization, I'm in a 50,000 person. The same foundational. Things are important for emerging leaders.
Robert Buckingham: Absolutely.
Bart Egnal: They need to know what the mission is. They need to know what the goalie organization is. Yeah. They need to know what they're expected to do, but you also have to give them autonomy and agency Yes. In how they go about achieving that and give them opportunities to, to try it and then to receive feedback on it.
Robert Buckingham: Absolutely. And it correlate two principles between corporate and military here. The two thirds, one third sort of environments what you had in the military. My job as a leader. Was to take, one third of the time to make the plan, hand over the plan and give two thirds of the time to the people to succeed.
The one thing that I always notice between the military environment and the corporate environment is we never plan in the corporate environment. And I force my lead force I, I persuade my leaders in my current role and in, in the consulting world is I want you to spend as much time as you can on value add activities.
Planning and enabling your people to succeed. I don't want you focusing too much on the day-to-day frontline activity, right? That's not your role. You said in the military a leader, if you are fighting in the fight right there, and you are so section commanders, who should be controlling that fight?
If you are in that fight, you're an ineffective leader. You should need be abound behind looking at the next step,
Bart Egnal: right?
Robert Buckingham: Because that's their job to fight the fight. Your job is to plan the next fight. So you get them to the flo, the frontline of enemy troops. And you basically, you wanted them to achieve that task and you are looking at the next one.
So I, in the corporate sphere, what I usually say to the junior leaders in my organization is, I want you to think about what 50% of your time is doing leadership activities. 50% of your time is doing sort of your team's tasks, right? And you should be planning, pRobertlem solving, coaching, enabling your people to succeed.
And your junior leaders succeed. Not getting into the trenches with them and doing it. So you, okay. So that's a great transition then. So you went from telling as a consultant
Yes.
Bart Egnal: To then you went back into the quote the field, this is the corporate field you joined, quest.
Robert Buckingham: Yeah. How many years I've been at Quest for four years now. Four years? Four years going into October. Yeah. Wow.
Bart Egnal: And you've been through a lot. There's been a merger, there's been growth, there's been a, the ups and downs of the North American Glass Company. Absolutely. And so tell me now.
You went from seeing all of these companies one step removed to now you're in the back, in the field. But in the glass field, in the corporate world. Yeah. What has, what have you kept and what have you changed in how you think about developing. Foundational leadership.
Robert Buckingham: So I think at the leadership level, I'm now in the executive team of the business.
It's, again, it's a different style of leadership. I think your leadership needs to be situational. But what I would say to it is, when you go into a senior leadership position in an organization, it's even more important to enable your directors, your senior managers succeed.
And you have to put the structure around them to succeed. And I think one of, governance is, obviously, it's a very wide spectrum of a term. But the way I see it is you need to set your team up with a structure where information flows up and down. To use a sort of business term, which pwc always talk about, like the golden thread.
How do you make sure that the vision of the organization is established and the people at the bottom of the organization understand what their vision is and understand their role within that vision. If you don't have cascaded goals down an organization and a leader isn't putting out the mission of the organization here on time, in full, high quality product profitability, and you don't cascade those missions down or those tasks down to your people, they won't be operating with that focus in mind. So we're not all going in the same direction. So a leader's responsibility in a corporate environment is to set the corporate objectives.
And make sure they're filtered down the organization. So the frontline understand how they can enable the organization to go in the right direction.
Bart Egnal: So unlike the military where all of those systems are in place
Robert Buckingham: Yes.
Bart Egnal: In the in, in the culture. And as you said, going back to your second World war, first world war.
Robert Buckingham: Yeah.
Bart Egnal: In the corporate world, it sounds like. Both through the lens that you saw through PWC and now through, going into a company it's very inconsistent whether or not these systems exist. Yes. And the culture of lyric development. So if someone is listening, how can they know if those are there?
And people are at different levels of organizations. How much influence can they have if they're not in the C-suite? Yep. To foster that.
Robert Buckingham: I think there was a very good show in the UK many years ago, and it was just basically CEOs would go to the frontline and do a frontline role.
Oh yeah. And it'd be a rally reality show. Like CEO Undercover. Yeah. Something there. Something that, anyway, and I always think about that as a concept. And the one thing I always try and do, and I, I just say, go and ask the frontline what their mission is. And figure out whether that mission is actually what the organization mission is.
And then you really understand if there's a disconnect between the frontline and the leadership group. A lot of the time, and this is a military thing during training some crusty old warrant would come into your trench and go, Hey, true. What's the mission? And you would go lemme look at my notes.
Shit. Sorry. And if you didn't know it, they would chastise like you should know the mission. Yeah. When I went into Quest, one of the sort of, one of the first things I did to gain sort of credibility is. Put on your your work boots and go on the glazing line to make windows and work and get trained on how to make that product and understand are they seeing what we need them to achieve at the highest level?
And you need to have sort of humility and go down there and understand how the front line is operating to be able to set your mission in the first place. But is it cascading down to them and ask them, what are you trying to achieve? What is the metric you're trying to achieve today? And if they don't know, then you've got a disconnection in what actually setting the goals for the organization.
Bart Egnal: That's a great way to evaluate it.
Robert Buckingham: I, and it's, and I'm not gonna go to that manager or that, that director and say, mate, that person didn't know what they're doing. It's not cascade down and say, what's the gap? Was what's the circumstances? Which, did you not understand it?
Did you not hear it? In the structure in the military, and I love this and I try and put it in place with my own teams is we had something called the back brief. So when you get your orders, you get set your plan and that plan is then you do your combat estimate and you go through, and I know Paul Carroll talked a little bit about the sort of comm estimate he was to combat estimate was talking about.
And you present that plan back to your commander and you go, did I get it right? And the commander goes, not really, or Yes. Go and do that plan. That structure of. Seeing what their plan is, approving that plan and letting 'em go and do it is so empowering for an organization because then you can focus on the next bound.
You're not worried about the control. You're not worried about them operating the task they're doing right now. You can trust they can get it done. And then you have the KP in place to measure whether they're successful.
Bart Egnal: So you're giving them clarity around what the mission is. They're creating the plan.
Robert Buckingham: Yeah.
Bart Egnal: You're having dialogue and they're trying it. They're succeed. And then you're having that kind of. Honest, open debrief. Absolutely. After. Absolutely. And it's this iterative process that
Robert Buckingham: and they learn. And then your plans become more aligned over time. And you get to trust that leader. And I think, that's why it's so important to have those junior leaders in that culture from an early phrase. So they go into that when they accept that sort of continuous improvement mindset. And that's, and that, again, that goes to the culture of an organization.
Bart Egnal: So let's, I see very much the threads between. The military experience that you had, what it taught you about fostering leadership and how you and where it does and where it doesn't apply to the corporate world. Let's now pull those two threads together to treble victor.
So for those listening, what does treble victor and how does it connect? Military and corporate.
Robert Buckingham: Yeah, absolutely. Travel Vic I'm, my current role right now is the Toronto Chapter lead. We have, around 222 sort of members of the organization in Toronto alone wide across Canada.
We've got chapters across Canada and Vancouver, Calgary, and so on and so forth. But what they want to achieve is we need to enable people's careers. So how do you as a network of professional veterans who work in leadership roles in corporate environment. Enable and coach talent to achieve their full potential.
Canada is not as mature as the states is on a scale of veteran transitions and veteran hiring programs. And it's our role at three V to really identify, key talent. And enable them to succeed in their journey and their careers. And it's not just at the entry level where we want people to get hired.
There's many great organizations. Through transition services within Canada who helped soldiers do that. What we want to do is enable people's careers. Keep on going. How does a, a person like me who came out the military in the, in their late thirties, work within the network and get to the next level in leadership, get to the next level in organization, and help grow their careers and enable them to succeed in a corporate environment.
So three V is a great organization of coaching and mentoring and enabling of people, and also advocacy. It got you into pwc. It got me into pwc and having a great conversation with a, one of the partners of pwc who is a three V member saying, coaching me of, snotty nosed young officer coming out of the army going, what do I do now?
And it's almost that you, one of the big mistakes a lot of veterans come out and was everybody should know how good we are. Look at all the great things I've done. And it's, it's a different language to the corporate environment and you need to.
As you said, deify the what you did in the military into civilian speak. So people aren't intimidated by your resume. They know they can apply you to an organization and I think it's more mature in the states but the culture of in the states, let's say, the turnover of soldiers is much greater.
They have a five to 10 year career. There's many veterans in the US forces in Canada. The career span or average career span is much longer. And they're only around, under, under a hundred thousand soldiers in reserve and regular force. So it's not like a huge pool of talent.
Bart Egnal: So both the business community is not used to taking them on. Yeah. And they leave. People tend to have a full career and then Yeah,
Robert Buckingham: absolutely. Don't go anywhere. And you're going into an organization, say in your thirties, sorry. And you're starting in, the one thing I had to do in my transition is I took a level lower, I joined, PWC as a senior associate because. They didn't know my resume, they didn't know my leadership skills. They couldn't do a correlation between the two, but they knew I had some, something about me they wanted to use. So they put me in at a junior level and I grew through that, which is how do you coach a veteran to understand that's what has to happen?
Sometimes you have to, you might have to start. You have to start a bit lower and start your career over again. But you will, the cream rises to the top, right? And you've gotta make sure that, people are enabled and enable organizations to understand, to identify talents and move talent through their organization. So that's really what we're trying to achieve and what we do.
Bart Egnal: Closing this conversation for organizations, listening there who may not have experience hiring veterans, you've really highlighted the depth of leadership development.
That's foundational level. In the military. Yeah. What should organizations know if they bring someone in from the military or recent? Recently, I guess you don't, do you say retired?
Robert Buckingham: I technically am retired. I could, yeah. I could put retired at the end of my name. Yeah. And then they're male from the government, but yeah.
You people who transition outta the military or retire from the military, whatever stage their career are, what will
Bart Egnal: you get if you're an organization you bring in? What are the qualities and obviously everyone's unique.
Robert Buckingham: Yeah.
Bart Egnal: What are some broad thematic. Three things that you should expect to get from someone who has been there.
Three things.
Robert Buckingham: Okay. There's the challenge, but I think what you'll get is you'll get loyalty and discipline for one. Okay. That's in, is that one or is that two? No. No. Okay. I'll give you a, maybe we'll take it for two, but, you get someone who performs well under pressure.
Bart Egnal: Okay.
Robert Buckingham: They understand, they put structures around their teams and they solve pRobertlems. I think the one thing that is very misunderstood by the military is. Their task isn't very linear. So the last role, the last thing I did in the Army was I was a desk officer for the Syrian refugee crisis.
It's actually I was getting my hair cut the other day the barbers down the road and one of those guys who came through that program was cutting my hair. No way. Yeah, it was fascinating. He came from Holmes and it was a lovely fellow coming from Syria, but he came through that program.
Amazing. But I was a desk officer, we were sitting in a big conference room and we were finding areas for people to live. Nobody trained me for that. But you have a structure in the organization to get us something done. You figure it out, you make your plan, you back brief your plan, you know what your objectives and goals are, and you get it done.
And I think what you get is a very diverse multi-tool of an individual. Who can identify what their role is. And I, a lot of hiring managers go I can't really map your resume to a skill that I need in the organization. Yeah. All I would say to those hiring managers, trust, trust that they can learn very quickly. Trust that they've got the structure in their head to be able to identify the problems. Learn adapt and achieve the mission. You set them right. Just give them clear direction and they will achieve it.
Bart Egnal: You've been grown in this system that clearly exactly is the foundation exactly how they
Robert Buckingham: want.
Absolutely.
Bart Egnal: Robert any organization, if they get someone as good as you they'll be grateful. And there are incredible talent out there. I know every person I've met through three V has been very impressive for different reasons. Absolutely. But I think what you're really leaving me with, and hopefully everyone listening is.
This importance of developing this foundational leadership. It is something that you can create a system, you can create intention and the results are compelling.
Bart Egnal: I hope you enjoyed that episode of the Inspire Podcast and the conversation that I had with our guests, and hopefully you left with some really practical, tangible tools and tips that you can use to be more consistently inspirational. If you're enjoying the pod, I'll ask you a favor. Please rate and review it.
I love the comments, appreciate the reviews, and the visibility Allows others to discover the pod. It's really how word of mouth has spread the Inspire Podcast to so many listeners and helped us keep making this great content. Stay tuned. We'll be back in two weeks with another inspiring conversation.
Thanks so much for listening. Go forth and inspire.