254: Bo Brabo — Execute with Precision

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Oh, the topic is execution, execution and people. How do we get them all working together? Well, that's our topic. I know, I know. If you're running a business, you've struggled with both those things. You may be in fact struggling with at least one of them right now. Hi everyone. Bill Gallagher, Scaling Coach, host of the Scaling Up Business podcast. We bring three episodes every week to you. A getting real conversation with the CEO about the development, their leadership as they grew their business. One of these shows where we talk with a guru expert in the world of scaling up. Something to do with people, strategy, execution, cash or the fifth decision, which is leadership in my world. And we do that once a week. Then I bring you a quick tip every Tuesday, a story and a tool to use to get right at it early in your week. So all those shows and more, hundreds of them now downloadable@scalingcoach.com or wherever you get your favorite podcast. So we're talking with Robert Brabo today. Robert has served now in a couple of White Houses as a military career officer in the world of operations and communication. Both the Bush and the Obama White Houses and I visited actually and we have friends who've served under Bush, Obama, Ford, so much to learn, working in that high, high pressure environment, that kind of thing. I visited a family friend in the West Wing in the Obama years. It was awesome and fascinating to visit in those days and well in any time really and see kind of how that works. So I think it's terrific. Thanks and welcome to the show.

Oh, you're most welcome. It's great to be here. Thank you. So.

Beau Bravo is a retired Army Chief of HR Operations, White House Communication, Presidential Communication Officer. He's also had positions in human resources with National Spine and Pain Centers. He's founder of Hale Media Group. He's co founded a consulting agency, working in HR for a range of things. He's got an MBA from University of Michigan. So all kinds of good stuff. And now host of the Bo and Luke Show.

There you go. That's great. You got them all. I think you got them all. Good job.

Everything in here. Well, I, I see somebody. Somebody's right in the crack of your door. Do you see that in the back, there's somebody?

I do. It's probably my wife. She's getting ready to leave. She's got to run down to Washington D.C. for some work stuff. So she's having to depart.

No problem. Well, thanks for coming on the show today and talking about this. I'd love to talk a little bit about your story. And we're going to get into how to execute with precision. So a focus on great execution. And it's interesting your topic and our theme here is executing with precision. But you have a deep background in people and communications issues which obviously who executes are people, right?

Yeah, that's right.

What's your story and kind of how your career has developed and led you to this place?

Yeah, sure. Thank you. Long story short. Long story short, it all began for me when I was 17 years old and I got recruited and I was a junior in high school to the Michigan Army National Guard. That's where I was introduced to the military at the very beginning. And I liked everything the recruiter was saying. He just drew me right in. I was sold. I signed up, went to boot camp. I was still in high school. Stayed in that National Guard world for six years. So when I graduated high school and went off to, to undergrad, I was still in the National Guard for that whole entire time. It was in a time frame before, you know, late 80s, before the Gulf War. It was the one weekend a month, two weeks in the summer kind of individual. But I learned so much starting then. That really stuck with me even to this day. So when people say where did it all begin for you? You know, your values, your values based leadership, where'd that all start? I really have to go all the way back to age of 17 and give credit to the, to the Army. Finished undergrad, I was out. I actually got out of the National Guard. I was done. My time was over. I was working. And then I really missed the uniform. So I went on active duty. Right. Shortly thereafter. And it wasn't. Oh man, I wasn't on active duty for I think about six years and I got recruited for my first tour to the White House. So I was actually there twice, and it started with President Bush. And then I went off. I was there for a couple years. I went off to warrant officer candidate School. That took me to Germany for a few years, Iraq combat. And I actually went back and replaced my boss that I had worked for. Worked for before. So I got recruited to go back, lead the HR department this time. But then that gave me the opportunity, as you noted in the bio, to train for and become a Presidential communications officer and lead teams for President Bush and President Obama. So I did that for like, the last eight years of my career before retiring in 2013 and jumping into the corporate world.

What does that actually mean? What is a. It's funny. So I have a friend who, he was like a special assistant for Legislative affairs or whatever. I'm like, what does that actually mean? You work on legislation? He's like, no, no, no. That means that I bring legislatures in and out of the White House and I coordinate.

Who gets to like, oh, got it. Interesting. Yeah.

What is, what is. What kind of communications work are you doing there?

Yeah, so, you know, I can bring this home for everybody. So when you see the. When you see the President on tv, regardless of who it is, this, the President, for you to hear them, all the sound, the audio, just like people hearing us now, is brought to you via a platform. All that audio is coming through White House Communications, delivered to the news agencies and so forth, so it can be blasted to the world. So we are in charge of the audio. The podium that the President stands at is built by soldiers who are carpenters inside the White House Communications Agency. The, the, the seal that's placed on the front is placed there by the audio visual team. That's part of the team separate that I was leading. So it gets put up there just before the President taking the stage. All the lighting, you know, for the event, audio, visual, it's all done by the White House Communications Agency. If you think about. You've seen it, you know, it happens. You even see in the movies where Secret Service agents lift their. Lift their arm up to talk for them to do that, wherever the President is located, to have that secure, secure line, if you will, to secure radio signals and frequencies. That's all White House Communications Agency delivering that service, putting that infrastructure in place wherever the President goes. So all led by a Presidential communications officer actually taking care of that to make sure that when the President and his senior White House staff, when they arrive on game day, as we call it, that it's 100% ready to go. No Rehearsal. You just have to execute.

This has to be there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Total reliability. Well, I have been in that press briefing room and stood at the podium there, so I have stood it.

Yeah. It's pretty neat experience, isn't it?

Yeah. It's one of the few places that let you take pictures, right? Yeah, for sure. White House in the West Wing. You're not allowed to take pictures in.

Right. Yeah. And hopefully you got the story. You know, the press briefing room used to be an in ground pool, indoor pool area before they turned it into the press briefing room. And then from my experience, it always seems so much smaller when you're standing there in person than what it appears to be.

Yeah.

On tv. Yeah.

It looks fascinating where people are packed in.

Yeah, for sure, they are.

Or used to be. Right. They. I think they're in different places and stuff now with COVID and.

All right, take them into the east room or to the west dining room. Make it a little bit bigger space for sure.

Spread out a little bit, Reduce the pool somewhat. Yeah, fascinating. All right, so. And then you went in the corporate world, so talk to us about that work and.

Yeah, so I had always been, you know, even when I enlisted in the National Guard at 17, it was as a personnel specialist, so. Old word for today's human resources. So I've always been in the human resources field literally my whole life. So even when I was on active duty and so forth. And then I got out, retired, went into a local government contracting engineering firm as a VP of hr. Did that for. For a little while, and kind of always had that entrepreneurial spirit, you know, to do something on my own. So one of my longtime mentors and I started a company to do staffing and recruiting for local government contractors in the D.C. area, because there's literally thousands of them. So we started our company, started doing recruiting and staffing, HR consulting, writing policy for companies and so forth. And, you know, that just kind of all. Lots and lots of work that we did inside of that company led to some other opportunities that were super intriguing and interesting. Getting into healthcare, the healthcare space as a VP of hr, but dealing with a lot of mergers and acquisitions. So much different onboarding a whole company versus, you know, one or two people. When you're hiring individuals, but when you're bringing on loads of people at one time and you're merging payroll systems and benefit systems and trying to bring cultures together, there's lots of planning and then there's lots of execution to go with that and accountability and so forth. So I did that for several years and literally, literally, March of last year was out on my own again with Hale Media Group. Because it's just. I just love having the ability to shape what we're doing and why we're doing it with purpose, real mission. We have our vision and what we're delivering to our clients and what we're going after every day.

Interesting. Really interesting. Well, I think anytime you get into a demanding environment. Right. You build key lessons that you carry through for forever into all, which I think is. I didn't have such a great experience in the military. I dropped out of my first year of college and went in the military to give myself a little more time to grow up. And I found it really uncomfortable and stifling, especially after having earlier thought that I was going to be a pilot, an astronaut and that kind of thing. To go in and then be enlisted was just like weirdly humbling. That kind of. But I did see the value of rigor and structure and that kind of thing. I mean, I didn't always love it, but I did learn something valuable that I think was really useful. And so while they didn't exactly want me to continue for a minute longer in the military.

That's funny.

I did. It's funny. I have a friend who's had a pretty successful career, and he and I both came in at the same time. We went through boot camp together, and then we served in the same office, the same unit for the rest of our time and that kind of thing. And he was a lot better at playing along, but both of us are like, oh, my God, that was a good experience, but many times a very negative experience in the whole thing.

Yeah, that's fascinating.

The thing that I found the most fascinating about it is how class oriented the military is as distinct from our everyday American society. Right. There's a notion of officers that enlisted, and there's a suggestion, an implication that it's attached to the individual, that you cannot move from one to the other.

Was that your experience often? Yeah.

Oh, yeah. No, you're a peon. You continue to act like a peon is often the thing. Not always and not in every and everywhere, but in many cases it was like, no, no, no. You're like, you can't mix that. Not like. Okay, if you start from that perspective. Right.

Yeah. The non fraternization type of rules that could. That could. Not just rules. I mean, you're talking uniform code of military justice that could end up in some serious punishment. Yeah, yeah. So I understand that completely.

Yeah. I was actually roommates once with an officer in my unit and. Oh, they was like, such, like. No, you can't talk to those people.

You can sit here and have a whole show just on those stories.

Right?

Yeah.

It's interesting though, I think, to segue into this topic and your topic. I think every organization brings with it certain rules and values and that kind of thing. And you've seen that in a lot of different environments as we're talking about that. I don't know, maybe we could talk about how the rules of an organization, the people fit in, they don't fit in that kind of thing. Maybe either the Utah trip for President Bush or, or the, the healthcare physician practice thing that you were talking about before. Yeah, one of those maybe is.

Yeah, sure. So I'll, I'll even, you know, let's just start with, we'll start with, you know, going to Utah with, with President Bush and the power of, you know, what is, what is super powerful. Because this comes, this is really comes down to the whole, in my opinion, the whole art of execution and why. And companies or organizations, people, leaders, whomever that do it well and those who don't do it well and those. And everywhere in between. It's really around, it's really around the empowerment of your team. The empowerment of the people that you have working for you.

Yes.

So even in such an environment, by the time you get to that event, now we're in the execution mode. There was a ton of training and testing that took place or was taking place and is always taking place when you're not in execution mode. So if you're not the team leading that trip or out on a trip, you're training and you're being tested on your training and you're getting better from the after action reviews from the teams that have been out there. And it just keeps evolving on how you're going to execute.

Yeah. So.

So when I get out to Utah with my team and this is, this is President Bush, he was going to stay overnight and we're in the ski lodge, super swanky ski lodge and Park City. But he had events in Salt Lake City. Park city is probably 30 miles up the mountains from Salt Lake. Multiple locations, fundraising events. It's pretty cool for me because my fundraising event, my event site that I was in charge of was actually at Mitt Romney's house. It was a big log cabin house in Park City. Anybody can google it. You can Google it if you want to look at it.

Actually selling it now, I think, I think so.

Yeah, I think so. It's either on the market or recently sold, one or the other. But that was the event site because there's going to be this, this big private fundraiser with the president and the RNC and everybody writes their $70,000 check at the door and then they can get in. But a fundraising event. But then there were other events in Salt Lake City. Point is, we had about an 18 person team on that trip. And as we talked about a little earlier, you're talking audio, visual, radio infrastructure structure, satellite communications and your IT from secure, non secure type of information technology setups. So you may have three or four people per discipline, if you will. Yes. Plus I'm there. And there's another comms officer leading another event site and then an overarching comms officer in charge of the whole thing. Lots of stuff to get done in six days. So when you're rolling into this city, you know that radio infrastructure is not there. It's not present. Your team has to, your team has to put it in. If I roll in and I, and I have not empowered that team and I execute as a micromanager, there's no way we're ready by day seven when the President arrives. It just will not happen because there's just, there's too many things to do, there's too many tasks to accomplish, too much execution for any one person to try and control. So it all comes down to the training that you did. You've tested your people, now they're executing and you've empowered them to do their jobs. And it's the morning check in to make sure they're on track with what has to be conducted and finished that day. And you know, you've opened that dialogue that if something happens during the day and what you're doing and it's not good, right. You think there's going to be a delay, something's impacting you, or there's an impediment. You have to, they have to know they can call you immediately and you're on their team to help them get that resolved. Right. It's not, you may have an impediment, it's not a bad thing. But let's get it resolved now. It can't wait because it doesn't get better with time. So you're experiencing all these types of things that are like the anecdotes that people talk about, you know, bad news doesn't get better with time and all of these types of things, only it's hitting you, it's hitting you Hard and fast in what we always termed a zero defect environment. Zero defect, meaning, you know, President stands up to the podium. It's not test 1, 2, test 1, 2. It's he needs to speak. And not only do the who's ever present, he's really not speaking for who's ever present, he's speaking to the world who's watching on camera. So. So that, you know, you bring this team together and it's just amazing to watch. And you, you give them the power, they have all the authority to do their job that they're hired to do. They do it. You check in with them. It's the regular leadership type of things that you would do to check in with your team, communicate with your team, you know, frequently check in with them at the end of the day, see where they're at, that the tasks have been accomplished. Trust and verify, you know, every single day. Next thing you know, the President arrives and you execute the mission to standard.

Well, you know, it's funny, the show that came out yesterday was with a woman named Shelby Scarborough, who's a dear friend, and she served Reagan on the advance team for a number of his trips and went along on a number of the trips, really like memorable big trips. And she talks about the criticality of working through all the plans and coordinating with all of the people and thinking about all the implications of all of the meetings and touch points. But we see this in every realm, Right. I was talking with my daughter actually earlier today about checklists, and particularly the evolution of checklists in. She works in the music industry. Right. And checklists are critical for big shows of how the show and the staging and the lists and all the different interfaces. It's a huge connection when you have thousands of people that. But even now when they're doing online shows, there's huge amounts of production that goes on. If a rockstar is going to do a show in their basement with people connecting in and it's going to live stream out different places and get broadcast, or you're launching a new. Her group's been launching a new music service called OX Live. Oh, wow. Shout out to OX Live. It's a great place to go, check it out, subscribe. It lets you watch all these terrific concerts. Like you can watch a whole show live and. And see actual cool music with good sound and light and that kind of thing. So it's fun. Remember MTV used to be about that?

Yeah, it used to be. Yeah. No, the. The power of checklists. I mean, we had them every. Every discipline and on our team had their checklists and they were, they were living and breathing documents. And then. And then, you know, you finish the event. The event's not really finished, even though the President leaves and he's on to the next location. You know, we. Every single time, like clockwork, we sat down the whole team, and that's probably about a two or three hour event. Talking about the entire event. Yeah. What did we do? What we're supposed to do, you know, typical aar. What went right, what went wrong? What can we do better the next time? Has everybody updated? You know, we had our document storage area, so per discipline, people would be updating, putting histories in there of what happened on this particular trip in this location. And then all of that feedback would go back to our operations team to update our checklists. Right. To make sure that they really had the latest and greatest, you know, real live information that can help the next team and so forth. And, you know, it's funny because even here in front of me, everybody can see it. I have our checklist for the Bo and Luke show, our recording.

Oh, look at you.

Not that I would forget, but it's just. And this is just one page for what would be, you know, a one hour recording on a podcast. So. Yeah, so our checklist in those environments, they were pages and pages long, but man, if we didn't have those, I don't know how we would have really executed anything that we were supposed to do. I think the more complex it gets, the more important the checklist.

Think about it, right? You've got a combination of things like that that you've got to use. So a pilot in a small or large plane going to start beginning the takeoff roll, is going to call out lights, camera, action or some equivalent. They're going to use a mental mnemonic, kind of a checklist to see, are my lights set correctly, is my transponder set correctly? You know, and then they'll go through. Okay, the gauges are alive, things are green, right. I'm. They're look for all of those kinds of things as they, as they move down. Then they'll call out speeds, and then they may refer back to a checklist after the most intense part to make sure they didn't miss anything, right. They continue to climb out, right. Then they'll have another one for the cruise portion of the flight and and so on. Right?

Yeah.

Having those things makes such a difference.

Makes such a difference in our business. No, we don't. You know, that was something I noticed right away as soon as I got, when I made that transition out of the White House into the corporate world that, you know, checklists didn't exist for everybody and for many, it didn't exist. So, yeah, even being able to implement something like that for your team, even if you're somebody and you have two, three, four, five person team, there's really nothing stopping you from you as a team leader to try and do these types of things to help you execute what it is that you're supposed to be doing. I always say when I'm doing our leadership seminars and stuff for HR folks to build systems, and within those systems you have checklists, understanding operating procedures and so forth that actually helps you lead your people because you're leading within this system that you've created that can actually help you accomplish whatever it is you're trying to accomplish. A goal, an objective, whatever the case might be. And then they live and breathe and you update them as you need to. You know, quick story about Utah, part of that checklist. Outside of my event, I was assisting, assisting another event site at the airport and I had to get into the President's limo before the plane arrived to check all the communication devices within the, within the limousine for the, for the President himself. So I have to. Have to get in, got to sit in the President's seat. But a key component, it would seem there's so much to check that if even something simple wasn't on the checklist, you might just go right past it, you know, but, but one of the big ones was, hey, I, I'm not in charge of this car. You know, there's a Secret Service agent who's going to drive that car. So even before I even touch a door, I'm going to say, you know, checklist, ask permission, ask permission from Secret Service agent to get in the car and do your checks, you know, and then, then the next one is make sure he starts the engine because you got to have power for some of these devices that you're checking. But it was funny because the one that wasn't on the checklist when I opened that door, there was like an Uzi MP5 machine gun sitting on the, sitting on the seat that I wasn't prepared for. But I was in the military, so I knew how to handle it. Yeah, no, exactly. So, yeah, so that's something needs to get put on the checklist. If there's a loaded live weapon sitting on the seat, you know, make sure you know what you're going to do with it or get help, whatever.

Right yeah, so it's funny, we had a little breakdown. We haven't been doing live events and we went out to an event and I don't know if Lucy's listening in the background. She'll have to go and look whether masking tape is on our checklist or not. But we forgot masking tape and we went and we did a live event with one of our teams outdoors and the papers were flapping in the wind, right. And we didn't have tape to. Fortunately, the folks there did and they taped it down. And it was a very, very minor thing. But with a bigger event and larger people, that might have been more of an issue, a distraction taking away from the intention and the focus of what we're up to in that moment. It's survival. But you start to have a couple of those things and then you just kind of look like you don't have the confidence of the team. So many before you can start to throw something off. And you think about it like the stakes are much higher. Right?

Right.

You fail to clean some water or oil or to trim the carpet right. On the steps to an aircraft and somebody trips going up the stairs one, two, three times, right?

That's right.

The whole world is talking about it and your political opponents are going, see, you're not fit for office and trying to undermine your credibility. And other people are kind of making laugh of you. And now late night comedians are making a joke about it. And like, really, it is a perfect.

That is a perfect example. I'm glad you brought that up because it's, it's the, you know, people say, well, how do you, you know, why such the pressure of a zero defect environment. What is that? What does that really mean? It means that right there, it means you can't afford to miss trimming the carpet on the stairs. If that's, you know, if that was the reason or, you know, in our world, it was, you know, if the, the nut, you know, the teleprompter screen sets on an angle on this pole. Right. That screen is like, is a piece of glass and it sets at a 45 degree angle from the podium. Well, it's only held there with one bolt and nut. Right. One what? Just one. So if it's not tightened to the precision that it needs to be tightened to, there's a possibility that it's going to fall during the speech. It's happened, it's happened, you know, and what happens, it's, he's mocked, the President gets mocked. It's an embarrassment to the White House. So your, your job in that scenario is to prevent, you know, the reason for the checklist, you know, is to prevent not only what could be a national security event, but, but embarrassment because it brings embarrassment and a reduction in.

Our self esteem and a distraction from the focus and the point on it. We live in an excessively partisan time where people snipe at each other, but get out of our little world and then go on the broader scale and you see nonstop that other nations will make fun of something or whatever because it's a little bit older reference, but President Ford is still remembered to this day, long after his passing and his brief presidency, for being clumsy. Right. The guy was very, very athletic and very capable, but he tripped a couple times and, and we still, if you're old enough, think of President Ford as being somewhat clumsy.

Yeah. Isn't that fascinating? Yeah. So, you know, I, you use stuff like this and use these stories and experiences like this. So you, if you have business leaders, CEOs, business owners of, you know, listening to this, you know, if example, you know, relate this to a company, you know, you're in, we're in this event, we're in this world we live in lots of virtual type of meetings taking place and you want to do an all hands, get all your people together, you know, to talk about what's happening with the company. And everybody's on Zoom. You know, it's the who's ever leading that hopefully it's somebody who's tested it, make sure it works, make sure people have instructions on what they're supposed to do on their end. You know, the settings within Zoom are all set accordingly. You know, whether you want people to be able to speak, not be able to speak, whatever type of control that those discussions have taken place. And you have your checklist and you've got this all set up. Because when the CEO gets on and it's, and it's his turn and he's going to speak, the last thing you want is for stuff to not work. All because you didn't set up things properly beforehand.

So we've been talking about preparations, about checklists, about practicing about that kind of thing. Now let's talk about empowering people. So what happens when you take something out and you roll it out to different locations? How do you give people the latitude? Talk a little bit about that. This is maybe a good place to talk about the healthcare group.

Yeah. So I think the biggest thing there when you're talking about empowering people is to make sure this, I mean, communication comes into play big time, that you're communicating intent, purpose, why you're rolling something out, why you're doing something new. Maybe you've engaged them throughout before you even put someone in charge to roll something out. They've been engaged on the front end to and whether it's an innovation type of project or just new processes, systems, tools, whatever it might be, that they've been engaged on the front end so that they're fully aware of what's happening and why it's happening. There's any training that they needed to receive, they've received that training. And you know, whatever type of I say testing, but testing is just, even if it was a one on one, that they have understanding of what it is that they're going to do and then you give them the mission to go forth and enroll that new feature out. So even like in the health care side of things, we had practices spread out, physician practices throughout, I think eight or nine different states all led. All these practices had a leader, an administrator, or what we call a practice leader in charge. And they were not the physician. This is an administrative, this leadership role, basically running the business at that location. Like Operate, they had operations and admin. Well, we needed performance management, new performance management system brought in to roll out, to get people on the same page. And I could have done that, I could have done that myself as the head of hr, I could have rolled out, hey, I've selected or the HR department has selected this, this process or this solution application. Here's the process, here's what we're going to do and here's what we expect of you. And just, I could have just set the expectations, but that's not how I handled the situation. I bring everybody together in what I call an HR roundtable. We start discussing what it is, what the mission is, what we need to accomplish. Give everybody homework to do on what they would think across various buckets. You know, if you have a system or a solution that you've worked with, what is it? How would this process work? What is it that we want to measure? What are our qualitative and our quantitative measurements that we're looking for? And they start having buy in right from the very beginning because you've brought them into the conversation and they have the ability to contribute and they start contributing, they're getting excited. Next thing you know you have this brand new process, this new system that you're going to roll out across the entire company. And every single, every single practice leader has been involved from the beginning. Now they are fully empowered that they are then going to be at their specific location and they're going to, they're going to run and execute that system. Is that a good. I mean, that's, that's. I mean, does that all make sense to you, listening hopefully to the listeners?

I think I do. And we've had a couple past guests speaking to the scaling up audience about this. We had Stanley McChrystal on talking about a couple times, actually talking about empowering people and transforming the way Special Ops were running around the world. And they went from every single operation running all the way up the chain to giving people rules of engagement and lots of information with their global daily huddle video teleconference, and then letting them run a whole different cadence of Special Ops that really helped them to finally not get their ass kicked so hard like we were for a little while. Yeah, Mission is really brilliant. Right, Right.

It's like in crisis, you know, and obviously the Special Ops community, you know, they, they're dealing in crisis all the time. Any mission can, is. Yeah, it's real, it's live. It can get weird. Nearing a crisis, what, what you learn in that and is that through crisis, anybody, anybody can stand and become the leader of that crisis. And it goes a lot into personal character and who, who in that moment rises to the top. And whether it's, whether it's an. Their idea is smart, it's the smartest thing that we need to do. They're seeing something that other people aren't seeing. Whatever the case might be, they rise to the top. And if you've created that environment, people will listen regardless of where you stand in your organizational hierarchy or the rank structure of your company. If you foster this environment of empowerment and encourage people to speak, you just never know who might rise to the top. And then if that is the type of company that you are, chances are your daily operations anyways outside of crisis are managed and led in much the same way.

Well, coming along, another one of our speakers, Horst Schultz, the former CEO of the Ritz Carlton, really emphasized ingraining some of these business rules. What are their principles and values? Having everyone have to memorize them and learn them and carry a little card about them and integrate them across daily huddles, that kind of thing. But then giving them broad latitudes so that anyone could handle a problem. So if your busboy walks over to you to fill your coffee or do something like that and says, how was your evening or your stay last night, sir, ma'? Am? And you say, I Didn't sleep very good. They could say to you, and without anything else, they could say, oh, that's terrible. Let's see if we can't turn things around. Breakfast is on us.

Yeah, that's awesome.

They don't have to go get approval for that or argue for it or whatever. They have a certain amount of latitude to create delight and to address the brand promises and the values of the company. That's not normal for most of our companies, right?

It's not. No, it's not normal, but it's. But I would imagine in that scenario, they gave some type of parameters around what it is that you could potentially promise or deliver or had the authority to do, which is great, but at least you're giving them. You're giving them that ownership now. They feel they truly. It does so much. It does so much for every person in the company. They. They will actually feel like they're part of something bigger. Like they're part of this overall mission that. That Ritz Carlton was. Is all about. Right? They're part of it. They're part of that team. They're included.

That's where you take a slogan and you turn it into something real, right?

Yeah.

Like, lots of people say stuff like, Ritz Carlton is, ladies and gentlemen, serving ladies and gentlemen. You're like, oh, yeah, whatever. They're like. And I don't know what the exact number is, but you've got a $5,000 personal thing. If you need to take care of anything to create a great experience for the customer, you, the guest, like, could do that. Right? You're like, oh, you're serious. You really actually mean that?

Yeah, yeah. And then. And you put in the mechanisms for accountability. Right. We had, we had a guest recently on our podcast, and the way he, the way he said it was perfect, and it's, you know, you get the people, the strategy systems, but then you have execution and accountability. So even if, even in doing things like that, you'll have an accountability system in place to ensure that, you know, the, the five grand is in.

What did we do?

What did we do? Why'd we do it? Like, there's real purpose behind it that actually supports the mission. Yeah, I, I equate that. It's, It's. It's funny because you may have experienced it yourself in the military. Not, not everybody above you always responds in the right way, but the military called it general military authority. So regardless of your rank, if you saw something that was out of place and somebody wasn't compliant with maybe their uniform or their boot strings weren't tucked in, you know, whatever the case might be, you had the authority to address that person. Even if they were a colonel and you were a sergeant or it didn't matter about the rank, if you saw something wrong, you had the authority to address it. Didn't always go well for people, but it was there.

Yeah, I think there's a big range and this is where also we see character count, right. So in the main unit that I served in, there were two commanders during my time frame there. And one of them I thought was an extraordinary human being and just wisdom and a depth of character and you know, he did his job and the structure and all that kind of stuff, but there was a humanity and a depth that you could just feel. And he went on to become a general and I'm like, yeah, that's why. Because he, and I do know his personal story. He started enlisted, right. And retired as two star or something like that. But that's cool and you could feel it. The next guy that we had was very much of a, you know, by the numbers academy grad, making his moves in his career and that kind of thing. But you know, I would have served and done my job for the unit and for the country or whatever, but there was nothing I was going to do out of the way way for no extra I would give for that guy. Nothing bad really about him, but it was just a little too much by the numbers. I could care less, you know.

Yeah, no, I get that for sure.

Not necessarily heart and soul. Yeah, interesting, right. And then I remember there was another guy, sort of a mid level officer and I kind of liked him, but that's because I'd worked closely enough to him to know him. But he wasn't well loved and liked. He had an offensive kind of a thing, especially if you didn't know you hadn't spent any time with him. And, and I ever heard somebody talking, you know, threatening fashion about it, you know, wow.

Yeah.

And, and I'm like, I, I had to report it but, but I was struck by that. You really have to be careful like the will that you set up and the, the way that you interact as a leader in a business like that, then in a business or any organization you've got, you've got a member of your team sounding off.

There she is, she's downstairs. I don't know what's happening. She is, she is sounding off and she's tiny but she has a loud voice. My apologies.

I think the tiniest ones often make the biggest noise. Right. We have a small dog and, and if he gets riled up. Yeah, I totally get it. But yeah, our listeners are going to have to include that because we're just going to keep going and finish our show. Yeah, I want to make sure that we cover this, the last piece, kind of, I think, in the thing and you talked about in our conversation today. So we've got people that are operating against preparation systems and that kind of thing in our checklist and all of that. And then you've got the empowerment going on to make sure. But that's all against the values. Right. And you've developed values. Can you tell us a little bit about the values in your HR company and, and how you got them and how you teach them and like that?

Yeah. So one of the things that I wrote in my book, and I thought this was just, you know, I'm going to start here. If a company doesn't have values, I, I wrote out what the army values were because you take the army values, you apply them and make them work for your company. Right. Because there's nothing. They're, they're, they're astounding really. Loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honor, integrity, personal courage. I could apply those to any company in any business if you wanted to. For. As words, right? Those are just words. You have to take those values and you have to dive into the behaviors around those values.

What do they mean? What do they look like?

What do they mean? What do they look like for your company? Right. So that's why, like, even in the work that I do with HR professionals, it's. You gotta, you gotta really define it for your company. There's not a one size fits all. So let's put this in a formula. And I did this, I did this inside the book to help, help bring it for folks. You know, behaviors plus time, those are your values. Just keep it really simple. We all should get up every morning. We're going to act a certain way all day long. Over time, we might falter here and there, but over time we'd have a pretty consistent view of what an individual's behaviors are. You multiply that by everybody in your company. And now you have your culture. Your culture is a result of. It's an outcome of your really, of everybody's behaviors over a specific time. Whether you, whether you have a good culture, bad culture, or indifferent, you have a culture in your company. So if you, if your value is empathy, right? This. You want people to be able to, to behave in an empathetic way towards each other, towards customers, whatever the case might be. Then you have to really draw out and define what empathy is from a behavioral perspective. So that then when you are writing job descriptions, when you're doing performance reviews, when you're hiring folks, you gotta be asking the questions and looking for the things that would show that an individual understands, not just can define it vocally to you, but who understands what demonstrating empathy really means. So it's behavioral based questions, not asking a candidate, could you please tell me what empathy is? But it's asking them a question about their background that you would, you would suspect would elicit an answer that showed that they understand or demonstrate empathy. And then kind of like your example with Ritz Carlton, you got to proliferate that around the company. It's got to go way beyond, you know, it's, it's for show. If it's just on your website or on the company wall, you have to get that out and about throughout the company, in your meetings, communicated on a regular basis, talked about between leaders and subordinates, on what your values are and what they mean, whether you have three values, five values, seven values, whatever, whatever it is. And that's why it really gets into company specific. And it's got to be led from the top. So it's not something, you know, the CEOs got to have as much buy in as anybody because they need to demonstrate the same types of behaviors or it's probably not going to work inside that organization. So leadership from the top.

Yeah. Makes all the difference, right? If you're not doing it right, then what's down on paper is either wishful thinking or aspirational. Wishful, like it's, or it's either wishful, aspirational or it's delusional.

Right. Or it's delusional.

It could be both. I mean, I was in a thing recently with the former CFO of Enron. And you know, Enron was really good at a lot of things, most notably running the company straight into the ground and cleaning out granny's wallets and producing power outages where I live. But their company values included integrity, right? Like, yeah, what version of integrity is that? Not anything that the rest of us would understand. Recognize.

Yeah, I wrote this. I wrote this. I think it was literally just last week because I get asked this a lot and like, okay, you can go to business school and business 101, you know, what's your company mission? We need to write a mission statement. Then we have a vision statement. You need your values And I kind of broke it down. I said yes. But listen, Mish, think about it in this. In this way, mission is what you go to work to do. That's what your company's in business to do. Whether you're building computers, writing software code, or you're a consulting company providing services to. To other business clients. Right. You're. That's your mission. This is what you're doing. You have a vision to take that somewhere. Whether it's scale globally, you want to reach a certain number of people or clients or whatever it is, there's a vision that's out in the future.

Yeah.

Your. Your values are what get you there. Your values are the behaviors. It's the driving force that's going to get you to achieve that vision. The DNA.

Yeah.

Yep. Yep. So don't sugarcoat it. Don't make it something that it's not. Right. Don't put. Don't put integrity on the wall if that's not one of your values. Yeah. Make it what it is. Be real about it. Because then only then and only then will you find the right talent that can align with those. With those values and build yourself.

It's the ultimate rules of engagement, isn't it?

Yeah.

Right. Anything else would be like a granular application specific, but they all fit in against this wider thing of how you say we do what we do. That's really helpful and great. So we're about building systems and processes and procedures and things like that, empowering people to do their job and giving them the values to figure out how to do what they do. From the leader all the way down through the organization in the world, in particular of HR and getting your people and your teams right. If you want to know more about Robert, then it's Robert Brabo dot com. There's a link and that kind of thing. And what sort of stuff is at your website for folks?

Yeah, you can. You can check out our elearning platform. You can schedule a call with me directly. You can learn all about me. You can actually find a link to our podcast on the website and so forth. Try to keep it all in one place. All about the book. Buy the book, get a signed copy, go to Amazon, whatever. It's all there. Get it all.

Execute with precision. Robert Bo. Bravo, Robert Bravo dot com. And of course, if you liked our show and love it, please like subscribe. Give us a review. Subscribe to, get them every week in your inbox or go to scalingcoach.com drop us a note, send us an email to info scalingcoach.com with any feedback corrections like whatever else. All that info scalingcoach.com Special thanks to Vern Harnish, author and creator of the Scaling Up Framework and the original Rockefeller Habit. Our show is being produced behind the scenes before and after by Lucy Summers there smiling at us off camera and our audio is edited by Albert Burge over at Podfly Productions. The show notes get written up, compiled by Ein Codina and proofread by Tim McGowan. Thanks everyone for listening. Keep Scaling Up. Thanks Beau for coming on the show.

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