186- Courage to Leap & Lead with Brock Brown and Marc Rossiter, part 1

You've got courage to leap, courage to lead. Be brave and be bold. Whoa, let it roar. Welcome to the Courage to Leap and Lead podcast, where each of our guests share the stories of courage that helped them become powerful leaders. Before we start today's show, please remember to visit courage-consulting.com Where you can find all the episodes and other excellent resources, all at courage-consulting.com. Now here's your host, Leadership Courage Coach CB Bowman.

Hello, ladies and gentlemen. It's Tuesday and it's CB with Courage to Leap and Lead. Hey, listen, I have a very special show today. I'm interviewing 2 people. One is going to come on shortly. The other one is already on, and this is Brock. Brock is an amazing executive coach, and true transparency, he is a member of the Association of Corporate Executive Coaches, which, as you know, believes in the philosophy of being an enterprise-wide business partner. With your client. Brock, welcome. Tell us about your guests that you're going to have on this show today.

CB, thank you very much for having me on the show, and I'm excited to introduce Mark Rossity. Mark is the CEO of Enerflex Corporation, home office out of Calgary, Canada, but they are a global energy organization with offices in, I think, 7 countries. So Mark came up through the organization as a chemical engineer and took over as their sales lead out of their U.S. operations and eventually became the president of U.S. operations. And a number of years ago, when the CEO left, they moved Mark into the CEO position, and he's just done a tremendous job of growing the company, took them through an acquisition of an equal-sized competitor. But one of the things that struck me most about Mark is he has a high level of humility. He is a well-trained leader. He has a growth mindset, but he loves people. And that's what makes him such a strong leader in the organization and such a strong values-based leader.

He has high levels of integrity, and combine that with high levels of humility, and it's a recipe Well, it sounds like he is a great example of the work that you do as an executive coach. So ladies and gentlemen, let me reintroduce or introduce Mark and Brock. Hey, wait, you can't see my beautiful pearl necklace. Okay, now you can see it. How's that? My husband gave it to me with the earrings. So you have to find somebody and you know what? With men, you kind of have to give them hints, like photographs of what you want pinned to the kitchen refrigerator, because that's where they always go. Anyway, now that I've given you a boyfriend, husband, significant other tip, we can rock into our show, Courage to Leap and Lead. And you know, we come on every Tuesday at 12 o'clock Mountain Time. So don't miss us. And today I'm doing something unusual. I have 2 guests on, and one is the client and one is the executive coach, and I'll let you figure out who's who. First, we're going to start with Brock. Brock, welcome.

Thanks, CB. Thanks for having me on. It's nice to be here.

Great. And, uh, full disclosure, Brock is a member of my association The Association for Corporate Executive Coaches, where we believe coaches should be enterprise-wide business partners with their clients. And we have Mark on. Mark, great to see you. Great to meet you.

Hey, thanks, CB. It's nice to be here.

Oh, Mark, you sound so serious, and this is a fun show, so good. I like that laugh.

Okay.

Okay, so in all transparency, Brock is the executive coach. Brock, tell us a little bit about yourself first. How did you get into this field?

So a number of years ago, 30-some years ago, I was working with an organization in Calgary, and they brought in a consultant to help sort of define our culture through a process called values-based leadership. And it had a significant impact on me. And I subsequently left that organization and was asked to head up as an operating partner of another private company. And I used some, a lot of what I learned in that company. And then I left my partnership and I left my partnership because I got some information from my kids that I wasn't being the dad that they wanted me to to be, nor did I want to be. And difficult decision, but did that. And then I phoned that consultant who had become a good friend of mine. His name was Larry Mills. He's with Caterpillar down in San Antonio, Texas. And I asked Larry if he would mentor me to go into organizations and help them build values-based cultures. And he said he would. I spent about a year going back and forth between Red Deer and San Antonio, Texas, and had a chance to sort of work in the Holt organization, be trained by some of their leaders. And about 6 or 7 months into that process, I got a call from a client in Canada and they said, hey, come talk to us. We've done, you know, I think they've done 24 mergers and acquisitions in 13 months. And they said, we don't have a clue who we are. We'd like to talk to you about helping us define that. And that was the start. That was back in 2001.

Well, I have to thank your mentor. He did a great job.

Yeah, thanks.

But, but I want to find out, since this is called Courage to Leap and Lead, your kids said you weren't being a great dad. Tell us about that.

Yeah, well, we were driving down the road and my kids were 12, 10, and 8. And, uh, you know, I just jokingly said, hey, you know, a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being, you know, lousy, 10 being awesome, What would you like your relationship with Dad to be? And I got, I got tens across the board. And, and then I said, oh, great. Scale of one to ten, one being lousy and ten being awesome. What is your relationship now? And I got a four to a six, which is a long way from a ten. So that night, when I, I put them to bed, I, I asked each of them. You know, what would help move your score closer to a 10? And they were all, of course, in separate bedrooms, didn't hear one another's answer, but they all said the exact same thing. They said, Dad, you're never around. And when you are, you're generally sleeping on the couch because you're tired, which I was. We just completed an acquisition over in Dubai. We are a year and a half into a merger that we completed in Alberta. It was 7 days a week work. And looking at the acquisition in Dubai, I was gonna be spending a lot of time over there. And I sat down and chatted with my wife. I looked at my values and realized that I wasn't aligned with my values. I definitely wasn't aligned with my role I wanted as a father. And I knew that I couldn't commit to the role as the COO and president of the company and sort of do all that well. So I chatted with my wife and I went to my partners and said, I need to leave, which is a difficult thing to do. It wasn't a very fun conversation to have with partners who didn't want to leave. And of course, you're involved in private shares, so your share value drops significantly when that happens. But I left it at a great financial cost and I think some reputational cost as well. Yeah, best decision I ever made. I spent 3 months just spending time picking up my kids, getting to know my kids again and my wife too. And then started consulting work and, you know, sort of didn't miss a sports game or sports event after that, you know, for the remainder of the school year or school, you know, school time in school.

So what I love about what you said is you had immense courage to ask children what they thought about their dad and how to make it better. I think so many parents need to hear that, especially from a man.

Hmm.

That is very much a question that we don't see men asking because they feel like My role is to bring in the dollars. That's it. And to ask a child that, and you know, out of the mouths of babes comes some realistic conversation. So, Mark, tell us about you.

Who are you?

Well, I'm the son of a Mountie, and I grew up in Eastern Canada. Mountie is a Mounted Police officer, RCMP officer, the red jacket, Stetson, that that, uh, your, your US listeners would be familiar with. And they had, they, they do community policing in smaller provinces in Canada. So I grew up the son of a police officer in Nova Scotia. Uh, my grandfather was a fisherman in Newfoundland. Um, so like a lot of people, our parents and grandparents were, uh, you know, had really humble kind of tough jobs, you know, growing up. And, uh, I graduated high school in Nova Scotia and I joined the Canadian, uh, Army and I went to the Canadian version of West Point that's called the Royal Military College at Kingston.

Yes.

Graduated from there, served in the Canadian Army, and then when I was done my service, I got into the Canadian oil and gas industry. I was living in Calgary at the time. That was my last, my last posting and had a chemical engineering degree. And so that was well suited to the oil and gas industry. And that was in 1996. And in 1998, I joined Enerflex. And 27 years later, I've been happily the CEO for the last 5 years.

Tell us about Enerflex.

It's Enerflex, and we, we provide sustainable energy infrastructure on a global basis, primarily in natural gas and primarily in 7 core countries: Canada, United States, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Bahrain, and Oman. And we're vertically integrated. We employ 5,000 people. We manufacture in North America everything that we deploy in those 7 core countries. And it provides mostly clean natural gas and CO2 to all the citizens of those countries.

So, Mark, let me ask you a naive question. You use the term natural gas. Is there fake gas?

No, the term natural gas means just what comes out of the ground. It usually comes with oil production, and it's methane, ethane, propane, the good General term for it is natural gas.

How do you ship gas? I mean, it's not something you can touch.

Pipelines.

Oh, okay.

Yeah. Yeah. Up until about 20 years ago, natural gas was just a landlocked continental commodity. And then all those brilliant engineers invented a way of liquefying it and putting it on boats. So you've got a liquefied natural gas trade. A lot of it's called LNG. You know, that's, that's the term for that. And now LNG that's produced in North America is shipped to Europe. It's shipped to different parts of the world. And people use it primarily for electricity generation. And it— the, the biggest improvement in the carbon footprint on a global basis has been switching coal to natural gas for power generation. And that's still a thing that's ongoing. Yeah.

Okay.

You're using so many big words, I'm lost.

Okay.

First of all, how can you make gas liquid? Second of all, why are we shipping it? Don't other countries have liquid or natural gas built in?

They do not. So first of all, you make it liquid by cooling it to about -200 degrees Fahrenheit, and it goes from a gas to a liquid form. And then you put it on these boats and it stays pretty cold. And Europe, for instance, doesn't produce natural gas within continental Europe to any significant degree. They get it via pipeline from Russia. They get it via LNG cargoes from North America and the Middle East. And you could say the same thing about Japan. Japan Korea, China, they import a lot of natural gas for power generation and home heating.

Well, is it that they don't know how to change the gas to liquid, or why doesn't their land produce gas like our land does?

Well, they, uh, natural gas deposits aren't spread equally around the world. It's, uh, it's, it's, it's in very pockets in Texas, Western Canada, the Middle East, anywhere where there's significant oil production. you'll find coincidental natural gas production typically. So it's a resource that's not spread equally, and usually it's produced where there's not a lot of people, but it's people that consume natural gas both for power generation and for home heating and cooking. And so it— you sort of have to transport it from where it's geologically located to where people need it. And probably from 1900 until 1980, that was largely just a pipeline within the boundaries of any particular continent. Since then, it's really become a global commodity. And if you've heard of the shale boom, a lot of the shale boom in the United States and Canada has been driven by that LNG trade. And it's really brought what I believe is pretty clean power and sustainable energy to a lot of countries in the world— China, Europe. Japan, Seoul, etc., those places.

So that's it.

It's, it's, uh, I'm, I'm so used to talking to people that this is all they talk about. Sorry if I went too quick too early, but this has been my life, so it's hard to, uh, not talk quickly about it.

That's okay. We'll break it down now. So what I got is because the earth is built weird in different places and this shell level Happens mostly in how the United States sits on the Earth. Is that correct?

Yeah, that's right. And it's, you know, if, if you believe in this, it's where the dinosaurs died. And all those dinosaur bones turned into fossil fuels, hence the word fossil. And that's the prevailing science is that's how it's come about. Not everybody believes that necessarily, but it's in pockets around the world. And The United States is, I would say, blessed with significant deposits of fossil fuels. And that inexpensive, readily available energy is what allowed, what has allowed the United States and Canada to develop as industrialized, high quality of living countries, really since the 1880s.

So in the United States, I'm guessing that California has the most fossil fuel because of their swampland that they have found dinosaurs got caught in like, like a kind of quicksand?

They've got an awful lot between like LA and Bakersfield and around the Bakersfield area. There's a ton of oil that's been produced for a long, long time. But the richest deposits of natural gas and oil are really found in West Texas, South Texas, North Dakota, And sort of West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, there's a big deposit there too.

So we are hearing a lot about carbon footprints and clean. What's the opposite of not clean energy and dirtying up the footprints?

I think I would rather not use those words. It's almost like It's almost like good food and bad food. I think there's different horses for different courses. And, you know, natural gas is a low carbon intensity heating fuel. So for per unit of electricity or heating, it puts less CO2 in the atmosphere than say coal, wood, et cetera. So it's less carbon intense per unit of energy.

Yeah.

Provided.

That's also what we're hearing about cows.

Yeah, you know, the cows, cows give off methane when they eat hay, they always have. But, you know, methane is a pretty damaging greenhouse gas. And so I think for every molecule of CO2, sorry, every molecule of methane provides the same greenhouse gas impact as about 100 molecules of CO2. So the oil industry, especially because we produce methane and in the production of it, some of it leaks, they've put a ton of time and effort into minimizing those leaks to reduce methane emissions because it's such a damaging greenhouse gas.

Okay, so here's a real naive question. How many cows, I mean, a molecule is really teeny, teeny, right?

Right.

So How damaging can a cow be when you think about the size of a molecule?

Well, and by the way, I thought this was a coaching podcast. My engineering books are elsewhere. But I think that the— let's put it this way. I'm not worried about the greenhouse gas impact of cows. Yeah, I think meat meat agriculture and cultivation in general, the biggest issue with that is really land use, in my opinion, you know, and I do think that when we consider how we want to grow our society over the next 10, 20, 50 years, we have to consider what role meat consumption plays in our overall health and land use. Those are, those are 2 parts that are much more significant in my mind than, than cows passing gas as they grow on the pastures.

Well, I did warn you this podcast riffs. We can go in any direction. Okay.

You're the leader.

Well, it's important because I want, I want the audience to understand, excuse me, why a company that deals with gas would hire an executive coach.

Okay, so is that, is that the next question? Why would we? Well, maybe I'll start by letting you know how Enerflex started its relationship with Brock. And Enerflex, we were formed by the merger of 2 primarily North American competitors in the natural gas infrastructure space of roughly equal size. And it was in 2011. And when the 2 companies came together, that was after 20 years of being just competing like crazy against each other for business. And our CEO at the time, Blair, was, uh, I think rightfully so, quite concerned about building a culture of this pro forma enterprise that would serve the needs of its shareholders and customers and indeed the employees. And so he, he engaged Brock. They had a relationship, you know, prior to the, the Enerflex. And, and I wasn't in those meetings, and maybe Brock can go into a little more detail, but what I experienced as a, as a leader— maybe I was at the time 2 notches below the, the CEO— was a specific and purposeful choice to build a values-based culture that would sort of bond all 1,500 employees of the company. And I think you start with some very, you can't get everybody aligned on here's how you win business, here's how you execute business, here's how you do it because everybody's got an opinion of what brought them there. But you can quickly get everybody aligned upon integrity, creativity, commitment, and success, which are Interflex's 4 core values. And let's talk about what those values mean to you as a person. And if you can get people that don't know each other, and not only do they not know each other, but they just came off of 20 years of trying to kill each other in building, you know, kill each other competitively. Can we come to an agreement on those 4 core values? Can we agree on those? Yeah. Let's talk about them. Let's tell stories about them. Let's use them in decision making. Let's like make them real, not just words on a page, but let's make them real. And once we all see that we can all get on board with that, then the conversation about how we're gonna prosecute business, how are we gonna serve our shareholders and our customers, that becomes so much more easy when everybody sort of believes in each other's values and that we've got this common language and how we're gonna expect each other to show up. And I don't know if Blair saw all that way back then, but I, he did. It felt to me from a distance that he knew we had to talk about it. Before we can talk about how we make money, we got to talk about how we act. And, and that's how I experienced Brock's leadership back in, in 2011.

So give me your 4 values again.

Integrity, creativity, commitment, and success. And, uh, uh, Blair used to talk about it this way, which I try to crib. If we can act with integrity, if we can solve problems with with creativity, if we can fulfill in our commitments to one another and to our customers, then we will all have success. And that's sort of the tie that binds those 4 values that they're all intertwined and connected and allow us to provide a successful return to our shareholders, allows us to provide complicated solutions to our customers at a fair price and allows us to provide a meaningful place for our people to work. where they can achieve their professional— be their best professional self, I like to say.

So Brock, you get this phone call that says help. First, where do you get the courage to know that you can go and help an organization who— that is currently formed by 2 warriors, 2 different warring companies. How do you get them to say, listen, my market share is better than your market share, and our way of doing business is better than your way of doing business? You're walking into a black hole with courage? With what mindset?

Well, it had to be a growth mindset, and I didn't know.

It's a setup question, you know.

I didn't know if I could have an impact. I had to test some waters. So the CEO that Marc mentioned, Blair, gave me a call, and they were about 12 or 13 months into the acquisition, and it had been very challenging. Like Mark said, they were literally combative companies business-wise, you know, different colors. Employees stayed loyal to their old brands. And the leadership had really struggled with making very decisive decisions around here's the policies we're going to follow, here's the safety policy we're going to follow, because they had 2 sort of equal cultures in terms of size at the very least. So Blair asked me if I'd come talk to the leadership team, kind of gave me a little bit of the background. And I think something that was really quite interesting was it almost looked— and Mark didn't mention this— almost looked like a bit of a reverse takeover because it was sort of, you know, this company sort of came in and grabbed Enerflex, but Enerflex had a better global footprint. And Mark, if I'm describing this wrong, No, that's right. you know, please let me know. So they decided to keep the name of Enerflex as opposed to the other company, and that really annoyed some employees as well. But I knew that what would need to happen was you really needed, they really needed to have sort of humble, courageous leaders. And then the question becomes, how do you sort of test for that? So I sent Blair a small executive summary that was done by another author on Kotter's 8 Steps of Change. And I said, just have your team read it. It was about a 2.5-page summary and then we'll come and talk about it. So he sent it out to the team, copied me on the email. I came into a meeting with the team and after some introductions, And, uh, so I, I had met some of the team previously, but of course not all the new members. And, uh, I said, I said to the group, they were kind of all sitting in a circle, I said, um, I said, so what do you think of the article? And, um, the room kind of went silent for a bit, and there was some, oh, it was interesting, and And then one fellow, and Mark, you'll know him, Jerry, he stood up. And Jerry was Mark's boss, and he was the president of US operations. And Jerry stood up and said, if Kotter's 8 steps are a standard for change, and he said, and it appears as though they're a reasonable standard for change, and I won't use the words And the language that he used, but he said, we have completely effed this up. We've made a complete mess of this acquisition. We have not created attention for change. We have not led with clarity. We have been indecisive. We've created infighting and failed to deal with it. And he said, we have created a mess. We have not done our job. And right then, you know, and you saw like people in the room kind of started to respond like, yeah, what he said, you know, and Mark would have seen it from the other side of the picture. And I remember thinking, okay, there's the humility we need to succeed in getting this organization going in the common direction because it really has to start with somebody going, you know, we haven't done this well. And we got to change some things.

So I'm going to challenge a little bit and question. When I was at General Foods and we were bought by Kraft, and then they were bought by Philip Morris, there was so much anger as we walked through the halls Mm-hmm. I remember saying to somebody in the C-suite, what's next? We were sitting there thinking our head's going to be chopped off or the whole thing is going to fall apart because General Foods was number one on the grocery store. And what's going to happen? We're going to lose our sense of identity. Philip Morris was known for cigarettes. Kraft was known for cheese. We were known for the grocery store. And yet we were bought out. We didn't want to talk to those folks. This was not the top of the organization. This was the middle of the organization. How do you You're you're telling me that you're speaking to the top of the organization. It's the middle that causes the waves and shifts. How do you go in and say, okay, this article was read. This is what the company feels that we've done wrong. But meantime, the middle has been. cut, sliced, and diced and doesn't want to hear any of it. How do you then bring your values together and make people feel secure so that they become more productive?

Yeah, a good, good question. Mark may see or have a different perspective on it than I have, but one of the things we were intentional about was executing on some research done by Barry Posner was published in the Leadership Challenge. And, uh, they talked—

By the way, I just interviewed him on my podcast.

Oh, interesting. Anyways, and I know Barry very well, but his research had a significant impact on me and on my practice because it showed a small— in the book, it showed this sort of small graph. I think a lot of people kind of glazed over it, But it talked about how, what was the impact on employees having clarity on their corporate core values, employees having clarity on their personal core values, and what was the impact on that clarity or lack of on what he called employee commitment. Today we would've called it employee engagement. And what was interesting, I won't go through the whole thing, was that Employees who were clear on their personal core values had a tendency to have higher engagement than those that weren't. And in fact, on personal core values alone, their engagement score was the same as those who were clear on both the corporate and both the personal. So, it really spoke to the importance of helping employees define, not tell them what their core values are. That's what the corporation does. It says, These are our corporate core values. But going to the employee group and go, what are your personal core values? Are they aligned with the corporate core values? And the courageous statement there is, if they're not, then you've got a tough decision to make. But if they are, how do we get you to engage not just our corporate core values that Mark talked about, but your personal core values in the decision-making in the organization? And we invited them to bring both to bear as they went through those changes. And that was very empowering for people.

How many employees are you talking about?

At the start, it was what, 1,500, Mark?

Yep, that's right.

Yeah. And so how did you find out— I'm assuming you did some sort of survey— what the personal core values of people in the middle and lower ranks of the organizations were? And then how did you evaluate the middle road?

How did we evaluate the middle road in terms of—

Yeah. So in other words, you're looking at the personal values of people in the middle ranks and in the lower ranks. And then you have to have some sort of coming together of those values so that you can develop A corporate value that is inclusive?

We did it the opposite way.

Ah, okay.

We defined the corporate values first. And I believe that the responsibility of the executive team is to define the values of the organization. I differ in many consultants. Some consultants would say, no, you gotta go out to the whole company. to determine what the values of the company are. My position is that's the executive's responsibility. And if anybody's gonna go to jail for the values being violated, it's gonna be them. Enron's a great example of values violation, if nothing else, but also executives going to jail for that. And so we took those out to the employee groups and said, what do you think of them? What do you understand? What do you not understand? Would you change them? What would you change them to? Do you think the leadership team will execute on these, or do you think you'll— they'll fail, you know, by those? So we had focus groups. Stop there.

Stop there. Mark, how did you get employees to be honest about this without fearing that they're going to lose their position?

Well, the, the Hey, I'll tell you how I talk about values, and, and I think I've been somewhat successful in it. So let's go with that as a working assumption. I agree with Brock that an executive team needs to consider the context of their shareholders and their customers and their industry and decide on values that will allow that company to serve those stakeholders.

Mm-hmm.

And I think that the values of an energy company especially in today's day and age, probably have to be quite different than a company engaged in food service, for instance. I think there's a Venn diagram where there's a lot of similarities, but I think that there's some differences in what they need from their people to be successful long term.

Absolutely.

And so we put some words to describe that. We contextualized it for our particular business. And then when we talked to our employees about it, what we said was, look, very humbly, You've got your values, like the, and these values were a part of how you were raised, the professional and personal mentors you've had in your whole life, and you're showing up with what's important to you, and we respect that. What we would like for you to have though is read these values that we think we need to have as a, as a group to be successful, and can you get on board? Like, and I used to say Can you agree with 3 out of these 4 being really important? And can you see 3 out of these 4 being— if you had to list 4 or 5 of your own personal values, could I talk you into putting these things in your 5? And would— is that something that you think there's an overlap between what the company wants and what you bring to the table? And if we can get 20 people in a room to go, listen, I can get on board with those. Those are not in conflict with the way I want to lead my life. I may have a couple of other things. I may have some spiritual things. I may have some other things that are really important to me. But for a professional context, if we can do those, I'll commit to those if the person next to me will and if the person across the room will. And then if everybody goes, yeah, these are good. And when you think about the 4 values, and I think a lot of companies have some subset of these, integrity, creativity, commitment, success. Those are not earth-shattering values. You know, they're, they're pretty fundamental human values. And I saw a high degree of success in getting people to say, I'll agree to those 4 values. And I'm willing to hold myself accountable and hold my colleagues accountable. And the unwritten, unwritten Is you, Mark, better be accountable to the same values. And as long as we're always reinforcing these things and talking about them, it's sort of the building block. It's, it's sort of the sinews that, that move the big muscles of the company around. And I'll tell you, I've talked about these values with Hispanic people that didn't graduate from grade 8. I talked with Thai operators that are 50 years old. I talk to people that are very devout, uh, followers of Islam in the Middle East. We've got evangelical Christians. We've got, you know, non-spiritual people. 20 countries, 5,000 people from a lot of different backgrounds. And I've never heard a single person say overtly or by their actions, I can't get on board with these things. And, and we can actually have people from Oman and from Argentina and from Mexico and from Houston in a room. And especially if they're frontline leaders, they've all gone through at least a 4-hour session on how to bring these values to their daily life as a leader. And they, they can show up. If I had a meeting in Houston, bring these people from all those different regions, and there's a shared expectation about how they're going to show up. from a values point of view, regardless of their backgrounds. And that's been so powerful for a global company to have those expectations. And I can go to any office in the world and I can see the values on the wall and we can start a meeting with the values, a value success story. Tell me about one of your colleagues or one of the people in this organization that did something in the last week that you can tie directly to a value. And let's talk about that and recognize it. And we start every one of our executive team meetings with 7 to 10 value success stories. And I'm not saying we have 100% fidelity of that concept throughout the whole organization, but a lot of meetings start off with value success stories. And it's that storytelling and it's a recognizing that allows those values to tie together people from 20 different countries and sort of drive towards a common purpose of being a great company. I want Everflex to be a great company. It is a great company, but I want it to be good. I want us to do good. I want us to be good and I want people to feel like they're doing good and being good. And that concept of good, I think great is a financial thing. We're great, we're big, we're growing, we're so many dollars per share and you can use whatever number you want to define that. But good is an extremely personal bar and a very high bar for a lot of people. And I think that if you follow those 4 values that we've laid out, That's a pretty good template for what good looks like, you know. And that's really what I strive to do as a CEO. And it's not easy. But when Brock started that with us in 2011, 13 years ago, it is one of the core parts of being a leader at Enerflex. And we just did a bit, a big transaction about a year ago and doubled the size of the company. And we told the new people, hey, you get to go through values training. And I'm like, can we change that, please? I don't like the title values training. It feels like it's indoctrination. You know, you can, you can, you can queue up the central casting sort of communist sort of, you know, camp kind of training. I said, let's not call it values training. Let's call it frontline leadership values sort of discussion or something. And the main message is, if you have a frontline leader, if you use these values in making your decisions, especially how you deal with your people, with customers, with safety decisions, I'll have your back on that. And like, I'm empowering you to make decisions every single day, especially as it pertains to people which matter a lot to me and customers which matter a lot to the company. If you use the values as a guide, I'll have your back. And I don't think there's been any situation where we had a frontline leader that used the values to make a tough decision that got in trouble for it. Not every decision is perfect, but the— if the person used the values and used the process, um, then we'll support them in their leadership journey.

So, Mark, first of all, I could see why you make an incredible CEO. I'd like to ask you a question that's probably going to get me into trouble. And it's not exactly related to what you just said. It's a curious question.

Your—

or is it your company is based in Canada?

Yeah, we're financially based in Canada. We're domiciled in Calgary, but it's only 10% of our business is Canada. We're really a global company, but keep going.

Okay, so you may have just answered my question because I heard when you spoke about values-based in 20 different countries. And I'm just curious to know, since here in the United States we're learning a lot about the indigenous population, did, did that factor play into your values-based statement? And how were they, that population, included or reflected?

It didn't play a huge role. In that, um, 20 years ago, or when, when about 15 years ago, when, and the new Enerflex was created via that merger that Brock was talking about, um, really being positive on reaching out to First Nations wasn't a big part of what we did. It just really wasn't. Um, Enerflex at the time was a global company, so even though we were Canadian-based we were very clear on the fact that our values had to be portable for a global audience. And, you know, Blair was a Canadian business leader, lots of global experience, but he didn't have a lot of experience in Latin America. And I remember telling him, I go, listen, we cannot transport Canadian ways of doing business to Mexico. We can transport our values. We can talk about our values and how important those things are to us, but the way that those values get used in day-to-day decisions, what as it pertains to people, that's just going to be different. And as long as it's part of our values and as long as it's lawful, then that's fine. We can't get too fussy about how we do it. But back to your question about First Nations, uh, Indigenous people, that's not been a huge part of Enerflex. It's a big part of the oil and gas industry. and the resource industry in Canada, the people that are in the field doing work on First Nations land, it's a huge part of their, their success story. In Canada, we mainly run manufacturing facilities in Calgary, and, uh, we haven't had a big First Nations, um, presence in our company.

So you talked about the success, and, and I love your story. Now my question goes to what happened to people who couldn't get on board with the corporate values?

Over time, they would leave the company and either self-selected, and they'd never say, listen, I gotta go because I just can't get on board with integrity. Like, no, like nobody would ever say that. But I think that if, if you say what the values are If you lead with those things in mind, over time, people will self-select if they just can't get on board with those values, or indeed we will actually let people go. And a lot of times not adhering to the values really manifests itself in other things like poor leadership, high degrees of losing people from their team, poor safety results. And I always say when it comes to leadership, it's, it's where there's smoke, there's fire. And the smoke is what leaders see. And it's almost, if you really think about sitting on a mountaintop, if you see smoke in the distance, you don't see the fire and you just see the smoke at a very, very high level. And you gotta do the work to get down to the bottom of that smoke to see what the actual fire is. So in, in business leadership, you look at lack of results for financial results, safety results, human resources results are all gonna point to a root issue. And at Enerflex, frequently when the leadership's not good, it's either a values issue or it's just leadership is a hard job and not everybody's cut out for it. And you'd like to take somebody out of a leadership position if they got the right values and put them in a worker position. That's always difficult to do at a company. You know, people see that as a demotion, there's ego issues. So we can't do that frequently. But You look for the smoke that's in all those results and you drive down to the, the root cause. And it's either a values problem or it's just the person is just not intellectually cut out for being a leader, you know. And, and that was our fault for putting them in that position in the first place.

Do you feel like the smoke has a common denominator or is it different depending upon the situation?

It's different depending on the situation. I've, but the one, the one common denominator is that leaders have to recognize the smoke. And when we have things like KPIs and, you know, everybody in the world's got KPIs and you can get into this almost religion about reporting on KPIs. The only purpose of KPIs is to provide some contrast from good to bad. And so if you've got a KPI of a 0.5 recordable incident rate, which is a technical safety term, a big reason why you track that is it's not that 0.5 is good, bad, or otherwise, but if it goes from 0.5 to 0.7, that's smoke. And that should be an alert to a leader, you got to dig in and there's something going on, you know, that you got to dig into. I think whistleblower hotlines that almost all public companies have, um, I think created to make sure another Enron didn't happen. It was— they really created for accounting malfeasance. They're being used by a lot of our employees to talk about leadership challenges. And a lot of the whistleblower calls, they're essentially just saying there's smoke here. We would love it if management paid attention to the smoke because here's the 3 or 4 things that we have a problem with. You dig into it, and there's probably a leadership issue. And I don't think we've got bad people working Interflex. I think that most people in the world share a basic set of human characteristics. And if somebody's not doing a good job, if somebody's got whistleblower complaints or safety records or something, they're struggling in the role for whatever reason. And it's our responsibility as leaders. to understand that, try to help the person fix it or move them out of a job that they're not well suited for. And so I think a big job of management and numbers and accounting and everything is just to provide leaders the early warning signs that there's some leadership problems and some operational problems that you can't see when you're hanging out at headquarters, you know, and I can't talk to 4,800 people every day to see how they're doing, but I can see high-level signals and I can tell their leader, you gotta look into that because That to me is an early warning sign of bad leadership or somebody struggling at a lower level.

Mark, how far down does this KPI differential go in an organization? I mean, does it go down to something like the janitor, or does it stop at mid-level? What— how far down?

It's—

I— ideally, you would go to every frontline employee. And if I can give you a fun story, I was over in our Middle East office 4 or 5 years ago and I was the US regional president. I thought I was a big deal and the people over there thought I was a big deal. There's only 5 or 6 regional presidents of the company. And, but I'm a pretty humble person in general. And in the Middle East, almost every office has a position called a coffee boy. And in the Middle East, they're almost always Filipino immigrants that their job is to get coffee. Now they don't get coffee for everybody. They only get coffee for bosses. And so when I went over there, in Canada, the United States, you get your own coffee, right? You don't have coffee.

You bet.

He's right. And, and so there was, there was a gentleman, uh, who was our coffee boy, and, uh, his name was Samson. And I was in there on a Friday, which is back at the time Friday, Saturday was their weekend, but I was doing work in Canada. So, you know, Friday, I just, what else am I gonna do? Go to the mall, you know? So I go to the work to, to do some work. And I went into the coffee room to make myself a coffee because I didn't think Samson was working that day. And as I was trying to get the Nespresso machine working, he sort of came in and lost his mind that I was making my own coffee. I'm like, well, listen, you can do it. You know, I'm not here to take your job. You can do it. And as he was making it, I looked over and I saw a performance review form that we all did the performance review form digitally. It was all online, but this was printed out on a piece of paper. And at the very top of it, it said Samson. And I'm like, hmm. And, you know, what, as a leader, especially a little bit higher level in the company, you have to really protect yourself from, you know, I'm not more important than anybody else. I've just got a different job than everybody else. But if you don't really remind yourself of that, you can start thinking differently, which I wouldn't like. And I thought to myself, wow, a coffee boy, a job that's relatively less important than mine. has a performance review, I'm really impressed. Well, he had metrics, he had goals, and he took these things seriously. And when I read through that, I'm gonna get choked up. It really reset my values, you know, that everybody deserves to have metrics and goals and get feedback if they're doing a good job or not. And I'll never forget that, you know, and I think that everybody in the organization and I don't even say top to bottom. I like to think that I'm here to support everybody else. So I'll say bottom to top, everybody deserves to have metrics and know if they're doing a good job, if they care to. And, you know, Samson and I were talking about his performance. It wasn't my business. I wasn't his particular boss, but I'm like, hey, do you You know, I see you got your performance review here. He goes, yeah. And his goals were like provide excellent coffee service to Mr. Phil, you know, and, and provide a very clean coffee room for all the staff and to be, to be available for it. Like it was things that if you read it, if you were an egotistical, I'm important kind of person, you would say, man, like I can't believe it. But every single person deserves to have, you know, goals such that they can judge If they're doing a good or a bad job, and then I started chatting with him about some of these goals and how he thinks he's doing, and you know that kind of thing. And we chatted with different things. He hadn't been home in eight years. You know Filipino immigrants, they don't go home. They don't get paid a lot in the Middle East. His sixteen-year-old daughter was the same age as mine, and he hadn't seen her in eight years. So to me, that's, that's how I feel about people and that's how I feel about values. And if you can use those, and in our performance review, we talk about values, you know, there's a line in our performance review. Do you think your values line up with the company values? And it's an opportunity for the leader and the employee to talk about it. And I think that's, that's a tremendous legacy that Brock's left with the company.

Ladies and gentlemen, on that story, I'm going to stop and invite you to come back to part 2.