The Learning To Lead Show with Mark J. Cundiff

#26 Building Trust and Inspiring Leadership. A Conversation with Retired Marine, Sergeant Major Bobby Allen"

• Mark Cundiff

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In this episode of the Learning to Lead Show, host Mark Cundiff interviews Bobby Allen, a retired Marine Corps Sergeant Major and seasoned maintenance and reliability leader. 

Bobby shares his leadership journey, starting from his early days in the Marine Corps to his extensive career in the corporate world. He discusses key leadership principles such as seeking responsibility, knowing your people, and leading through influence rather than authority. 

Bobby also provides practical advice for young leaders, emphasizing the importance of trust, humility, and emotional intelligence. The episode is packed with valuable insights and actionable steps to help leaders improve their skills and drive organizational success. 

Don't miss the expert tips on how to handle culture change and the impact of AI on maintenance and reliability.


00:00 Introduction to Leadership Challenges

01:46 Welcome to the Learning to Lead Show

03:24 Bobby Allen's Leadership Journey

04:46 Key Leadership Lessons from the Marines

06:15 Transitioning to the Corporate World

08:06 The Importance of Seeking Responsibility

11:00 Leading with Influence and Informal Leadership

19:50 Challenges in Maintenance and Reliability

20:48 The Role of Culture Change in Leadership

31:32 Building Trust and Credibility

36:54 Recommended Leadership Resources

41:29 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Connect with Bobby Allen:

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🔎 About LeaderNotes

LeaderNotes is a quick-hit companion to each episode of The Learning to Lead Show. In just 5–10 minutes, Mark Cundiff recaps the top leadership insights, frameworks, and action steps from each interview, designed for busy, growth-minded leaders who want to review and apply the episode’s biggest takeaways on the go. It’s like the highlight reel + playbook—all in one.


Contact Mark at: mark@markjcundiff.com

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I think early on, my mistake when I first moved into a leadership role was not really knowing my people as well as I needed to. You recognize your mistakes and you try to figure out how am I going to improve on that? What I started doing give you an example from the Marine Corps is when I became a sergeant major, I had first sergeants, scattered across the country at these different reserve units. As a regimental sergeant major, I had five battalion sergeant majors under me and 21 first sergeants under me. When I moved into that role, the first thing I did was send out and I had them create a bio. I sent the out a template, and I had questions on there and what I would do when I went to visit one of my units is I would pull up the First Sergeant Bio and I would read back through it. So the first thing I was able to start talking to him about when we got face to face was, how's your two kids? How's your wife? Calling her by name? Some of had completely forgot about that bio, which was perfectly fine. But even if they remembered it was, they knew that I took the time to look back at that potentially. But it was getting to know them, what they liked to do and have some conversation around, their personal life. Then we could talk business. But just getting to, just really getting to understand people because everyone has challenges in their life and if you recognize them, even when we talking about on a plant floor being able to recognize when someone comes in and they're just having a bad day, it's not that they're a bad employee, they've got something going on. If you've got that personal relationship with them you can have sometimes conversations that you need to have to help them. Hello and welcome to the Learning to Lead Show. I'm your host, mark Cundiff. Today we are going to get to hear from a good friend Bobby Allen, who you just heard an excerpt from. He spent 30 years as a Marine working in the reserves for 26 of those years and retired from the Marines as a Sergeant Major. He also spent nearly four decades working in maintenance and reliability. Bobby started out as a technician and then he worked himself into different leadership roles over the course of his career. Working in different levels of leadership, all the way up to being a maintenance manager for a large organization in North Alabama at a large rolling mill. Before he moved into consulting and coaching role, he is now retired and he is sharing some of his wisdom and insights from the things that he learned during his career. You're going to get some real great leadership coaching and teaching today from Bobby make sure to grab a notebook and a pen and pull up a chair and get some good leadership wisdom from my good friend Bobby Allen. Also make sure that you download leader notes. It is a good comprehensive summary of all that we discussed today with an outline of key topics and some action items that you could share with your team to help you take your leadership and your organization to the next level. Now let's join my conversation with Bobby Allen. Hello, Bobby. It's great to have you with us today. Good to see you, mark. Look forward to learning from you today, and I want to help our audience to get to know a little bit more about you. Can we just start a little bit with your leadership journey, your story, how you progressed over the years? First I'd go back to I joined the Marine Corps in 1977. So that's what put me on my leadership journey. The reason I decided to join the Marine Corps was I lived in a rural area of Virginia was not a lot of opportunities around there. I wanted to do something different. I wanted to change the situation that I was in. I decided to join the Marine Corps. I recently told someone thinking back on that I'm not sure how I thought$392 a month was going to actually change my life. It didn't change my financial situation at all. But what it did change was it changed the trajectory of my life because the Marine Corps gave me a lot of a lot of skills, particularly in the arena of leadership that have really helped me throughout my career. Both in the Marine Corps obviously but also in my civilian career. Did first four years got out and started working at a paper mill. A couple years later I went back into reserves. That's how I got started As far as, my leadership journey. What would you say are maybe two to three key things that you've taken out of your time with the Marines, that you spent 30 years there all together that were foundational for you as a leader, as you moved into the corporate world and working in paper mills a lot and other different type industrial settings. I would say the, first thing joining the Marines. I was 18 years old. Thought I knew everything, like most 18 year olds do. Figured out pretty quickly. I didn't know much at all. But it took an, an 18-year-old kid and it transformed me into a person that really just didn't understand the words any longer, give up, quit. You can't do that. So getting that at an early age was just, very instrumental in helping me throughout my life. Because that mindset I think, is critical to anything you do. Too often I see in today's society, people, they give up too quickly. They want instant gratification on things. They want things to happen right now. You just can't give up. You gotta keep pushing for the things that are important and you can't quit. So I think, getting that mindset early on was very fundamental to, throughout my career. I, like I said, I spent four years in. Got out for a couple years, had a good friend, killed in Beirut in 19 83, and decided to go back into reserves. And as you mentioned I spent another 26 years there. I actually, retired as a regiment sergeant Major I think, when I got out in 1981 originally I was able to get a job as a, at a paper mill. Started out as a maintenance helper. And then 24 years later at that same paper mill, I was a business unit manager and I worked my way, up through virtually every role that there was up until that business unit level. I think the skills that I learned in the Marine Corps helped me progress fairly quickly. Obviously I was a mechanical helper and then a a millwright for a number of years. But after some time I start moving up, through the ranks, if you will. That experience there has in my mind has given me the unique ability to connect with people. Doesn't matter if they're on the shop floor. Or if they're at the C-suite, I'm able to go into organizations later in life as a consultant and make changes. I've seen you rise up through the ranks and part of our career that we crossed paths in and, you're talking about starting out as the helper. Then when you left the industrial side and went into consulting and coaching. You were running a site where you were managing close to 200 folks and numerous contractors. So one of the things that people can learn, you may start out just at the very bottom, but over the course of time, you can move up the ranks if you build inconsistent leadership habits. What would you say were some critical things for you to get to that point of your career? For the guy that maybe is starting out there, maybe they're a millwright, maybe they're a technician, or maybe they're a new employee at a new company and they someday wanna end up in the C-suite or in a leadership role. What would you say to them right now to start doing in order to grow into those roles? One of the things that the Marine Corps, as I mentioned, taught me many things early on. Whether we're talking about, courage, integrity one of the big ones for me was to seek responsibility. And take responsibility. What I mean by that, it doesn't matter what level the organization you're in you need to be looking for opportunities to take responsibility and to step up to the plate. When there's something that needs to be done and go talk to, your manager and say, I see this is a problem. And get some alignment there and take charge of that, and listen, if things don't go the way you thought they did, remember you sought that responsibility. Take the responsibility of what the outcome is really, and usually the outcome of that is gonna be good. Because you really put that in it. Too often I see, people I've said in my career, mark is, like the Marine Corps, everybody can't be a private and everybody can't be a general because if they were all privates, nothing would get done. And if all Generals, nothing would get done either, right? It takes everyone in the organization working together for common goals, but you really gotta, look for that responsibility. No matter where at always setting the example for others to follow it. You have informal leaders in an organization when you don't have a title, be that informal leader and help drive change in an organization. I love what you said there. That's a good transition point. I love what you said about seeking out responsibilities today. We live in such a victim mindset. It's like people are sitting back waiting for something to happen. That lesson, if the listeners don't take anything else away from what we talked about today, is if you'll seek out responsibility and go take on the added responsibility, that'll do a lot for your career and for your leadership roles. It will. When we get back to, the Marine Corps taught. Not only how to be a leader, but how to serve others too. Because I think it's important that we have to realize for things to happen in an organization, it takes everyone from the janitor to, let's say, the plant manager. I've had people question me for how's the janitor important? What I usually tell them is if you're in a facility let the women's restroom. Become a mess with all the commodes plugged up and stuff and see how quickly that gets to the mill manager because everyone has a role. Doesn't matter where you at, and if you all gotta be doing that for the organization to be successful. One of the things that I would encourage any of your listeners and followers to look at is just Google Marine Corps 14 leadership traits and 11 leadership principles. I actually took them and modified them, for the business world, for, how how that relates to the business world rather than how that, relates to the military. You talked a minute ago about. The informal leadership roles, and I'd like you to delve into that a little bit because one of the things I think is key with leadership is like John Maxwell said, leadership is influenced nothing more, nothing less, that's whether you're leading from a positional leadership role or like you said, maybe informal or a staff position. Talk to me a little bit about what you've learned about the value of. Leading with influence versus like in the military. A lot of it's positional but there's also trust and respect and things that are brought in there to where you influence your guys. Talk a little bit about how you've transitioned into the civilian world with that. How does it how has that shaped your leadership? I think, one of the things that I that I tried to do early on in my career when I was, working at, in the paper industry, for example, and I was, just a, just another craftsman out there working on the tools, right? Is I constantly. Look for opportunities to do things for about seven years of my career, I worked as a a shift mechanic that was responsible. You was on a rotating shift and when you were there, everybody else was home asleep usually, right? So you worked on a rotating shift and stuff. I saw lots of people that if they didn't have any calls, they just, they'd set the whole day in the break room. I'm just not built that way. I cannot do that. So I'd go over to, the paper machine area, we had a little rebuild shop down there where we had gear boxes and cylinders and stuff that would need to be rebuilt. I'd go just, rebuild stuff to keep busy and to do something. I had the, maintenance the area maintenance manager come up to me one day and said, I noticed that every time you're working night shift, when I come in, there's stuff that's been rebuilt, setting there with your name on the tag and everything, but none of the other shift people ever rebuilt anything. So that's that, seeking responsibility, so looking for opportunities to do things. And I think, when you're looking for opportunities like that, somebody, you may not think anybody notices it, but somebody eventually notices that you're going above and beyond. And I think when it came time for them to start looking for people to promote, maybe that's what helped that. Then, another thing is just, when you're working with a. A team of people on a job somebody's gotta usually take charge, right? Just taking charge of the situation and helping work through whatever the problem is and in fixing the equipment, getting it back up and running whatever that looks like. I think, that helps, one is your building skills but that gets, noticed, I believe, and helps you, in your career progression, right? What I see in that story is that you're leading by your behavior. Yes. You're doing things that influence others because of your behavior. Yes. And all of us can do that. Anyone can exhibit positive behavior that impacts whether it's in your family, whether it's in your church, your community. We can exhibit behaviors that have a positive impact on the organization. Let's flip it a little bit and go back to. Your early days and think back, you said, when you went into Marines, you was an 18-year-old that knew it all. Think back to some of those days what are some key leadership mistakes that you made early in your career that you would go back to young Bobby and say, Hey, you should have done this, and this. What are some things that you wish you had known then that you know now? I think mark, if I think about that just a little bit, that's, a really good question. I believe for me it was. Early on, it was not getting to know the people that I was working with as well as I needed to. I think that's more important, when you, as you move into leadership roles, it's all about building relationships, right? Building key relationships because people need to, there's a saying out there that I've said many times in my life, people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. When I look back at that, I think early on, my mistake when I first moved into a leadership role was not really knowing my people as well as I needed to. You recognize your mistakes and you try to figure out how am I going to improve on that? And what I started doing now. Give you an example from the Marine Corps is when I became a sergeant major, I had first sergeants, scattered across the country at these different reserve units. As a regimental sergeant major, I had five battalion sergeant majors under me and 21 first sergeants under me. When I moved into that role, the first thing I did was send out and I had them create a bio. So I sent the out a template, and I had questions on there and stuff. And what I would do when I went to visit one of my units is I would pull up the First Sergeant Bio and I would read back through it. So the first thing I was able to start talking to him about when we got face to face was, how's your two kids? How's your wife? Calling her by name? Some of'em was. Had completely forgot about that bio, which was perfectly fine. But even if they remembered it was, they knew that I took the time to look back at that potentially. But it was getting to know them, what they liked to do and have some conversation around, their personal life. Then we could talk business. But just getting to, just really getting to understand people because everyone has challenges in their life and if you recognize them, even when we talking about on a plant floor being able to recognize when someone comes in and they're just having a bad day, it's not that they're a bad employee, they've got something going on. If you've got that personal relationship with them you can have sometimes conversations that you need to have to help them. That is powerful. I tell you. If a young leader or any leader would take on that idea that you have there of this bio and getting to know their people or just some other way that you put into practice that, did you come up with that on your own? Actually, I would like to say I did, but I didn't actually, when I early on in my career, I had a young captain that I worked for he was at a company level and I was a sergeant and he had everyone from Sergeant above create a bio. I thought that was a, good idea. Completely forgot about it until I start realizing that was one of the things that I just, didn't have that personal connection that I think you need to have, particularly with your direct reports, right? You really need to understand something about the life of the people that report directly to you. I can say that you learned that lesson well, because having worked with you in a very difficult situation just over a decade ago that would be one of the character traits that if you ask about Bobby Allen is that no matter whether they were the frontline employee or the senior person in the company there, you had great relationships throughout that operation. I think that was what you were well known for. So I think you learned that lesson how did you. Get into the reliability maintenance world. You left the marines, you came out and you went to turning wrenches in a paper mill. What caused you to gravitate to that type of work? As far as transitioning into, reliability I think it started really early on in my life. At probably about six years old, I start tearing my dad's lawnmower apart the engine apart, just to see. I had to see what was inside. I just had this fascination of anything mechanical. I wanted to know how it worked. Now, fortunately, most of the time I was able to put it back together and it would start when he came home and was actually ready to use it. It didn't matter what it was, if it was a stove, I would tear it apart. I wanted to see how it worked, so I had a fascination with them things. When I was in high school, I took automotive mechanics for a few years. Really enjoyed that. And when I first went in, as I mentioned to the Marine Corps, I didn't go in expecting to make a career out of it. I went in as a diesel mechanic. And went through diesel mechanic school in the Marine Corps. And then that just, when I got out and I went to, to work for a paper mill, I really just had a great understanding because of all of that tearing stuff up when I was a kid. Even though the equipment was different there were so many similarities. Okay. If you think about. Putting packing in a pump. That's kinda like putting rings on a piston. You can't line'em up together or it's not gonna work, just having that fascination helped me transition into the world of maintenance. You spent probably what, more than a decade now, coaching and training leaders in the maintenance and reliability space and that's a high pressure environment. People that aren't familiar with that when a piece of equipment's down the, it seems like the whole world stops and everyone's looking at you to make sure that you get it back up and running, and then they wanna know why you had it broke down to begin with. What do you see is going on out there in the maintenance and liability area? What kind of stresses and challenges are these leaders facing today? You're right. When we think about the the world, particularly of maintenance and reliability, it's fast paced. The environment is constantly changing. There's all kind of cost pressures. There's equipment, keeping equipment running, if you want to. Improve profitability. What you really gotta do is keep your equipment running, right? You cannot have unscheduled downtime. Even those, there's a number of challenges. I think culture change is actually the biggest one. I don't know how many times I have heard people say, we've been doing it this way for 20, 25 years. Why do we need to change now? People are, in a mindset that what they did, for the last 25 years is going to make'em successful for the next 25 years. I know you and I, and many of your listeners can agree that's just not reality. When we think about things that are coming on, for instance, ai, how's that going to change the way we go about doing maintenance? I put some stuff together. Several years ago, and it was about the evolution of maintenance. If we think back in the, like in the fifties and sixties pretty much you just ran stuff till it broke. That was no predictive technology or anything. So a. And then somebody figured out let's do some PMs. The problem with PMs is you can, and you and I fought this when we worked together with some of the leadership is if something broke, the first question was who did the PM? Then if it had been done why did it fail? If you looked at it many times, the PM was either invasive where when you PMed it, you actually caused the problem to begin with. So it was invasive or it wasn't based on failure modes. So you could do it, but it wasn't going to change your situation whatsoever. Then we move into predictive technologies and stuff and now with the onset of AI and big data and all of that, and AI being able to analyze so much stuff so rapidly, that's going to change the way we look at a lot of maintenance. It's not going to change the fact that you still gotta have people out there that understand reliability and maintenance. It's just that you can dig through data much quicker than you used to. One of the things that you really gotta think about from a culture change is people I read a book years ago and it had this thing in there said People listen to WIFM, like it was a radio station. That's what's in it for me. Because as a leader, you've gotta set the vision of what's in it for them. You gotta make them understand why things are important and that the way we've been doing it ain't necessarily the right way and it's not the way we need to do it in the future. So I think culture change is the is the big driver out there and for me. One of the things that I used early on in my career, even as a maintenance supervisor, is realizing these informal leaders that you have, it doesn't matter if you are a maintenance supervisor and you've got 15 people working for you. All of them are not the same. Some of them actually want change and they're early adapters to ideas about change. So give them responsibility. Give them, projects to do and help them, start becoming a future leader. I think as leaders, one of the things that we really gotta realize, our biggest job is to create future leaders. That's the number one responsibility that we have. I think even though you can't promote all of them you give them skills and stuff to actually help you be more successful as a leader. One of the things I remember seeing you do, talking about the informal leaders is when we were at the aluminum mill, we were doing a large five s process throughout the mill. It started out you were leading it then eventually you handed it off to a supervisor to lead it. When we finished that process, who was leading it at the end? It was craftsmen leading it. Craftsmen were leading it. Over time you, you built leadership in down through the organization. This was some pretty heavy lifting work that they were doing leading these processes, and I saw you take that and move it down through the organization over a period of time. Very strategic in building future leaders and creating more buy-in. Bridge that to when you moved into the consulting world and the coaching world that you've been in for the last number of years. How did you coach them to go back and implement change? One of the things that I think is very important for leaders when we think about, change management and driving, reliability changes and asset health improvements and all the things that leaders have to focus on is one of the things that I think is very important is a leader has to remain calm. There is so much stuff in most manufacturing industries that are just tearing, equipment tearing up all the time, just plagued by unscheduled downtime, can't keep equipment running and the managers are wanting to know why it's broke down to begin with, like you said. You gotta remain calm. One of the things that I've told a lot of leaders, particularly ones that I see that have this trait is if the building's on fire, nobody wants to see the fire chief run in waving his hands screaming, oh my God, the building's on fire and everybody's gonna die. Nobody wants to work for that person. When you and I worked together on the production side, we saw some people that were like that, right? That were just really hotheads. You gotta be calm under pressure. I think, that's one of the things that the Marine Corps taught me was because if you're in combat, you can't freak out. You gotta remain calm and you gotta take control. So leaders gotta stay calm and you gotta make, sound decisions and timely decisions because if there's something going on that needs to be addressed immediately, you can't procrastinate. You can't hesitate on the decision. If you're hesitant on making a decision, then you're gonna lose the people that are under you, so you gotta be really good at your job for one thing, but you gotta really be good as a leader as well. I think that's very critical, that leaders are. If you look at traits of people that you admire through your life that you've worked for, it's never been a hothead. It's always been somebody that was calm under fire. You're just talking about the need for having great emotional intelligence is the catchphrase that's used for what you're talking about there. If you don't have that, you, like you said, you really stand out in a negative, but if the people that have that actually stand out. Rise to the top because they're looked to, to lead through difficult situations. If you could encourage the leader out there that's on the front lines to build in one new habit over starting tomorrow to help them grow as a leader what would that be? One new habit. That's a very good question. I think, one of the habits that you know I think one is obviously, remain calm when you've gotta make, tough decisions I think, one of the things that I always wanted to do given time, there's times you gotta make decisions immediately, right? There's time that you can actually get some input. Before you make decision, get the facts one of the things that I tell people sometimes if Mark is standing on one side of the street and I'm standing on the other, and as a wreck we actually saw two different wrecks potentially. Because we got a different viewpoint. So getting your team engaged when you can. I think is critical to build, like I said, that next level of leaders and stuff. But, one of the things that I think people do is, if you can lead by being a dictator, but you're going to have very limited success if you are a dictator. I remember something I read years ago, and it was about, dictators, if they're working in the facility and they're the job that their people have is to bill 50 widgets an hour. They will bill 50 widgets. They won't bill 60 widgets, they will bill 50 because they know if they only bill 49, there's paying with that. Somebody's going to chew them out. So they'll build the 50 widgets. So what you really gotta do is you've gotta. Figure out how to get discretionary effort out of people. That comes from leadership. The person that wants 50 widgets, that's a manager. Leadership is inspiring people to go above and beyond. That comes back to that's, what's in it for me.. If we look back at, knowing your people and your people respect you and they know you've got their back, then they will go above and beyond and give that discretionary effort. And I think that's what, young leaders in particular have to figure out is there's a huge difference between being a manager and being a leader. If give an example of that a manager's focus is different than a leader's focus. So manager usually is around maintaining a system, maintaining processes. Day-to-day operation, a leader sets direction. They inspire their people and they drive long-term vision. They've got a vision for where they want the organization to be. I've had to coach, lots of leaders, that are. Plant managers, maintenance managers, operations managers if you are down, what they often do is they let themself get drug down into day-to-day firefight. If you're in the day-to-day firefight because you have no one below you that you've actually trained to be able to take them types of responsibilities, then you're never gonna move the organization. As a leader, you should be looking at where do I want my organization to be? It doesn't matter if you are maintenance supervisor and, got 15 people, or if you're or maintenance manager that has a, 200 person workforce, you've gotta be looking at where do you want the organization to be six months from now, a year, three years, so on and so forth. How you're improving skills and stuff, so you know, a manager's kind of the person that's out there ensuring that work gets done and it gets done effectively. A leader is somebody that ensures people understand why the work matters, why are we doing this to begin with, and motivate them to do the best that they can do. So I think there's a huge change there. So you gotta ask yourself the question, do I really want to be a manager or do I wanna be a leader? You talked about having different perspectives, and I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on how you transitioned from being a person that was on the front lines, that was leading organizations every day for more than a decade. You went into this coaching, consulting, training role. What did you learn stepping away from being on the front lines and observing other leaders and the struggles that they're going through and how you had to help them overcome? I think one of the biggest things is realize you've got no authority. Okay. You have absolutely zero authority to make change, and you know what happens a lot of times when as a consultant, when you get pulled in is you'll find very quickly that the, at least some portion of the people that you are going to work with don't know why you there. They don't want you there because they think they've got all the answers themselves and that they don't need you there. Okay. So realizing you've got no authority over them to make things happen. For me it was always about going in and identify what I, what we commonly refer to as a low hanging fruit. Figuring out, these are the people that I'm going to be working with. You've met the ones that, it doesn't matter, I've went in. Doing coaching and mentoring in a number of different areas, whether it's reliability improvements, or whether it's work execution management. If I go in and I'm working with, let's say, planners and schedulers it was identifying very quickly what are the things that they're not doing that I could show them. One little trick that will make their life much easier. One of the things as a leader is you gotta be technically sound. Okay? You've got to, you don't have to have all of the answers, but you gotta have most of them, right? You gotta have a lot of'em. So going in and just figuring out., If I get him to do this way, that's going to make their life easier. As soon as you show'em that and it clicks to'em, it's ah, this guy's actually here to help me. And not only is he here to help me, he knows how to help me. So you build some credibility or maybe it's a reliability engineer and there's been something that's been plugging the plant for a long time and you help them resolve that, right? You build credibility of this is not, a textbook consultant. This is actually a practitioner that knows what they're talking about. It can actually help me. So I think going in and figuring out, low hanging fruit, building credibility very quickly. And that goes down to, doesn't matter even if you're, if you are maintenance supervisor in a facility that you just got hired to going in and identifying where the issues at and helping resolve some things very quickly builds credibility on you. It sounds like to me, you're talking about that. The foundation for a lot of your leadership and if you don't have this is trust. Yes. Can you speak to that a little bit about, I would imagine that goes all the way back to your marine go days about having to be able to trust those you're in the foxhole with, and then you've carried that throughout your career. Talk a little bit about how that building that trust is foundational. If you think about Mark trust that a person is going to, has integrity, they're going to do what they say is extremely important. And, you and I worked together for several years and we came together and met for the first time in a facility, didn't know each other from Adam. And very quickly we built trust. I knew what to expect from you, and you knew what to expect from me. I think that's, instrumental, doesn't matter what level the organization's at, you have to be able to trust the people that you're working with. I think, one of the things is, when I think about from a consulting aspect is, when I went in as a consultant, I would get, pulled in a lot of times to meetings and stuff that were about something that I was not even there to work on. But they had developed some trust in me and knew that I could probably help them resolve this. And going in, and helping them resolve problems, made it much easier for me to make change. Because you're trying to change the way that an organization is operating, and it doesn't matter really if you're the people on the site that is working there day to day, you're trying to make improvements as a young maintenance supervisor, maintenance manager, reliability engineer, whatever. You're trying to improve things and if people don't trust you, then they're not going to follow you. And I think, when you think about that, mark, it's, you can't, if you don't know the answer, don't try to BS your way through it. Just be honest and say, I don't know the answer of that, but let me give that some thought. Let me do some research and I'll get back with you if. Make sure you get back with them, right? Because the answer's out there to some somewhere, you may have to go talk to several people. That's why I think, and so often particularly, a lot of leaders don't want to go down and talk to their subordinates. Get feedback from their subordinates. I always loved to do that because I figured the people that was closest to the problem were the people that were out on the shop floor. So going and getting their input and a lot of times you come up with great ideas on how to resolve issues, if you don't know, be honest. Man, I think that's two great things right there. You're talking about trust and humility. If you have the combination of those two things as a leader. It'll carry you a long ways. Bobby, I've seen you grow over your leadership journey just since the time I've known you, so I know that doesn't happen by accident. You spent a lot of years in Marine Corps training and the trainings that they have, but you also do stuff on your own. What are some leadership books, podcasts, or trainings? What? What are some things that you would. Toss out there to our listeners that might be of help to them, that have helped you in your journey? I like to read. Two books that probably a lot of people haven't heard of. One of'em called Simplify Business Leadership, the Marine Corps Way. This book is really good. It takes them, them foundational leadership principles, 14 traits and 11 principles, and applies that to how do we, operate in the business world. One of the first chapters, if I recall in there is it talks about getting somebody as a recruiter, for example, to recruit new talent into your organization, make sure that's the best person that you have that's doing that, right? You don't want the worst person out there trying to recruit for your organization. So it makes common sense, right? It's really good going through there on things like that makes a lot of sense. The other one is gung Ho and this book here I read probably the first time I actually had a, a marine officer that I worked for gave me this book, and I read through this book years ago and I've read it a couple times since then. What it really does a lot about is it talks about organizations and it talks about the importance of everybody working as a team and and really talks a lot about, how important it is to keep the people under you informed that they know exactly. What's occurring, right? Because people want to know what's going on in an organization, the worst thing that you can have happen is not communicate and people start making up their own stories about what's going on. Particularly if you're working in a highly reactive organization you better squash them rumors about things, so just around good communication. That's really good. Those are two good books. I'd highly recommend. We'll put those in the show notes. Is there any last words you'd like to share with our audience before we wrap it up today? I'd like to just tell one little quick story if you will. When we talked earlier about organizations what are the challenges and stuff that, many maintenance organizations in particular have? One is they have so much stuff going on. It's where do I focus at? Where do I focus my efforts at? Because everything is just tearing up. So you gotta have a plan, you gotta have a strategy. You cannot work on it all. And that's one of the things you have to realize as a leader, is you can't empty the ocean, You can't do that. So you gotta figure out what's important. I was working at a site in Mexico one of the things was the site manager there, he said. Can you help us with, he said, I know you are working on our work execution stuff. He said, but we got so many breakdowns, can you help with that? I said, yeah, I'll go pull some data. So I went and pulled six months of emergency work order data, and I went through that and it only took me about an hour and I paraded that out. Then he wanted me to meet with the reliability engineers. One of the interesting things that I found was, I had a piece of equipment that had 127 work orders in three months on the same piece of equipment. I took that and pareto that out a little bit and saw what was the common thing. 91 times the work order was actually on the same thing. So when I sat with the engineers, I said, I don't know what this is, but it's a problem and we need to fix it. They looked at it, oh, that's a proximity switch. Okay, so let's go out there and figure out what's going on. I went out there and we got one of the craftsmen to come around. And said, the last one that had worked on it. What do you what are you having to fix on this? Oh, the photo eye gets out of adjustment and I have to tighten that bolt down. It keeps getting loose. I'm like, I look at the at the air supervisor and I say, go get a welding machine. They come over there, we get everything lined up. They tack welded. When I went back three months later for another visit, they hadn't touched the thing in three months, it was only about a five or 10 minute fix, but it was stopping production. Figuring out what's the low hanging fruit to free up time to work on, the more important stuff. Stop working on the same things over and over. Sometimes you just have to find out what the real issue is. Absolutely. Working on the symptoms. That's good. Bobby, we thank you for your time today. This has been some really great leadership content, some great practical steps that folks can take, and we appreciate your time for being with us here today. Thank you, mark. Happy to do it.

I know you've got some great leadership. Coaching and training today from a good friend Bobby Allen. Make sure you go to the show notes, click on the link for leader notes and download our leader notes so that you can get a good comprehensive understanding of everything that we listen to today. And it'll give you an outline of the key topics discussed, the books discussed, and give you some insights to take with you from today's episode. Also, make sure you subscribe so that you get this on your favorite podcast directory, and we would love it if you got value out of today's content that you would go give us a rating of five on your favorite podcast directory. This helps us spread the word about what we're doing here on the Learning to Lead Show. Now, make sure that you go out this week and learn. Grow and lead at a higher level so you can take your organization to the next level of success