Michael Hunter
Hello!
Welcome to Uncommon Leadership. I’m Michael Hunter with Uncommon Teams.
Today I’m talking with Mark Fulcher.
Mark is the managing director of Beacon Consult, a leadership and organization performance consultancy based out of Melbourne, Australia. Mark has taken his experience from leadership roles in Big Four consulting and multinationals to help growing small and medium organizations get set up for future success.
Mark believes that business success is so closely tied to leadership effectiveness and so should stay front and center for all organizations.
I wholeheartedly agree with that.
Welcome, Mark.
Mark Fulcher
Thank you, Michael. Nice to be here.
Michael
Happy to have you here today. In your journey to seeing people as people and learning to leverage their unique gifts to best accomplish your goals, what has had the biggest impact on your progress so far?
Mark
Wow. Big question.
If I reflect back, there’s a couple of things. I have a career over twenty-five years and a chunk of it in consulting and a chunk of it in working for multinationals and larger corporates. The one that does reflect that I really was forced to stand up and really had a big impact was probably when the planets aligned. I moved as a family, my family and I moved to Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia about nine or ten years ago, I had a new role with Ernst and Young. I’d never really spent much time in Malaysia before. It was a big move with young children.
We moved there and that was fine. Within a week of starting at Ernst and Young, they put me out on a project, not realizing that it was going to be the largest project for Ernst and Young globally, which was the transformation of Malaysia Airlines. Five weeks after they lost the second plane that was shot down over Ukraine.
So here I was in a new country. All together, I was leading up the change in comms [communications] for this big transformation with a team of a variety of consultants from different parts of the world, including Malaysia from the local organization. People of different nationalities, different cultures and religions.
It was a significant baptism of fire of how to lead an organization that was in crisis. Lead its team and really to drive forward for successful outcomes and bringing that team along the way, learning a lot about culture and religion and different, technical areas, et cetera.
It was a real learning on how to exercise leadership, but at the same time, understanding the strengths that people brought, the nuances around religion, culture, language and all these things with no time to practice. It was a phenomenal time, it was extremely stressful, but at the same time, I felt like I almost did it was like a mini-MBA [masters in business administration] in a few months. It was something that really stood out to me.
Michael
Is there a story or any experience from that really stands out as what really brought home the value of doing this?
Mark
One of the ladies actually in the team, she was on, there was a team from Malaysian Airlines, because when the plane got shot out over Ukraine, a lot of the passengers were from the Netherlands, like a significant number. And she was on the team that went over from Malaysia to the Netherlands to really help, almost like counsel, families.
It was a really traumatic response. Here it was she was coming back, she was in quite a state, but to know that she could come back, be part of a team, know that she was supported and help her probably recover from where she’d been on, where she’d been, but also to help her understand that she could play a role in taking the organization forward.
It was really strong focus on the vision and how we could support her. It was understanding individuals, different stories, and how to get them to be and to perform in a really traumatic time.
But that was one, there was many stories. Another story was, we were sitting in a steering committee for the whole program, and because one of, the story of the MH370, the plane that’s got lost, that’s still lost right across the Indian Ocean. And that one, they know certain things happened.
One of them was that the transponder had been turned off. And so they lost track of the plane. We were in this meeting and we were sitting there and trying to solve all sorts of things. And an individual who’s one of the engineers said that there was a technician in in London who had been caught turning off another transponder on another Malaysia Airlines flight.
It was just crazy and trying to get everyone to focus and to understand why we were there and there were so many distractions and it was quite chaotic, but also knowing that, as a leader, you have to stay your course, be really clear about your vision, try and minimize the noise for the team and so that they stay focused and really ensure that they’re connected and, we’re working as one to deliver on some really critical outcomes.
Michael
How do you keep your balance and help your team keep their balance in situations as chaotic as that must have been?
Mark
It’s something that I’ve had to work on. If I have to be really transparent, I think as a leader it’s important to and I’ve done a lot of work in around leadership assessment, leadership effectiveness and what are those competencies that are really important for driving effectiveness.
One of them is around composure. And so being able to, it’s almost emotionally regulate. Despite what’s going on, not necessarily ensuring that your own personal reactions and emotions don’t fluctuate with what’s going on because it can be quite intense and people see this. So that as a leader, they see how you react and if you’re not focused and stable and consistent, that can have a real impact on people.
I learned there were times when I experienced stress and a lot of things going on in my life to move there and then to work through this. I learned to really ensure that I didn’t do; anything that I had to focus on, that I needed to deal with, I did that in private.
So that people would see that I had a very balanced approach to the team we did a lot of things. It was really important. And in a country like that, they’re very good at connecting and deliberately connecting at times, mealtimes, over food. Food’s really important there. So that is a real leveler.
So, we ensure that we maintain the traditions that were important to them so that we could walk away from this and we could spend time together. Share food, decompress, let people talk and then we go back to the craziness and all sorts of things going on. That was some of the strategies, but I remember this was ten years ago. Some of the finer detail I probably don’t remember as well as I should.
Michael
Which of those tools have you found still hold you in good stead today? And which have you found you needed to tweak a little or a lot or even leave behind?
Mark
Understanding those things that are important as a leader.
I need to practice a bit sometimes. I, like all leaders, you have things to work on. And so tools; certainly that emotional regulation, I think I’ve really learned to look at all the things that make me healthy and that I turn up to be the best version of myself. I had one thing through this time. I was, even though it was extremely humid, I was doing lots of exercise. I was focusing on my sleep, my diet and things like that. Cause I know those things all add to your balance and how to turn up as the best leader as you can do.
I’m very connected with people and teams. I know one can say that, but I pride myself and I think empathy is one of my strongest, one of my main strengths actually. They’ve really been able to build strong relationships and create environments where people are comfortable.
They know they can open up and talk and know that there is a real safe space to talk and work. I do a lot of work around coaching. I do executive coaching. I support and train leaders with coaching skills and build coaching skills. You need to be able to have those really powerful coaching conversations. You’ve got to be able to create safe spaces that people feel comfortable to talk openly, without fear of retribution and all those sort of things. Safe spaces, conversations, empathy keeping well. There you go.
Michael
How do you find works well to help the people you’re coaching create those safe spaces in their workplace for themselves and for their teams?
Mark
You’re asking about when I’m coaching or the advice I give to a leader who’s coaching?
Michael
Advice you give to the people that you’re coaching.
Mark
Okay. So for them to create safe spaces.
Michael
So that they can create safe spaces for themselves?
Mark
One thing I think is important. I’m a big believer in coaching, as I’ve said, and it can occur in different places and times, and it can be very organic in the hallway. I’m a little old school, preferably face to face, doesn’t have to be, but for a sort of a structured coaching session, I always think it’s good to go to a neutral space.
So when I coach people, I try and get them out of their workspace. We go somewhere different. I think it’s good because it clears people’s heads and they can, look at things openly. And also away from , ensure that they’re, It’s safe in that there is, they can talk openly and no one else will overhear. It might be a corner of a cafe, for example, or it might be the places you can find it, meeting rooms, so that they know they can have that space.
What else?
It’s good when starting a coaching conversation for a leader to, when they’re doing this, to set up a space and make sure that, themselves, but the individual who they’re coaching, the coachee or counterpart, whatever you want to call it, is in the right mindset, and so taking some time to get them.
For example, they might be turning up and they might be really distracted. They might have been really disturbed by something that’s gone on and some, we’ve all done it, but simple breathing techniques or, the opportunity for the start to vent and get some of these things out, they can possibly just leave them aside and so we can start coaching. All these are tools to get in the right mindset to be able to have a great coaching session. Or at the same time, as I said it, doesn’t have to be a coaching session per se.
And the other thing , we’re talking about safe, I think ensuring that this conversation is confidential or whatever the rules are around that conversation
If I’m coaching someone, I always ask for permission if I’m going to take something somewhere else. That’s an important rule to maintain.
Michael
What has been the biggest surprise for you in your journey?
Mark
I’ve started this business. I reckon you could have asked me three years ago after working in corporate for over twenty-five years if I’d start a business and I’d be like, nah, no way. I’m comfortable working in corporate. I have quite big corporate roles. For example, my last big role was somewhere called Australia Post, which is like your U. S. Post. It’s a big organization of 60,000 people.
It was never on my radar that I’d start my own business. We, I live in Melbourne, and Melbourne was significantly impacted by COVID. I think it was possibly the most locked-down city in the world. And unfortunately, that has had an impact in all sorts of areas, like we all experienced. But, personal, as in for personal people, mental health issues, educational impacts for children and also the working environment. So it was very suppressed for a while, depressed at the working environment was. And things changed. I had some changes in my own career. I was made redundant and I’ll be transparent about that. One thing led to another, and I realized that, perhaps finding the next big corporate job wasn’t for me. And I started doing some smaller contract work, small individual consulting and one thing led to another. And with conversations with several people, I realized maybe I could make a business out of this.
It’s never been on my radar. So the fact that I’m doing it now. It’s a lot of work. I don’t have the answer yet as in I haven’t arrived where I want to arrive and I’m working out still where that journey is. It’s a challenge and it’s fun and I’m surprised how much I’m enjoying it.
Michael
And in your work with clients, what have you most not expected?
Mark
Early on, cause I’ve spent, now, ten years in Big Four consulting. So the likes of PWC [Price, Waterhouse and Cooper] and EY [Ernst and Young]. And a lot of the consulting, if you talk about consulting, it’s the work can be quite similar. However, working in different size organizations varies a lot. I found it refreshing and also frustrating working with clients who are smaller.
It’s amazing to work with clients and see the impact you’re having and know that decisions can be made quickly and benefits can be realized quite quickly. And I don’t see that as quickly in sort of big corporates at all, like big corporate clients. Conversely, I got very comfortable with the structure and the organization that comes in big organizations.
When you work for small and smaller clients, learning to be really adaptable and agile was really important. It was almost like having to unlearn some things and unlearn the way of doing things. And that is a barrier because when I first started, and I had some clients say that I was, I kept bringing in my big corporate ways to their smaller businesses.
I still do that sometimes because I know it’s the right answer and pragmatically it’s the right thing to be done. Particularly as an organization grows, they need to start designing in new processes and maybe systems and different ways of doing things that are a sign that this organization is growing.
The flip side is it is chaotic. That was another thing. It’s like working in a smaller end of town. And this could be organizations up to a couple of hundred recently. It can be chaotic and getting used to that and being able to still function in that and still deliver value and not get frustrated because that’s the way things are done and you might want to change everything at once. There’s a couple of examples.
Michael
What you said about sometimes the big corporate way of doing things is the right solution for the little companies. I find to be true as well.
Lessons we learned from other size organizations, other disciplines, other parts of the country, other, any frame of reference you want to think about is, there’s always some aspect of that’s immediately applicable to the context that I’m in, even if on the surface, they seem to be completely different.
And because that frame is so foreign, oftentimes bringing that into the new context can be disconcerting for the people that we’re trying to help or introduce this to.
How are you finding works well for easing that discomfort for your clients and helping them understand, take the parts of that foreign concept from a foreign context that are going to work for them in a way that they can really understand how it’s useful and integrate that in?
Mark
I understand what you’re saying. It’s not uncommon and it’s a really important exercise of driving change. You may have actually just described change in a couple of sentences, actually.
The first step around that, I could take you through change models, but the first step is awareness. This is really important that if you’re going to make something and say, for example, in your words, bring something foreign into this context and new, and it could be significantly different and it could be anything, right? It could be new processes, it could be systems, it could be bringing in new roles or a structure, etc. Really getting really clear and spending time around articulating the value and the benefits, how it’s going to impact them. Personally, but positively personally, so that they spend time so that they genuinely believe it.
And that starts, may start with the very most, most senior, because you need that person. You need, if it’s a CEO or a founder in a lot of the work I do, they need to be on board. Because if they’re not, the thing will break. It’s not going to work. So they need to be on board.
The leadership team is probably the next one, how to get them on board. Because they’ve got to genuinely believe it. This is when it gets back a bit to enterprise leadership, because it’s them as a leadership team, they have to believe it. And if they don’t, they can vent that, but they can do that into the team. So it’s, okay we agree as a team, whether we support this or not. And if we challenge it, let’s not do it outside the room. Because as soon as you come out of that room, you as a leader, as one of those leaders, needs to support this and you need to be an advocate and you need to go and support and communicate and support your teams.
It’s really that whole thing around being a really unified leadership team, and it’s different ways of describing it because that’s the way that you can get change and then supporting people through that, but really having the leaders of teams being front and center of doing that. That’s really important.
It was funny. I was having a conversation yesterday. This just jumped into mind.
We often talk about when there’s change and there’s people probably leaving an organization. There’s a lot around how do we manage people and the changes as they go out, et cetera. Then there’s also thinking about, the people left behind, there’s change for them as well. So how do you support them? For example, there might be some lots of job cuts. We assume that everyone is still left behind they’re going to be happy because they’ve got a job, but there’s a whole lot of change for them. So how do you bring them along again in this sort of new way and new worlds and of doing things?
Change is messy. It’s designed to be messy. Having, upfront leadership, having, clear and ongoing communication, is really important. And that power of a unified leadership team is really important.
Michael
What, for you, is the most fun part of helping teams navigate these changes?
Mark
Wow.
Probably seeing them get it, seeing them become the advocates, because it can be quite a journey . And then when they flip from being, they flip almost to becoming an advocate. And then you can see that moving through, and that’s why I love working with lead with people and around behavior change. You can do a great piece of work and it could be a piece of change, et cetera, but the most exciting bit is when it gets embedded and it’s sustained. 12 months later, two years later that change will be there.
I’ll give you an example. I’ve done quite a bit of work in building coaching cultures. That takes years. And I worked for a big corporate by saying that this Australia Post and we went through and it’s not uncommon for large organizations to go through perhaps every couple of years to go through an organizational restructure or looking at a new operating model review or whatever it is.
So we were doing some work around coaching, building in some leadership team about building skills. They were doing a great job. However. You push through a large piece of change, people can do under the stress or whatever, they revert to habit, revert to the old ways of doing things. So we’d go through change and there could be six months, could be up to a year where you’re just trying to get people through the change and through to the next sort of phase of being.
And then we’d come back at it again. And we’re like, okay, a year ago, you were doing amazingly around these coaching skills. Let’s take it back there and let’s start to build on it again. So we start building back and we keep going on. And I know that went for four years. I think we were building skills there.
You just need to have the long term to be able to ensure that things are embedded.
Michael
Integrating those new ideas can take a long time sometimes. Being able to maintain some visibility on the progress that we’re making and thinking, remembering back to, oh, wow, a year ago or six months or even yesterday, I was there and how much farther am I in today? help that journey be so much less stressful and confusing.
Mark
Cause it also gives them some proof that the data and some of the effort that they’ve been putting into the change and this, they’ve been devoting all this energy, it is achieving some results.
And of course we all want to see that. We want to know that we’re doing the right thing. And it is achieving the results that we’ve targeted for. We were doing this because we were working towards a strategic priority or a vision that the leadership team talked about. And this is actually working. We are moving in that direction.
It’s the compounding effect. It does then hopefully encourage people to keep going or do more. Communicating back results is important. Sometimes when you’ve got the business-as-usual time and everything is running smoothly and we can start spending some time and sitting on the business a bit more and doing some strategic things. But if things start to go wrong, perhaps, financial results start to dive or something, goes a bit kilter, we step back and we don’t spend as much time as we should on those strategic, they start to get forgotten about or pause for a bit, so it’s trying to continue to maintain that while the busyness of work gets in the way.
Michael
What else should I ask you today, Mark?
Mark
That’s a good, what a question. What else should I ask me? I don’t know.
I’m just trying to think of something from a regional context. There was a story I was going to tell you about before, which is a very actually Australian context.
This is probably the highlight of my career.
It was a terrible time in Australia. I live in the southern side of Victoria, which is in the southern part of our country. You would probably have seen pictures of deserts. A lot of our country is not inhabited. We generally live around the east coast and the sort of southern coast. There’s a lot of bushlands and forests and things, but in the summer months, it does get very dry and there’s risk of bushfires.
In 2009, we had the worst bushfires we’d ever had in Australia. They’re called the Black Saturday bushfires. An hour from where I live in Melbourne, 173 people died. There was 2,000 homes were burnt. It was like 47 degrees, which is, I don’t know, 125. I don’t know what that is in Fahrenheit.
I was working for a consulting firm. You think, how does a state respond to that? And so we was like, okay how do we respond to the disaster? Then how do we respond to the aftermath and the recovery? An authority was set up and I was working for this consulting firm and we had a team of six sent in to help set it up.
There was like thirty people there. And we’re doing everything from recovery out in these communities to basically to get these communities back on their feet. And then, but also it was to manage the donation. So I went in and my job by myself was to go, okay, we are getting donations of millions and millions of money and products and food and all sorts of things. We need to work out how to distribute this equitably.
To cut a long story short, within three months, I recruited a team.
This is all to do with the Victorian government. What amazed me was how we could mobilize governments and private sector to respond to a problem. And the way that leadership stepped up over that time, and we were able to distribute equitably all these goods to 2,000 people, so it was 500 homes and 2,000 people.
We won an award for that work, actually, for, it was policy development to be able to deliver in a time of crisis.
It was a really good example of what can be done without the, excuse my French, the BS in the way and people, That people just get there and they focus and they deliver. Remove all the politics and everything and it’s amazing what humans can do.
I have a lot of faith in leadership. That’s why I love working in leadership. Leaders and organizations can do great things, and it starts with great leadership from my opinion. However, there’s not many perfect leaders in the world. So I’m very happy to try and help them get as close to perfection as possible.
Michael
A wonderful story. I’m so glad to know that even government, which we often malign as being impossible to do anything, it shows that even in the worst situations, great things can come out.
Mark
It was a really proud moment for our state, our country, actually. I was so fortunate to be part of it.
Michael
That’s exciting. It must’ve been really heartwarming to participate in that and watch it and know that you’ve been a driving force and a reason why it was so successful.
Mark
Oh, for sure.
And then you were getting out there and we’re meeting people. So we weren’t all hemmed up in a sort of head office or a war room sort of thing. You see the positive impact because they’ve already had enough negative impact. It was great.
And we still, we had a ten-year reunion a couple of years ago. It’s a very unifying activity. The way you stay connected around that because you have this very intense shared experience. It’s almost like you’ve found a secret sauce for a period.
I can’t say I’ve ever seen, never seen performance at that level ever again, really.
Michael
And you have a wonderful guide for your audience to help them make their own secret sauce and create those same awesome outcomes for themselves. Tell us about that.
Mark
As I’ve explained, I have done most of my career in big corporate, but that’s given me a whole lot of experience and I’m thankful.
I love working with people and leaders and teams and organizations. And that’s where I consult to now, but my experience goes broader than that. So I’ve worked across a lot of across technology, a lot of business consulting, marketing even. And so it gives me a really good feel of the entire business. So I suppose you’d call that a bit of a, perhaps refer to that as commercial acumen.
As I’ve been working more recently with small to medium businesses, realizing that the the areas, the pain points have become quite clear to me and my consultancy. So we decided to put together a document and it’s called the Beacon Consult Guide to Growing Pains and Finding Success.
Cause it’s about, at different stages of growth, organizations will undoubtedly come up against certain growing pains, whether that’s whether you have a strategy in place and how that’s implemented and used, because unfortunately, often there’s a gap right there. How do you set up the organization? How do you evolve the organization? Do you need to look at the entire operating model as you grow?
Leadership I’ve talked a lot about today. That’s another one. As an organization grows, it’s understandable what’s expected of a leader evolves as well. How do we support the capability of leaders to grow, or, maybe you need to be realistic around what leaders are right at what level of an organization.
The next one is around attracting and managing talent looking at what I call ways of working and the communication and collaboration and effectively working in organizations and the things you need to start putting in place as you grow.
And then finally looking at performance. I do quite a lot of consulting around performance and development.
So it’s a guide to say, okay, we’ll give a bit of a sense of where those, what those problems are and some insights in how to solve them. Really happy for people to have a copy of that and always happy for a conversation.
Michael
If people would like to take you up on that conversation, what’s the best way for them to connect with you?
Mark
I’m on LinkedIn, of course. So you can connect with me on there. You can search Mark Fulcher. I think there’s probably one of them. And then, my email address is mark.fulcher@beaconconsult.com.au because we have a au suffix down here in Australia. So there you go.
Michael
That’s great. And I’ll have all those links in the show notes.
What would you like to leave our audience with today?
Mark
What do I want to leave today? I truly believe in the faith and the power of great leadership and to, continually invest in that, to really, to enable success both, within your organizations personally and beyond and what else you’re doing in your community. Cause there’s so much great work can be done being a great leader. Spend some time investing in your own leadership and the leadership of your people.
Michael
I second that emotion.
Thank you, Mark, for a great conversation today.
And thank you audience for joining us today. Please let Mark and I know: how is leadership awesome for you? Where are you struggling a little bit? Let us know how we can help.
Thanks, and have a great day.
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