In the latest episode of the IT Factor podcast, we have the privilege of hosting Rob Hartley, Operations Executive at Factor who brings a unique perspective to the table. Join us as we delve into an engaging conversation about
- Rob’s journey from the Australian Army to civilian life, highlighting the invaluable transferable skills of leadership gained along the way
- Rob’s extensive 12-year military experience significantly influencing his leadership at Factor, shaping his empathetic and relationship-driven approach
- A recent client project where Rob seamlessly bridged his military background with his current role as a tech executive, achieving remarkable results. Tune in to discover the exciting outcomes and gain practical insights from his wealth of knowledge.
- Get to know Rob beyond his professional accomplishments, that helps him cultivate the delicate art of balancing work and life priorities, a perspective that resonates with us all.
Transcript
[00:00:00] Rob Hartley: To establish that bond, you can only establish bonds with real people. You can’t establish a bond with a caricature of a person.
So if the leader is not being true to themselves and not leading in their own style, the person that they’re working with is never gonna build a personal connection. And I think you need that personal connection to break down barriers, to build trust, right, so that you can have a real conversation. It is so easy to go through the motions of “Hi Juvi.
How are you today? How is your family? How are your career goals? Are you progressing?” Well, tick Juvi and I just had a work check-in. Yeah, yeah. Like we didn’t get anywhere. It it would require us to build trust, a frequency and a period of time. As we talk more regularly, you get to know me. I display vulnerability by telling you like, I am tired.
You know, my daughter’s sick. I’m not at my best today. And then you feel you can share with me. And I respect the trust that you are bestowing in me. And over time, a real relationship builds. And that to me is, I view it like investing in all these little bank accounts of the people that I work with.
[00:01:23] Juvi Rivera: Hi, my name is Juvi Rivera and I’m the marketing manager for Factor and also the podcast host for the IT Factor podcast. In today’s episode, we have Rob Hartley, and today’s topic includes transitioning from active military to life as a civilian, transferable skills between the two, how Rob’s 12 years of experience in the Australian Army influences his leadership at Factor, and also a recent client work that had him bridge his experience from his past life in the military and his current life as a tech executive, what the results were for that project and his takeaways. And of course a lot of friendly banter and some practical advice along the way.
So to introduce our guest his name is Rob Hartley and he is one of the executives at Factor. He oversees operations and all things related to people. Rob started his career in the military where he served in the Australian Army for 12 years. Since separating from the military, Rob has worked in the IT sector cutting his teeth in Canberra based technology company before spending a few years at Microsoft prior to joining Factor.
Across those roles regardless of company or industry, Rob has come to appreciate that it is working with great teams that brings him the most satisfaction. Rob is also the parent of four young children and husband to his amazing wife Fi. He would like to think he brings this balance to his role at Factor and in understanding that we’re all juggling work with the broader priorities of life.
So Rob, welcome to the podcast.
[00:03:08] Rob Hartley: Thanks Juvi. I’ve been waiting for my invite. Thank you for having me on.
Thank you for mentioning the amazing wife part to keep me out of trouble.
[00:03:17] Juvi Rivera: Oh, well, you know, I’m just reading off what you wrote, so you should pat yourself on the back.
But yeah, no, I’m excited to have this conversation with you. I’ve recently listened to a podcast that you were on and learning more about your story, I was like, wow, there’s, there’s so much here that I feel like our Factor community could really get out of learning more about your time in the military, what it was like to transition into civilian life and also Yeah, how that informs your time here in Factor.
So my first question is can you tell us about your life before Factor? Those 12 years in the Australian army?
[00:04:06] Rob Hartley: Yeah, yeah, of course. Look, so I joined the Army when I was 18, so pretty fresh out of school. I had a gap year after school where I didn’t do a whole lot, just, you know, worked and tried to work out what I wanted to do with my life.
So I joined when I was 18, went across and did my university and officer training through the Army. So that took me across to Canberra. For four years, and then I graduated as a young officer and I kind of did the usual round of postings. So initially I was at Sydney at a work at a parachute battalion.
So yeah, got to jump outta planes and learn my core skills sort of on a, on a gun line. It was there that I did a 14 month exchange with the British Army. So we went across took a troop of guns and, and soldiers across did seven months of pre-deployment training in the UK and then deployed to Afghanistan for seven months with them.
Came back, posted up to Townsville for a few years some different, you know, military training up there and a bunch of cool stuff. And I took a bit of a segue within the Army and I went to study at the School of Languages and studied as an Indonesian linguist for a year. And then I, I posted back to dun True in the Royal Military College in Canberra, instructed there for two and a little bit years. And that was where I sort of decided to finish up my career . I felt it had a nice little poetic you know, learn a whole bunch across 12 years, come back to that training, pass it on to the next generation of, of people coming through.
Hopefully impart some of my lessons on them , and that’s where I felt it was a good time for me to step out and try new things and put down some roots with the family.
[00:05:41] Juvi Rivera: Yeah. Wow. I mean, 12 years, you, I feel like you summed it up with a nice a little bow, just did a little bit this, a little bit of that, but like 12 years in the army I’m sure was a hugely transformative time for you and those skills that you’ve learned at the front lines were really important for you and still are. So specifically I wanna ask you about like, the team-based skills and lessons you’ve learned and what you’ve taken away from the military that have transferred to Factor?
[00:06:13] Rob Hartley: Yeah, it’s a great question.
And look, I find it in hindsight, the military’s approach to training, leadership and management is quite unique because you do specifically train for it from the start of your career. So what I’ve noticed over the years is that in a lot of other organisations, It is something people are just expected to get better at as they go.
You start quite junior, you’re not expected to lead or manage anyone. You’re around for a while. You maybe get promoted to a senior role or you know, become a team leader and you kind of just expected to pick it up. Or maybe you show a bit of natural flare, a natural talent for it. But what I find is depending on the organisation, you can get quite senior people within an organisation who really have no training or no robust training in how to lead, how to manage and what to expect. Whereas in the military, I was what is termed a generalist officer. So they’re generalists and specialists. So specialist are really good at a specific thing and my type of trade, you were called a specialist generalist.
You were just being really good at across a broad range of things. And so at the heart of everything you do is leadership and management. So from when I joined at 18, that was four years of deliberate training on top of my uni studies. And you just start at the foundations of this is how you lead a section of eight people, and these are the skills, and this is how you present and this is how you give orders, and this is how you, you know, work in tough conditions. And it’s theoretical training in a classroom. You then take it out and you practice it in a field environment, you deliberately pushed outta your comfort zone.
You know, all the things you kind of see about the military, like what? You’re wet and you’re cold and you’re, you, you, you know, you’re doing all these crazy things. It’s with a purpose of pushing your own barriers and then trying to work out how you lead in those environments. So how do you lead when people are tired and hungry?
Yeah, and stressed. How, you know, how do you do it when you are tired and hungry and stressed? How do you keep you cool and that you cannot just read a book or listen to a podcast and learn? You have to practice and experience it. And so it starts from when you join that modular building block of Cool, now you’ve sort of graduated, you’ve done six months learning at how to lead eight to 10 people.
And, and then we’re gonna step that up and how do you, how do you do 30 people and three, lots of three moving around? And how does your leadership style change the more remote you get from people? Yeah. And so looking back on it, that that was an enormous gift from the military. The fact that from the time I graduated as a young officer, you were sort of in command of up to around 30 people.
Mm-hmm. And you, you a place that you’re trained for that you’re experienced in it. And it is very real. It’s not a side effect of what you do. It’s not sort of, oh, you have your main job and, and hopefully you can manage people. That is success means being good with people, being able to motivate them, being able to do the right things.
And I think in that lens, it’s got that super real element to it that it genuinely can be life or death. You have to learn that leadership isn’t just being popular. It’s a balance. How do you get close to people? How do you understand people? How do you motivate them? But sometimes you still need to make difficult decisions that are the right thing to do that might put someone’s life in jeopardy.
Mm-hmm. And those are all totally transferable to the business world. You know, hopefully no one’s life’s ever in jeopardy. But being able to make hard decisions, profit margin versus people’s wellbeing. You know, when is the time to balance the two? Yeah, so the, the great lessons that I learned enormously grateful to have had that experience and something that I look back on very fondly.
And I sort of feel that I did enough, but left early enough that I loved it. I’d do it all again if I could go back and talk to 18 year old me.
[00:10:12] Juvi Rivera: That’s awesome. So from what I’ve heard, one of the best things that the military gave you was just the experience to be a leader in tough conditions.
Yeah. Where you are leading people when they’re, when they’re tired, when they’re upset, when they’re homesick when it is a life or death situation, like very high pressure scenarios where if you know how to rally people even through their darkest times, that is a sign of like a good leader. Is that what you’re saying?
[00:10:50] Rob Hartley: Yeah. I certainly think it’s some of those elements. The other thing that I think is really worth calling out is that the opportunity I was given was a chance to fail in a safe environment. Mm-hmm. Because you are trained to be a leader. I did not start as a good leader. None of us do. But you go through these processes of being tested, sucking, learning lessons, having great feedback, and I find in, in the corporate world, it’s often that you just get promoted into a role and you’re expected to be good.
And the time isn’t really there to go, oh, actually I messed that up. I didn’t handle that as well as I could have. So what the military afforded me in that training command environment is a chance to learn and practice, which means learning when you are not good, learning your own quirks, learning where all your own pressure points are.
Failing an exercise, getting feedback from an instructor whose job is to watch you and say, you did this, you could improve that and here’s how. Try again. So, So I think that’s something that we can bring into a, into a corporate world. You know, you can’t expect people to just, just because they’re senior mm-hmm or have been around a while, you can’t just expect them to suddenly be good at leading people. You gotta get feedback. You gotta be willing to let them find their own way.
[00:12:05] Juvi Rivera: That’s a great point. It’s an art, right? Like leadership is a art, not a science. Correct. And, Like learning those soft skills, you can be like a senior consultant and be really good at project management, but that doesn’t mean you’re really good at, you know, leading a team of people and seeing their growth and having tough conversations.
So in the corporate world, not like the military world, there isn’t that structure for growing leaders the same way.
[00:12:38] Rob Hartley: I think there’s often the same importance put on it. Mm-hmm. You know, in, in that military setting, it is years and years of training and it is ongoing throughout your entire career.
As you progress, you will always go through another level of training about how to step up and do the next thing. I think in our corporate world it’s more about your core skills. You know, you’re a great developer and you keep training technically and you just expect it to get better at leading. Or maybe you do a short little, you know, online course or a workshop, but it’s just not given the same emphasis.
Mm-hmm. And if I think, if I go back to what you said earlier, About that ability to sort of, you know, control your emotions and all those other things. I, I think that is a really key lesson that I see people get wrong every day, which is, if you are in a leadership position, you have to be able to sort of compartmentalize and rise above your own frustration, your own fatigue, your own hunger, and make solid decisions.
And for me, that’s about having a filter. I can be tired. I can be afraid, but you can’t take that out on the team. And too often I think we see people with a boss or a manager and they go, oh, you know, they’re in a mood today, but they’re always like this when they’re tired or it’s really, Ooh, ooh, they’ve been fighting with their partner at home, and they’re obviously snappy, we better steer clear of them. In my world, that is not an acceptable outcome for a leader that you have to be above that. It doesn’t mean you’re not gonna feel those things. And part of being honest and transparent is sharing that with the team sometimes, but you can’t make your problem someone else’s problem.
You can’t take it out on the team.
[00:14:22] Juvi Rivera: Yeah. Yeah. I, I can definitely understand how some leaders take their position for granted and there’s this thing with like ego and like leadership, you know, at times where you get to a position and then you stop having that empathy and that patience, when you have more on your plate the bandwidth and the patience to deal with other people kind of shortens
[00:14:49] Rob Hartley: You said the keyword there. Empathy there is this really weird almost sort of assumption amongst some people that empathy and leadership don’t go hand in hand.
You know, I’m like, oh, that person’s a good leader. They’re very, they’re they’re strong and they’re firm. Yeah. Leadership is a hundred percent about empathy, and it’s not about being soft. You know, to my mind, being soft would be, if you are completely driven by your emotions, sometimes the right decision to make is gonna have a negative impact on someone.
For example, it might be the business has to close a business unit, and you do have to make people redundant. That is a terrible decision to make. But if it’s the right business decision, you might have to do that. You might have to sit someone down and look them in the eye and let them know that they’ve been made redundant.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t have empathy. Mm-hmm. And people seem to think that keeping distant from people and, and not having empathy somehow makes you a good leader. Whereas I, I think you have to lean into empathy. You have to lean into warmth, you have to get to know people cause at the end of the day, leadership is about motivating people to do something that they otherwise wouldn’t choose to do.
Yeah. And to do that, you have to understand what makes them tick. You have to really know them. And for that you need empathy. You have to get close to people. Yeah.
[00:16:14] Juvi Rivera: I think this is a good lead to my next question, which is about having good conversations between managers and or commanders and their direct reports.
And when it comes to having good conversations, I think we’ve started to touch on it like we need to have empathy. Okay. But how would you define having a good conversation based on your experience, both in the tech world or in the corporate world and also in the military?
[00:16:42] Rob Hartley: First and foremost, I think a good engagement, a good conversation, people has to be authentic.
So your style of having a check-in with someone might be completely different to my style. And that’s okay. We all have our own flair. You know, you said it earlier, leadership’s an art, not a science. So we all can do it slightly different ways and still get to a good outcome. So there’s nothing worse than watching someone try and lead in someone else’s style.
Yeah. You know, like I am a pretty jovial, lighthearted person, so that’s the way my engagements are with people. If someone else tried to joke and banter in that way, it would come across as inauthentic. Just the same as if I sat down and I was very, you know, serious and professional and suit and tie Rob.
It just wouldn’t come across as authentic. You know, you screw your nose up, right? Like, it doesn’t make sense. That’s not Rob, that’s not me. So people have to be true to themselves because I think. To establish that bond, you can only establish bonds with real people. You can’t establish a bond with a caricature of a person.
So if the leader is not being true to themselves and not leading in their own style, the person that they’re working with is never gonna build a personal connection. And I think you need that personal connection to break down barriers, to build trust, right, so that you can have a real conversation. It is so easy to go through the motions of “Hi Juvi.
How are you today? How is your family? How are your career goals? Are you progressing?” Well, tick Juvi and I just had a work check-in. Yeah, yeah. Like we didn’t get anywhere. It, it, it would require us to build trust, a frequency and a period of time. As we talk more regularly, you get to know me. I display vulnerability by telling you like, I am tired.
You know, my daughter’s sick. I’m not at my best today. And then you feel you can share with me. And I respect the trust that you are bestowing in me. And over time, a real relationship builds. And that to me is, I view it like investing in all these little bank accounts of the people that I work with.
When you do nice things or you engage with people when there’s nothing in it for you, you’re putting deposits into the bank accounts of all these people, and then at some stage they may need to make a withdrawal. And you’ve put that trust, you’ve kind of banked it all. You’ve built it up over time, and then they go when they really are having a hard time or they need to have a real hard discussion.
I do think I need a promotion and I’m worried about asking for it, or my life is just going into an absolute puddle at the moment, and I need help. You’ve got a trusted rapport there that they can kind of leverage on as a lifeline. So I think that’s like the core of building those good conversations.
Where you need to then take action from it is that it does need to be, you know, captured and actionable and followed up on, because otherwise it is just chat. So there’s two parts, right? You might just sit and talk to someone. But in a career setting and in a professional setting, people often want something out of that.
You know, they, if they’ve raised concerns with you, they’re gonna stop raising them if you don’t do anything about them. Sometimes people do just want a sounding board, but quite often it’s, yeah, you know, that’s a great point. What are we gonna do to progress your career? How can we identify what skills you need and can I get you on a course to help improve that?
What are we gonna do about your next promotion and how can we get you there in the next six months? So part of this client project we did recently was about how do you take the little gems of goodness that are happening and use technology to help sort of surface that up to a higher level where you can start to see across an organisation, okay, conversations are happening over here, but they’re not happening over here.
To try and balance out that need for everyone to have their own flare and, and leadership style, but you also need some consistency so that people’s experiences are similar across an organisation.
[00:20:41] Juvi Rivera: Right. So I wanna touch on the project that you worked on and that you spoke about at the Brisbane user group recently.
And the reason why you’re the perfect person to be presenting this is because it really touches your past life and bridges your current life which is, you know, this military style of having a commander and direct reports structuring conversations and making sure the people that these commanders are in charge of are being checked in on, like mental health wise, career wise on a regular basis.
So do you have any takeaways from that project? I know that was a pretty long engagement, but the outcome of that was pretty spectacular. I don’t know how much we can necessarily divulge, but just, you know, top level. I know that this project was really important to you.
[00:21:41] Rob Hartley: Yeah, I mean, we, we won’t go sort of into any of the client sensitivities, but we can talk easily about the, the outcomes and the types of things we tried to achieve and, and maybe the, even the way that the project was engaged and why it worked so well from my perspective.
I think obviously why I’m passionate about it is I am passionate about people. Some of my roles that I’ve been in were sort of individual contributor roles since I left the military where I didn’t have a team, and it was such a strange experience. I found myself in these organisations that were paying me really well and I just felt hollow. And it took me a while on some self-reflection to go, what am I missing? And it was the fact that for the first time since I was 18, I didn’t have a team, I didn’t have people to check in on, I didn’t have people around me. I was an individual contributing, like in a sales role or something like that.
And I just realised that that is not me and it’s never gonna be me. So that, that sort of really drove home to me that if I’m not working with people, The rest of the business world just doesn’t hold the same appeal to me. It’s like people are the ultimate chess board. Cause we are all, we, we bring so much to the party.
So it takes your full brain to say, You know, but what’s happening with this person on this day? And how can I get the best out of them? And how do they work with this person? And how can we, are we communicating our goals well enough? Are we getting forward? Take people outta the picture. And I am bored. So this project was about facilitating better conversations at all levels of an organisation.
And most importantly, it was about the lowest levels of the organisation. And I don’t mean lowest in any disparaging way. I mean furthest from the hierarchy. It was about trying to enable people at a junior level so you’re not talking like CEO of a company to someone, cause you’re gonna get a very filtered conversation there.
So, It’s about, you know, junior leaders, team leaders, how do we empower them to have the information at their hands to have a good quality conversation? Because that manifests so many more times across an organisation. If you rely on just one or two people at the top checking in you’re limited by time and you’re limited by, the honesty that you’re gonna get outta those conversations.
If you can empower junior leaders within an organisation to know what to say and have good conversations and feel empowered to do it, you can reach a much broader range of people. And then the other thing that’s really Im important for me is mental health and our own wellbeing, and juggling that in the workplace.
And so, you know, some of the findings that led to this project were about people not being supported through suicidal ideation or really serious mental health challenges, either because their issues weren’t being surfaced, or the people dealing with it didn’t have the right information and didn’t know what to do with it, so it didn’t go to the right places.
So that there is a technology part there where you can support people and say, you know, if you’re seeing these types of things, you don’t have to be a qualified psychologist or council worker, frankly, you’re not trained to deal with this. Here’s how you get help and you can try and connect the people to the right support within an organisation.
So that was a really cool part of it. Right. And then just in the way that the project ran in, in a, in a post covid world, we had some really tight timeframes. We had a client team and our Factor team in a shared workspace actually together every day. It broke down the barriers of us and them of consultant versus client.
We had a client that knew what they wanted to achieve and were empowered to make decisions. So it was just this awesome environment. You know, to get 10, 15 people together, moving quickly, moving with purpose. It was an awesome mix of banter, watching people develop in real time, great camaraderie with the client because there was a lot of common ground there.
So it was just, it was honestly to date the most enjoyable project I’ve worked on.
[00:25:46] Juvi Rivera: That’s awesome. I love to hear that. And you presented that project to the Brisbane user group recently. Factor’s mission is we like to create some social outcomes from our projects. And I think this specific project is a great example of that, how we’re taking a common problem, especially one that is a personal experience from you, and then taking technology and trying to bridge the gap and then going from there, showcasing it to other people and saying, these are problems that you can solve too.
So, yeah. How was presenting to the user group?
[00:26:32] Rob Hartley: Yeah, look, it was great and there were a few parts of it that made it so cool. Firstly, the way it initiated, so from our team, Zuleika and Jared two Brisbane based team members who are actively involved in that Brisbane user group, were the ones that said, Hey, you know, would you be willing to come up and present, and I sort of said, Hey, look, if if people are willing to listen, I’ll talk. So it was just cool. Those user groups are a fantastic grassroots way of getting people engaged. So the fact that it was initiated from our team members who organically in their own time go and meet with other people of similar tech technical interests to me is just fantastic.
So I was super grateful for the opportunity and the invite to go up and, and speak. The second part of it was that it meant I get to go up to Brisbane and spend the day with them before. So just cool to sit down with our team in Brisbane and we were on working on separate client engagements, but we got a WeWork room, so we got to sit together and that was really nice.
And then the actual user group, super engaged audience, you know, this is people that are after hours, you know, sort of 6:00 PM on a weeknight when a lot of people work from home. So have come into the city specifically for it. So I love that passion that people have to learn about the technology stack.
And the thing that resonated for me was they were all interested in how the technology could be used to solve a client problem. So luckily for me, they were not after the technical discussion of how was it configured, because I would struggle massively.
[00:28:12] Juvi Rivera: Oh, Zuleika was there. She could have helped out.
[00:28:14] Rob Hartley: Zuleika would’ve gotten us out of trouble. The interest was learning more about that client type, you know, not, not client sensitivities, but in that client environment how did you go about x .Do you find that the client had an understanding of the technology when it came to Y and they were all thinking, how could I apply this and these learnings to other clients. So great example on that project, we had crystal working as a BA slash UX UI designer because she’s got that amazing sort of graphic design flare. So the Canvas app that we built looked really pretty good. Mm-hmm. And a lot of people in the room said, you know, wow. Like, because they were tech first, they were kinda like we’ve never had a UI designer on our team.
Because it’s sort of just what it looks like is what it looks like. As long as the functions are there, who cares. Right? Whereas for our particular client, they said, this has gotta look and feel like a modern application. This can’t look and feel like it’s something straight out of the nineties.
So a number of people in the room sort of went, wow. I wonder if we could consider having one of our BAs cross-trained as a ui ux designer and bring that element to their teams. Or we spoke about that, you know, integrated scrum team and the way we worked with the client and, you know, there are a number of takeaways.
So it was an awesome opportunity just to talk them through a very informal, relaxed sort , ordered pizza and we’d sort of eating and chatting. So it was far more of a chat than a, a formal presentation. Yeah. But then people open up the questions largely from other consulting companies in Brisbane.
One of the key takeaways for me, again, about Zuleika that had helped organise the events. A lady came up to me afterwards and she had worked previously with Zuleika in a previous role several years ago, and she came up afterwards, introduced herself, and she, she sort of said, oh, look, you know, she was working for a health-based client in Brisbane, not not a techie. She just said she wanted a career change. She was looking for something more in her career, and she looked at what Zuleika had done with Power Platform and with a low-code application development, and they had worked together and in her mind now, Zuleika was just charging off into this new career and she said, I wanna do what she’s doing.
Reached out to Zuleika and said, How are you doing this? What are you doing? Lik had said, just start coming along to the user group. Mm-hmm. Everyone’s willing to share their knowledge. You can learn about the technology platform. And then as a result of this, this lady was upskilling herself on sort of the low-code fundamentals and the Microsoft platform was taking that back to her client was getting her employer to fund some training for her trying to find apps that she could get involved in.
I thought that’s such a cool organic way of this technical skillset manifesting. Yeah. And a great example from Zuleika of leadership at the lowest level of an organisation, and it shows that, yeah, leadership is not about a position. It’s an attitude that we can all have regardless of where we sit within a structure.
[00:31:19] Juvi Rivera: Yeah, I think you’ve touched on a lot of really good things there. Specifically how the user groups is such a democratic way to get into tech, which can be a very intimidating thing. But what we are focused on when it comes to Power Platform and dynamics and all of these low-code solutions is that you don’t have to have a degree in coding. You don’t need to know Python and c plus plus and all these like fancy languages. And I think that’s the beautiful thing where you can transition from one career to another. And then a lot of the times, because you transition from a career, like a career in BA and then to u y ux, you’re taking a lot of those skills and then you’re you’re even more valuable because then you can take your experience in one industry and then create business solutions for them in, in such a flexible, fast dynamic way. So that’s, that’s a really exciting thing about Microsoft and the Power Platform. Another thing that you touched on is Zuleika and how she has been so proactive about engaging the community, not only like outside, but also inside Factor.
She’s done a good job of mentoring one of the consultants , instilling in them also a passion for Power Platform. So yeah, I think when it comes to leadership, it doesn’t really matter the title. It really just matters about the attitude and that teamwork mentality of if I have information that could benefit you, I want you to benefit from it and I’ll take my time to mentor you or like take you to a user group.
We’d love to be able to start or restart a user group out in Canberra, which is a lot of where our work is and where a lot of our people are. Stay tuned. Watch this space to all of our listeners for some user groups in the future.
So now I want to transition into some more personal questions to round off this interview.
Rob, what are you currently working on inside and outside of work?
[00:33:36] Rob Hartley: Inside work. I’m looking at a lot of our internal operations and specifically around our sort of career pathways for our people. So part of the challenge of being a young and rapidly growing company is you get the, yeah, that excitement and chaos of that rapidly expanding bubble, but you also get problems with that.
A lack of structure, a lack of clarity. It is a bit of a maelstrom, so, now that I’ve rolled off more client work, a lot of my time is about focusing on how do we build good career pathways for our people. How do we provide people with the clarity that they need and what their role is and what their role isn’t?
How do we help ’em identify the next steps? So that’s really everything from clarifying our expectations. A lot of the work that we did on that client engagement we’re rolling out internally, so we’re rebuilding our own version of that application for our own employee hub. So we have a way of capturing goals, performance-based check-ins with our people, making sure that managers are having those conversations across the organisation.
So that’s something I love doing. And another area that I’ve picked up for this new financial year is around our philanthropic efforts. I don’t like Csr, E S G , I just don’t like those terms, but, you know, doing good stuff. Mm-hmm. We want our company to be more actively involved in society and doing things that make a difference.
So we have a number of initiatives that we’re looking to champion. We’ve got some money set aside in the budget for this year. So we’re trying to work out how we can do that and maximise our impact even as a small organisation. So that’s something I’m super happy to get behind. And outside of work I guess it’s kind of still working, but I have a voluntary role on the board of the Osca Freedom Project.
So that’s a charity that is working to prevent exploitation and sexual trafficking of young girls in Cambodia. So that takes a fair bit of my time. And then beyond that, you know, four young kids ,trying to be a good dad, trying to be a good husband. I spend as much time with them as I can, and that’s everything.
Just getting out, riding the bikes with ’em. Mm-hmm. The usual dad taxi, getting ’em to and from sports, reading books with ’em of an evening. It’s just that crazy whirlwind. But, but yeah. I love it.
[00:35:49] Juvi Rivera: I mean, talk about leadership skills being an art, not a science. I feel like that’s directly correlated to fatherhood.
[00:35:57] Rob Hartley: It’s chaos if nothing else. And if you can manage to motivate kids to move in roughly the right direction, that is a really strong starting point for managing other people in life. Yeah.
[00:36:07] Juvi Rivera: I feel like a whole nother conversation would be like, how did this fatherhood transition into, into leadership in the corporate environment? But that could be for a future episode.
Any advice you would give yourself from 10 years ago?
[00:36:22] Rob Hartley: Look, I think. Yeah, I’m a huge believer that we keep learning and I’ll always keep learning. I think the biggest shift for me over the last decade has been about finding balance. So I think that the me of 10 years ago was far more goal oriented and outwardly, I was chasing success probably.
I was very motivated. I would’ve come across as very motivated, very driven. I was willing to sacrifice a lot to get to where I thought I needed to be. But I think deep down, if you’re scratch a few layers, I was probably expecting work and achievements to bring me more happiness. When I think as I’ve matured, I’ve realised that you know, you kind of have to work out organically what happiness is for you. Find that and the goals and achievements then take care of themselves. So I think now I come from a perspective of it’s not just about achieving things or ticking things off a list, cause there’s just always gonna be another thing on the list.
It’s about being a happier, balanced person. It’s about be juggling time with family and your career. It is about balance across all things. Your health, your fitness, your sleep, your work priority is when to push, when to give, when to listen to your body and, and rest. As opposed to the me of 10 years ago who just treated my body like a higher car. You just push, push, push and you take it back with an empty tank. So I think that the advice to me of 10 years ago would be try and find balance.
[00:37:57] Juvi Rivera: Balance. That’s good. Any advice for anyone transitioning from the military into civilian life?
[00:38:04] Rob Hartley: Look, it’s a great question. That’s, it’s always topical. I would say have the belief that you can do it. There is a well worn path there of people who have successfully transitioned. But there is this sort of attitude out there today, maybe that you’re entitled to something or you are owed something because of your military service.
I disagree with that completely. You know, never put yourself in a victim mentality. If you’re leaving from the military, reflect on what you’ve learned. Be proud of that. But then the burden sits on you to identify what skills you’ve got. Find people that can help you translate that into other careers.
But you have to be realistic and acknowledge that you’ve gotta come and learn a new skillset. Because the, the 10, the 20 or 30 years that you’ve been perfecting your career in the military, other people have been perfecting a skillset outside of the military. So you need to be smart about where your skills transfer the best.
But then you also have to roll up your sleeves and go, you’re gonna have to learn a new industry or you’re gonna have to learn a new technical skillset. The second you, you think that you owed something or things should just be given to you, it’s a fast road to nowhere. Yeah.
[00:39:13] Juvi Rivera: Would you say that anyone who’s interested in kind of going down your route, A good and easy way to start would be joining a user group, a local user group, seeing what it’s about, starting those conversations, starting those networks.
[00:39:28] Rob Hartley: Yeah, look, it probably does depend on what people are looking for. For me personally, you know, starting on the tools and starting building applications wouldn’t have been the right path for me. I’m just not that, I’m not geared that way. I found my way into sort of operations management because I just found I had a good skillset for solving random problems and sort of bringing some systems and organisation to things. But I would say just reach out, you know, if anyone’s listening to this and wants to reach out to me and have a chat, more than happy to because I think it’s about finding what’s right for them. Because there are certainly facilities and groups available for whatever their preference is.
[00:40:05] Juvi Rivera: I think we have had a lot of really golden nuggets of. Truth, and I hope people on the other end have gotten a lot out of this podcast episode and. Yeah. Do you, any last words for the people? Anything you wanna shout out?
[00:40:26] Rob Hartley: No. Thank you for organizing and, and thank you for hosting this.
It’s a great effort. It’s a great, again, initiative that you’ve been driving and I’m really, really happy to have the chance to have a chat.
[00:40:35] Juvi Rivera: Woohoo. Hopefully one day you’ll be on the host seat. Feel like you’d be really fun to be the one giving the questions.
[00:40:43] Rob Hartley: We might have to flip this around for an episode and get the life of Juvi.
[00:40:48] Juvi Rivera: Oh boy, I think I’ll have to be absent that day. Cheers, Juvi. Well, thank you so much, Rob
and catch you next time on our next episode of the It Factor podcast.