You Can’t Automate Passion: Engineering People

Welcome to the Oil and Gas Sales and Marketing podcast where every week your hosts, Mark LaCour and Matt Bertram share proven strategies and real-world tactics to help you connect with customers and close more deals. Let's do this! Howdy welcome back to the Oil and Gas Sales and Marketing show I'm your host Matt Bertram. Mark LaCour was here earlier said hi to everybody and then took off and said good luck and we're at the Cellwell conference here in

Houston Texas and I have Laurie Hall here, Laurie Peterson Hall with New Horizon Strategies to talk a little bit about, well, enterprise selling in the oil and gas space as well as some business coaching and that sort of thing. Hi, thanks for having me Matt. I really appreciate being here and Cellwell itself is such an energizing event. Yeah, I know it's been really great and we got to talk earlier and we talked about some of the stories. I can't wait to get into

this podcast. Excellent. So why don't you just kind of set the table and tell everybody a little bit about your background? Yeah, that sounds great. Yeah, happy to. So I like to joke and say I'm a recovering NASA engineer meant to be funny since we do coaching consulting and facilitation now with New Horizon Strategies. So how did a recovering NASA engineer get into doing people development? Well, that was kind of my journey. I thought for the longest time

if you built the perfect system then people would come but it turns out you actually need to get people on board before they even understand what perfect looks like in the first place and that makes it perfect or so that's why I opened New Horizon Strategies almost 15 years ago and now we do coaching consulting and facilitation with a team of about 12 different champions instead of bench coaches or bench facilitators that sounds so stagnant. We're helping

leaders get bigger breakthroughs faster through coaching consulting and facilities. And you have a lot of initials after a name because you just go through it really quickly. It's like my shield, our little shield, all those letters. So when I was in the government that's when I had my big aha moment. I thought if I could fix the government, hopefully everybody's laughing again. The one most has decided that it might not be possible. I know. I was like oh maybe I can help and

then I saw how he was doing it. I thought maybe not but for a long time I tried to implement Lean Six Sigma process improvement principles to try to fix the processes. I didn't realize at the time I was trying to make NASA the place that it felt like when I first started there that level of excitement and energy that I think we all have early in our careers and then somewhere maybe around our 30s or 40s we kind of hit a plateau or we hit a wall and we're

like is this it? That's what my Lean Six Sigma experience was that helped me to see that it's not just about fixing the process it's about making sure that people love what they do including us. Well I'd love to talk a little bit more about how important mindset is because I think you kind of alluded to that. Mmm. Mmm. Mindset is everything and that makes sense when you say that from your brain's perspective but from your heart's perspective I think we still

sometimes struggle with getting our alignment down. I remember for the longest time and maybe some of your listeners can resonate with this too. I felt like I should just enjoy what I was doing because I had for so long and then I thought maybe it's about making a difference in people's lives. How am I making a difference? And people would say Lori you're making a difference and that's when I realized something really important and this comes back to

mindset. I think the better question is is this making a difference to me? Mmm. Because when we do the things that make our soul soar and sing and really help us thrive in life that's when we tend to make the biggest difference to the rest of the world too. And then let's port that to a business setting. I have many times walked into an organization that I've come in on a consulting gig or trying to fix a problem and really quickly either you

realize everybody's on the same page and is trying to solve this problem or not everybody's wrong in the same direction. Yeah that's typically the majority of the time. I think it's an Albert Einstein quote that says if I had an hour to solve a problem I'd spend 55 minutes figuring out what the problem actually was and then five minutes trying to solve it. Which is what I love about facilitation is to help people come together and essentially bring that problem to light

and talk about it and get really clear on what it is. Normally when you get that level of awareness with a group together this is the beauty of facilitation. You sometimes get alignment for free not always but most of time when I have an aha moment with everybody else it's like this permission to just be human and realize I didn't have to have it all figured out. We didn't have to know the answers. We discovered it ourselves and after awareness and

alignment then you can work on an action and accountability of whatever it was that you wanted to do moving forward. What do you think? Oh so all right now let's look at that overlaid oil and gas. So maybe share some examples with some of your oil and gas clients of where you've walked into a room and you don't need to share the client or anything but just share the situation of what happened and maybe the transformation that happened through the facilitation.

Perfect, perfect. Well we're honored to work in energy and oil and gas and in sustainable energy too and a pro case and a con case. Yeah that'd be great. I'm gonna focus on the coaching side because we've done a lot more work in coaching but we've done some facilitation in oil and gas too but one thing that I think some companies for some reason start with is an approach to coaching that this will help fix someone and sometimes you have a culture

that thinks coaching means I did something wrong and I'm bad and that can be really hard to overcome. That's a cultural thing. So then when a coach shows up with the client sometimes the clients maybe beat down or they've got their arms crossed like I don't understand why I need to be here and that's hard for the coach too because we're not really convincing anyone they need to be here. We're trying to help them gain that awareness. Typically when

we figure out what we really need that's the biggest chunk of trying to move forward. We wouldn't be as successful as we were if we didn't know how to put an action plan in place but just figuring out what that next step is is critical. So in one case we were working with a client who had gone through a major restructuring from having sort of like a stovepipe organization in their downstream department and moving it into more of like a supply chain. Each level

depended on each other and it created a significantly better integrated organization but anytime you have a change like that at that large or this is one of the largest companies in the world it has a massive impact on the culture and how people work with each other. So that organization included some leadership coaching in that organizational change that transition which was really helpful. So in one case one of the a handful of clients that

had an opportunity to work with was not interested in coaching at all. After about the second session of just talking through data and numbers of what's this transition look like and essentially he was kind of asking me like to justify why I was talking to him almost like a test which is okay you know I'm a recovering engineer I don't mind playing the game a little bit but I had a conversation with him about like what is it you really want though because it

doesn't feel like coaching is what you really want at this time and he said no I don't want coaching at all they told me that I was supposed to come to these and I'm not sure what I'm supposed to talk about. So that actually was the best coaching session I ever had with him because it gave him permission to do what he wanted to do to put the steering wheel in his hands. Conversely though even in a situation where maybe you're vol untold you will have coaching I had

another leader of one of the world's largest refineries that I had an opportunity to work with and they had such extreme ah-has that it completely transformed the way that they were able to lead their organization and they made some pretty significant changes because of it. Sounds like there's a bell curve right and some people want the coaching and want to excel and they look at as a rocket booster and then others are hesitant to change and then there's

probably everyone in between. Yeah that's a good way to describe it and no judgment sometimes maybe we've just been through a huge change. I don't want to open up the treasure chest of my own personality and my psyche and figure out what my belief systems are that are gonna maybe I just did that last year or maybe for whatever reason I just don't want to do that right now but that's where coaching whether it's an oil and gas or other sectors or even coaching

with sales professionals is so powerful because it helps us gain awareness on the thing that matters the most to us right now today and then what do we do about it? I love that so I have a personal question when you're interacting with people I'm big on technology my mom works for Microsoft like I do a lot of stuff in the AI and marketing space how are people viewing on average AI is just wrecking ball into everything and it started in maybe marketing and sales

it's really an HR now it's starting to dig through HR I actually have a chart of where it's probably gonna go next this was a LUD University I've been taking a lot of AI courses and I wanted to see how people across the pond were viewing it and they had some great frameworks and it's almost dead on of what's happening because the big thing for me when AI started having is like are we gonna have jobs in a couple years what's gonna happen is it gonna take my job

how is it gonna affect it and you have to embrace it and I had people in my organization that were writing content for example I'm not gonna touch anything with AI I'm like well you use Grammarly don't you there was a whole mindset shift there is hey there's skill sets we have to learn in automation and agentic flows and things that we're talking about and LLM visibility like there's all these kind of new things that are happening and getting everybody

in the organization on the same page was the first step like you talked about yeah I'm curious how as you interact with your clients what are their view points on it is it kind of homogenous or is it all over the place or just what have been some of your experience there I would love to give you a more concrete answer and say that it's homogenous and people are like yeah this is like a good thing it's all over the place I think it's the Wild West for people but I did a

fantastic course on AI for coaches earlier this year and it was eye-opening I thought I understood it pretty well turns out I only had like a little toe in the water and they pushed me off in the deep end but it's an excellent question to consider would AI improve to the point where we could rely on it almost as a coach or a therapist or just somebody that we can brainstorm with and so we tried that with some of the different AI platforms to understand the

level of empathy that showed up and in many cases I call a coaching session the awareness funnel we're taking the chaos of the day we're trying to think through it we're trying to kind of then like feel through it like hi this is driving me crazy or oh my gosh I'm so excited I'm a little nervous whatever and then sometimes we get down to our core belief systems sometimes that are helping us or maybe getting in the way and that's often where we get a big

aha that's the power of coaching is the aha moment not the action plan the action plan comes after the aha moment could AI help me get to that aha moment short answer yes it can it absolutely can but what at least the research that I've seen so far is showing is that I think when people know it's not a human being there's a level of empathy that's missing so they may you know when you do like an online training course versus when you actually

have an instructor training course like that just feels different sometimes the online one I'm like yeah yeah yeah maybe I'm flying through it because it doesn't matter as much it's like when you pay $500 for something versus $5,000 for something I am subconsciously assigning more value to the thing that I'm paying more money for and so when it's a human being on the other side I think humans are still subconsciously assigning more value to the impact that

that aha moment has I can totally see that I see there's a lot with like intent because I do a lot with online data I love data like data is just I could talk to you for hours and I forgot the name of the book I wish I remembered it was talking about Google searches and it was talking about what people were typing in Google and they're collecting all this data and people were a lot more open about wow it was pretty interesting to see what people are searching for I would

think if the intent was right and you're like hey no one's listening now FYI anything you put in chat GBT is completely recorded by the federal government can be recalled for whatever Pfizer whatever it is but basically it's not a human so I can see the value assigning like based on that intent basis and then I can see like oh this helps with pattern recognition maybe I can understand myself more there are a lot more questions are unstructured now

that are going into search prompts is on average eight words that people are using search engines for it used to be like a core word and people would sort and now people want just the answers given to them I think that there's going to be a bell curve adoption yeah blended approaches maybe yeah I think there's a blended approach because one of the things we did really early on is we scraped the transcript of all our calls that we put an agent in right and

there's some issues around having an agent in all the meetings that just right he's only came out but yeah pull the transcript run it through a custom prompt that's uploaded with like sales frameworks that we want to find out more and then it sends an automatic email on how they did perfect so if you and I are talking and I probably should set this up for the podcast Matt stop talking let the guest talk they're the expert right you'll tell you what to do

those little touches because you're not defensive because this is what yeah the data is just wrong and you're gonna you're gonna sign wait that differently I think that there's a really good a blended approach because something like that and there's of course other use cases but that just chipping away every call and just little tweaks can start to make a big impact especially if you apply it against yes a huge number of sales professionals I don't remember the

name of the tool I can get back to you on that there is a software tool that's AI based where you can record of course with your clients permission we're never gonna do anything without the client's permission you can record the coaching session and almost use it as a mentor coach so you can see that how often did I talk versus how often did the other person talk and it's even measuring tone and inflection pauses most good coaches are part of the

International Coaching Federation it's the most globally recognized certifying body for coaches in the world which is really helpful to use a certified coach there's a lot of great people out there but use somebody that buys by the code of ethics of ICF but it helps to also monitor your coaching conversation against the competencies that the International Coaching Federation uses so I just again learned about that in my AI for coaches class

and it was phenomenal that would make me a better coach at least it would give me more awareness because I don't have that data at my fingertips right now all right I know I jumped off the deep end everybody hopefully y'all follow me bring it back so Lori I know you have some stories that you put together that you prepared for I would love to open it up for you to kind of go through some of those that you thought might be valuable for the listeners good good

excellent well I know maybe less of an interest in exactly what coaching is but that's often how coaching happens is it sort of sneaks in the backdoor and then people go like oh maybe that would be something I'd like to try but specifically in oil and gas organizations what are they looking for when they're trying to hire anyone that's going to help them with their human forces and is that typically going to be driven by HR or is it going to be an executive team or a

technical leader that has an issue with somebody or all the above excellent question it's really all the above but in my experience when you're working with a global organization they have a global HR function that's typically looking for someone who can deliver services with a repeatability some of the organizations that I've worked with to get into oil and gas companies I was a subcontractor for because they were able to supply people across the globe and I just

happened to be the one that's in Houston Texas working with some of the folks here and time is big thing yeah so so on one hand it's very systematic it's HR focused they have multi-year contracts to deliver the same thing so that they're creating a language a common language in their culture when it comes to coaching though a lot of times executives have worked with someone who they've already built rapport with is pull them in and there is a special vendor right that's

right they will say make this person a vendor that we can work with in that way it's a little bit probably how almost all industries are but I've noticed that there's a trend in tech industries specifically and I think maybe this is because it was my initial hypothesis to that if you build the perfect system people will come so we don't have to worry about the people side just make sure that the operations and the tech work and maybe there's some HR people

that are like screaming right now like what did she just say but you do need the people side of things and some tech organizations are less likely to identify their people needs proactively if that makes sense and I think it's a little bit harder to break into some of the oil and gas companies because they aren't necessarily prioritizing the human capital equipment first yes equipment first and then the other thing that I think is happening in the oil and gas

sector is there's oh my gosh how many decades now 50 years maybe 70 years seven decades worth of riding the roller coaster of the ups and downs of this industry they're used to like how do I lean out everything including people we're seeing that in Houston right now a lot of layoffs and then when do I bring him back up again and that makes it a kind of tough market to get into which just means you have to develop the relationships yeah I can totally see

that most people that I talked to that are in sales or in oil and gas in general are like I've mostly been in oil right and I might go work at a golf shop or something but that's what's hard for oil and gas companies because when they go through these cycles they lose really skilled people and it takes a long time to get somebody trained back up when you need them again yes and if they get lodged in wherever they're at they're not coming back people want that

consistency yeah I think it's a big part of organizations understanding what that core threshold is and keeping it consistent there might be surges where we need additional people but to maintain that through that and be able to project that out is maybe why oil and gas seems to restart a lot yeah right there's new trends and things but I can also see that as a positive because a lot of people from aerospace or different engineering platforms come in yeah

and bring skill sets I've actually seen more than anything people come from other industries see like oil and gas lagging and then they come up with an idea and then they go start a company I remember I forget the name of as a reservoir engineering software but basically the name escapes me right now but he got laid off he got his like big bonus or whatever his or not and he was a reservoir engineer and there was a tool that they were using and they had

to be in the office to go in and put in all their stuff oh my and he was like this should be a SAS platform yeah yeah we don't need to go in the office yeah we don't need to go in the office and as engineers are graduating from all the major schools the expectation is cloud yes like and if you can't get on if I will not mention the organization they are outside of oil and gas but they are a major organization I'm talking to them right now about Microsoft Dynamics

implementation okay and they have like a older ERP system and they can't log calls in the field right now in there with the sales team you can't log calls like on an app in the phone or on a laptop plate do you know what year it is yeah yeah something that needs to happen rather that's so funny that's so it's not funny I mean it's where people are but this is going back to AI people aren't even to web 2.0 people are now figuring out social media is important yeah right

yeah like now really people are like okay social me and then we have AI and then this is going to be like blockchain integration and payment structures technology moves so fast that if you don't stay with it like you're you get left behind you have to continue and I think see guys I'm sorry I go off the rails sometimes relay this but bringing it back people got to have that right mindset and they have to understand what's happening and they need to weigh

everything that's going on and many times coaching can help coaching can help insert and training can help insert something that you're not going to maybe do on your own yeah and help get through the transition I think actually everything that you're saying is all in the same general direction that we are in the army I think was the first one that used the VUCA term you know I haven't heard all uncertain I think it's constant change and ambiguity VUCA that

we live in this VUCA world and I was in the 80s I think I was in the 80s and it's just non-stop and the truth is as much as we may feel the pain associated with constant change to be alive is to be in a constant state of change yes and to not necessarily just get you know that bottom line revenue of course that's something that's important but to actually live a life that makes me smile I think that's the goal we want to do the things that matter to us in our lives

and it's painful when new technology comes along but at the same time it's a blessing too for us to be able to use things oh my god marketing so much easier for me with AI than it used to be before when I would try to figure out like how to write something helping people navigate the change through whatever adoption process it is whether it's tech or organizational or maybe even something happening in your personal life and what are the core

principles or guiding stars for you that you follow or frameworks I feel like you have a sense about you and I feel like you're operating in some kind of framework system or system can you tell him I'm a process engineer I would love to hear more about that because I think perspective is so important and I think a lot of times people just are not equipped with the tools yeah and I don't feel like even in school we prepared you and then all the stuff that's happening

now of course you're not prepared for it yeah and we're all living today an exciting time but you got to get used to this constant state of flux and change and chaos and noise like sales and marketing well any good sales and marketing organization will just take it to the next level and just ruin it for everybody right I mean now we're talking about text laws okay like there's in Texas there's text laws yeah I remember when there's facts blasting okay it used to be a volume game

now it's a personalization game and like kind of cutting through the noises is really important but I would love to hear more about the frameworks maybe that you operate or even the guiding principles of your your organization excellent excellent happy to share thanks great question so I think fundamentally there's one thing that we're trying to do and that's to help people maybe this is analogous maybe this is just dead on for some folks but I feel like we have a light

inside of us and sometimes we live in a world with too many shoulds self-imposed maybe externally imposed but we have too many shoulds of how I should do it how I'm supposed to live my life what I should have accomplished by now how much I should be done and all of that dims are light all of that dims are our ability to shine and this is why I say recovering engineer because the me from 20 years ago would be like what's all this fruit first stuff she's talking about but the truth is if we only have 80 90 100 years on the planet to live this life then what are we

doing with it and what really matters so I think fundamentally we're trying to help people understand what really matters one of the ways that we do that is I have a new horizon strategies transformation model so when we're working one-on-one with folks we use our it's an alliteration reflect resonate resolve refocus and it's like Deming's plan do check act in a sense the kind of that change curve like how do we actually adopt something new into our lives and then there's another model that we use when we're working with a group kind of similar concept it's

also an alliteration it's what I indicated before awareness alignment often shows up for free and then action and accountability that's how we focus on working with teams in team coaching or when we're working in organizations and doing facilitation with groups we focus a lot on the awareness and alignment piece all that to say it's all that awareness funnel how do we get to that aha moment I think there's a time and place for people to be paid to have the answer when you hire a consultant by all means expect them to have the answer have them do the report on the side

when you hire a coach or facilitator you're hiring them to be present with you to find the answer that already exists within you you just have to dust it off to figure out how to get your light to shine as brightly as possible so to kind of land the plane with this podcast I want to ask you one more question and then find out a little bit more about how people can get in touch with you when you're approaching oil and gas what are the biggest pain points that have been consistent in organizations that you've seen of when people need to think that coaching or

consulting is what they need that's the answer because I think a lot of times when you said it comes in the back door aha they know that there's a problem but they don't know what the answer is interesting who that's a good one that's a great question okay so the first thing that came to mind is the amount of time that it takes us to adopt an idea so I'm gonna say typically senior leaders will go off and think about something and be like man here it is this is the perfect solution maybe that took two months or three months or half a year to come up with and they had a tiger

team that you know went off and figured it out and brainstormed it and then they launch it to the rest of the organization and they go we finally figured it out here's the perfect solution and the people what do they do we think it's going to be perfect but normally people balk at it because they go why what is this why do I need it why do you think it's perfect this doesn't work for me here are all the reasons this doesn't work for me I think Brené Brown was the one that said fears and feelings will always be part of the equation they're smaller when you address them

up front proactively than when you address them reactively you address them either way that's an indication of one thing that's really important is that we need to give people the same level of time it took us to adopt the solution and it makes so much of a difference to include them initially I should probably have her on the podcast I actually know her through my wife she has a house here yeah Brené's great she's great yeah she's written a lot of amazing books and created a language for an area that I don't think most humans have ever really

talked about or thought about yeah which is the connection between vulnerability and courage yeah no I love that yeah all right so how do people find you find out more about your work follow you on social media that sort of thing awesome awesome thank you so newhorizonstrategies.com go to my website you'll find our team you'll find the about us you'll hear a little bit more about what our why is and why that's our why and the biggest thing that might help people remember it is a quick story if you don't mind so of course we do coaching consulting and facilitation

please check us out if you're ready for that level of transformation so why new horizon strategies I remember when I was first thinking about leaving NASA and I was like oh man NASA was everything to me it had to find me I didn't realize that but a lot of us hang our hat we hang our worthiness on where we work especially the first part of our lives and to think about leaving that place was really thinking about leaving what I had to find my worthiness by after months of trying to figure it out and think it through and figure out a name because you can't do anything

in your business without a name this was about 15 years ago I came up with new horizon strategies sorry domain's open cool I bought it and 20 minutes later I'm in this like honeymoon phase of like maybe I should google what else is new horizons so I did I googled it and there was a funeral home new horizons that's catchy and then there was this NASA page and I thought what I'm trying to get away from NASA look I still love NASA I think NASA for everything including the level of discomfort to go do something else but so I found this NASA page and it turns out in 2006

NASA had launched a satellite to go to Jupiter to go to Pluto to take the first photos of Pluto when it was still a planet now we know there might be a lot of Pluto's out there but so I'm reading through it because I'm so fascinated by space stuff as it went around Jupiter to get a gravity assist from Jupiter you can't make this stuff up it used the lorry camera lorry hall it used the lorry camera the long range reconnaissance imager to help bring things far far away into focus and that's when I felt like I got a sign from the universe literally saying lorry you're on

the right track new horizon spacecraft and new horizon strategies are going in the same direction I feel like there's no coincidences and for everybody listening the earth is not flat everyone thank you so much for listening make a difference not a sale thanks for listening to OGGN the world's largest and most listened to podcast network for the oil and energy industry if you like this show leave us a review and then go to oggn.com to learn about all our other shows and don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter this show has been a production

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