Advancing Your Team with Internal Development Programs

May 09, 2024

Butler Machinery’s dedication to staff development is evident in numerous programs focused on career advancement and personal and professional growth. During this can’t miss general session, Dusty Schulz, executive director – regional operations, walks attendees through the programs Butler has built to grow its employees and prepare them for future roles. Each of the internal programs focuses on a different layer of development for employees.

The Fundamentals of Butler Leadership was specifically designed and tailored to the 20-store AGCO and Cat dealership to develop strong and consistent leaders. Butler understands that leadership is much more than a position or job title — it’s about creating positive transformations throughout the organization. During this program, employees discover practical, engaging and relevant techniques that give leaders the tools needed to elevate their effectiveness and build relationships.

The Lead Yourself program is a carefully crafted initiative tailored to individuals seeking to make an investment in their personal growth and development. This program highlights that “leadership” is not the same as “management.”

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Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids