Energy Renewables | Senior Leadership Team | Development & Strategy
Energising an energy company’s leadership team around an ambitious new vision and roadmap.
Summary
A series of 1-2-1 stakeholder engagements and workshops to improve the cohesion of an energy company’s leadership team, and to help them define a collective company ambition, and roadmap to guide and communicate this journey.
Back story
The company was facing an uncertain future in a market with ageing plant, an ageing workforce, rising operating costs, and increasingly disruptive new technologies and commercial models.
The company’s leadership team was made up largely of long serving internal promotees. Succession was an evident issue with several of the team due to leave in the next 2 years. Meanwhile one much younger, highly entrepreneurial leader had joined in recent months. The team was not as settled or as effective as it could be.
There was a strong focus around managing and delivering on in-year contracts. The CEO understood the need to lift his colleagues’ eyes towards some strategic goals and the development of capability to deliver on these.
The ambition the team wanted to reach for
The CEO wanted consulting and facilitation support to help the leadership team to:
- Explore and define how it must work together to successfully lead the company into a very challenging future.
- Define a collective ambition and roadmap to deliver and communicate this.
Solution and outcomes
We ran a series of 1-2-1 interviews and two workshops, one of which included a number of creative outdoor elements.
“The morning session outside worked exceptionally well and really appealed to the team.”
The first workshop used Appreciative Inquiry to explore the question, “What does it mean for us to lead with drive and daring to create a long-term sustainable future?”
The pre-workshop 1-2-1s drew out participants’ lived experience of high performing teams and their personal contributions to this success. The workshop developed these in the specific context of the present leadership team and the ambition to lead with drive and daring in the service of a long-term sustainable future.
“An excellent day with lots of interaction and substance.”
The workshop produced nine action themes, from which the team collectively committed to address the top 3 priorities.
One of these was to gel around the co-creation of a company vision and a roadmap for the transformation that was needed. This set the requirement for a second workshop.
“Style throughout by both facilitators was brilliant.”
Second and third cycles of interviews led to the development of a candidate ambition and draft roadmap. This was then finessed during a day-long workshop involving the leadership team and shareholder representatives.
“A really well planned and executed workshop.”
This achieved agreement and ownership around immediate momentum-creating activities and projects within each roadmap “swim-lane”. Governance and holding-to-account arrangements were also agreed.
