SUMMARY & THE CHALLENGE
Summary
This British multinational oil and gas company employs 93,000 people and operates in more than 70 countries. In 2021, the company announced its ‘Powering Progress’ strategy, to set out the target to become a net-zero emissions energy company. The strategy articulates a very clear direction for the next few decades, with the ultimate goal of becoming a net-zero business by 2050, while growing shareholder value, providing the energy the world needs today and, in the future, whilst Powering Lives and Respecting Nature. Alongside this overarching strategic goal, the London-headquartered firm must also satisfy global demand for a robust energy system, continue to deliver shareholder and customer value amidst headwinds from political and socio-economic shifts, changing learner paradigms, and climate change pressures.
To deliver the new strategy, leaders need to pull on different levers of performance which goes beyond their technical expertise and practical skills. They need to connect with their deeper purpose and values, relate and listen to others without having all the answers to co-create solutions to meet evolving needs in a rapidly evolving and unchartered business context. So, the company needed a new leadership development approach which would assist middle managers as they became key drivers of organisational performance and strategy in a paradoxical world i.e. needing to drive higher performance standards whilst also improving psychological safety.
The learning journey would do this by developing the inner leadership world of the manager — such as building the individual continuous learning mindset as well as their ability to effectively manage opposites and uncertainty — while building new outward-facing behaviours such as showcasing an ongoing learner mindset and building psychologically safe environments for themself and their teams. All of this is geared to better manage teams, embody the company’s key mindsets and behaviours to drive a strong performance culture in an uncertain future.
As such, Hemsley Fraser and this British multinational oil and gas company developed LEAD for Team Leaders — a Brandon Hall Gold award-winning ecosystem of learning and development for leaders.
THE CHALLENGE
As described, in 2022 the company had a new leadership skills challenge. Not only did the business need to develop stronger core leadership skills, and then have middle managers embody and showcase these, it needed these individuals to adapt to their new roles in a recently reorganised business and build on their technical expertise.
This meant creating a learning journey that would develop managers who can think beyond conventional and logical means of what is possible to work effectively and inclusively to achieve seemingly opposite outcomes. To get to this place entails deeper, strategic thinking and attentive listening to understand how issues can be turned into opportunities that create winning outcomes for staff, the organisation, shareholders and society. To this end, leaders are guided on an interconnected inner and outer learning journey.
This inner journey would mean middle managers building a secure leadership foundation. This gives leaders an improved base of self-understanding and awareness, so they can better understand their impact on others, deepening relationships with team members and peers, and appreciating that individuals will have different viewpoints. This improves performance and links to the leader’s outer journey would mean learning to lead well and then embodying the company’s desirable mindset and behaviours. These include modelling curiosity, empathy and humility for team members, encouraging intelligent risk-taking and prioritization of business outcomes and leading others in reflecting on their learner mindset.
The impact of the new skills would also need to be measurable: both in how they impacted managers, their teams, the business, and individual retention and progression.
