HOW TO CREATE URGENCY IN THIS ENVIRONMENT

The changing power industry is positioning leaders to lead their organizations to a successful future or get stuck in the past. Our last article outlined some of the common pitfalls in leading this change. This article presents some solutions.

Find and integrate new capabilities, holistically.?Mergers and acquisitions aimed at bringing on new capabilities and talent should always be on the table as options. This is especially true in long-standing and often slow-moving regulated monopoly organizations. Leaders need to consider both sides of this inorganic growth opportunity: the technical and the talent/culture.?

The first is often the focus, with unregulated small entrepreneurial company products, services, or technology being assimilated and leveraged by the larger organization. What is often underleveraged is the impact of a new culture and new ways of working (which enabled the acquired organization to build its successful technology in the first place).?

By considering culture as far upstream in the due diligence process as possible, leaders can be more deliberate about retaining the new talent that brings an innovative culture. Bringing culture and new ways of working into the conversation early helps employees feel valued, will increase their chance of staying, and ensures the positive impact they have on the acquiring culture is realized.

At the same time, current teams need to understand the vision and opportunity presented by this new team. Create networks early that look to build conversation, collaboration, and trust across the teams.

Create room for (and connections between) old and new.?How do you motivate the organization to perform today while bringing new technologies (shiny new objects) to position for the future? Do everything in the context of “tomorrow” – building transferable skills. This needs to happen at the communication and messaging level and all the way through to capability-building.?

As an example of putting this into action: A region that created almost half of corporate’s global free cash was asked to increase margins and “stay the course” so the increased profits could be reinvested in their green tomorrow—essentially an internal carbon offset market. While this increased the carbon investment opportunities of the overall organization, leaders needed to help regional employees see how their work was the foundation of the greener tomorrow and upskill them so they could have – and see – a future in the organization. Leveraging the mantra (not just keeping it as a corporate slogan) enabled employees to see how they were all contributing to the larger corporate strategy, whether they were working directly on innovative green technologies or funding them.

Build a?change-competent?culture. Leaders need to create a holistic change-competent culture: a culture that can help spur the ongoing internal innovation needed to accelerate the pace of change and capability-building in a historically hierarchical environment.?

This kind of change competency requires more than just training. It requires a deliberate shift in how the organization views and engages with different internal and external stakeholders (such as unions and customers). It focuses on creating spaces and initiatives that bring different groups together to explore problems and opportunities.?

One organization we work with created a common “change language” through training, and then put it into practice through well-supported demonstration projects that encouraged new ways of working and thinking. In addition to the impact of the specific innovations and digital transformations that came out of this work, the organization also maintained a focus on building broader capabilities (e.g., agility, resilience, and customer-centricity).

So much of the future of power is still unwritten. There is no blueprint on what it will look like. However, today’s power sector leaders can build teams with the urgency, agency, and capabilities to shape this future. It requires an intentional focus on communication, culture, and collaboration between the experts of today and the visionaries of tomorrow. Creating the space and incentives for these groups to come together and recognizing the critical value that each plays will help accelerate progress towards the future of power.

Future articles in this series will provide more specific insights on fostering collaboration across the workforce, from bridging analog to digital infrastructure and skills to bridging perceived “generational” divides.