Managing Talent for a just transition

Those that have been following my newsletter for the past two years will know my passion for management, leadership and talent development. If you have worked with me since 2009 when I switched from a legal career to HR and joined TotalEnergies (or Total as it was back then) you will also know I’ve developed a keen interest in energy, and the huge transformation of our industry in light of the climate crisis. Let’s look at how the two are linked : management and climate.

Before delving into this article, an announcement. I’m going to hit the pause button on this newsletter for a while. I’ve really enjoyed writing it, and sharing my thoughts each month with a humbling number of subscribers (almost 60,000!), but life is very intense at the moment as I’m working on perhaps the most ambitious and strategically important project of my career to date. More on that below...

A just transition

Ambitious action on climate and global warming is an imperative if we are to ensure a future for humanity. The Paris Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, achieved in 2015 (COP21), together with the Glasgow Climate Pact (COP26), implies massive but necessary industrial transformation as we move towards a zero-net-carbon future , together with society. This obviously impacts on jobs in fossil energies and power generation with a transition towards renewable energy sources, and the scale of transformation required is equally true in all energy-intensive industries. Sustainable development is no longer just a nice idea, it is a matter of survival.

Just transition, ensuring that the transition towards a climate-neutral economy happens in a fair way leaving no one behind, is the sustainable pathway to get there.

The project work that is keeping me busy is designing and preparing the ambitious global rollout of a multi-module program called Visa for TotalEnergies. With energy accounting for 76% of GHG emissions (according to Climate Watch, World Resource Institute), energy companies must clearly be part of the solution, so the importance of ensuring the widest possible alignment and understanding is crucial. We aim to reach between 30,000 employees globally, by the end of this year. The program aims to ensure that all employees are onboarded to the new strategy of transforming to a broad energy company voted in May 2021 to enable our ambition as a world-class player in the energy transition, the climate and sustainability principles of actions approved at the latest shareholders meeting in May 2022, and understand the fundamentals behind the energy mix, supply and demand, and climate change as described in the energy landscape .

Working with an excellent internal project team, getting the program designed and the content validated by some very high level sponsors and climate and strategy experts, whilst remaining sufficiently accessible for a highly diverse target population, has been a challenge. The next significant step is mobilizing our teams worldwide to ensure its delivery and rollout, which has started this month and is already well underway.

Our aim is to generate a dedicated time for exchange between all employees to take ownership of the ambition towards carbon neutrality in 2050 together with society, and inciting everyone to take an active role in the transformation induced by it. The learning experience will ensure we forge a shared knowledge base, strengthening the link between peers and developing the foundations of a common multi-energy culture. An important outcome of the program is to promote adherence to the ambition and generate motivation to achieve it. ?

As employees of an energy company we are often questioned by people we meet in our work and personal lives on climate and environmental issues: our aim also is that employees will be able to more comfortably explain the issues, challenges and strategic orientations and encourage individual engagement in our transformation. ?

And Managing Talent…?

So, you may be asking, what does this have to do with Managing Talent? Why is Alan using this newsletter to talk about the climate crisis and this internal training project?

In short, because without appropriately transforming the ways we manage our talent, we simply won’t succeed in a just transition with our employees.

Managers are key to driving this transformation. It is our managers who will implement the ambition, ensure our teams understand it, help them to find their place in it, and going forward support them in acquiring new skills and competencies in delivering it. It is also our managers who will accompany their teams’ reactions in the face of change during this transformation.

Concretely, over the next six months, hundreds of our senior executive leaders at various levels - from our executive committee, to business unit directors, and internationally our country chairs, managing directors and their local leadership teams - will roll out the plenary sessions in the Visa for TotalEnergies training. We’ll also be relying on a few thousand of our senior managers to run half day collaborative workshops in small groups. Taking this approach of internal roll out rather than contracting external trainers places our managers at the forefront of a sustainable transformation, and is a real test of everyone’s ability to step away from the traditional postures of “I’m a manager because I am a recognized expert in my field, I can tell you what to do and how to do it” towards a facilitation role, that of manager-coach: enabling and fostering a learning culture where the manager is not expected to have all the answers or be a subject matter expert and where the team themselves are empowered to be part of identifying the solutions and the way forward. Indeed, having now observed the training in action since the test sessions in May and the first live sessions launched mid June, what is great is the answer to some of the tricky questions came from the participants themselves rather than the senior executives who take the role as our trainers.

As we transition our mix of production and sales to new decarbonised energies, new molecules and renewable electricity, we will face new challenges and it is crucial that we trust our teams to find the best solutions, and we accompany them to acquire the skills and knowledge to solve them and help them to use their talents in a way that meets their needs and motivational drivers .

Of course, ensuring a just transition cannot rely solely on training alone : it is holistic approach in which employees themselves are in the driving seat of their careers and professional development, supported by both their manager and by human resources professionals. To this end, we launched an ambitious project called Better Together in 2019 as the human component of our corporate project, with the ambition to develop the talents of each individual. A global network of more than 400 Talent Developers have been trained and mobilized to support employees individually in their professional development and to provide them with dedicated support. Last year alone, nearly 4,000 individual career reviews were carried out to help employees make informed decision in planning their careers effectively. Actions to develop the managerial culture have also been taken to empower managers in their role as manager-coaches, to support team development and to improve collective performance. Over 1,000 codevelopment workshops have been conducted to encourage over 8,000 managers to put their heads together to solve problems while also strengthening ties with their teams.

The latest Better Together workstreams were announced as our Transforming with our People program at the end of 2021 to support TotalEnergies’ employees in the Company's transformation with three drivers, listening, informing and learning. “Listening” involves deploying tools to measure knowledge, understanding and support for TotalEnergies' new ambition, as well as the feelings and state of mind of the Company's teams in the field. “Informing” will enable everyone to understand the shift towards a multi-energy Company and to project themselves into the future of TotalEnergies by sharing live round table presentations of our major projects. Visa for TotalEnergies is part of the "Learning" workstream that will offer five days of training in 2022 and 2023 on the fundamentals of the Company’s ambition and electricity in order to build our new common multi-energy culture. An upskilling and reskilling approach is also underway to support the development of skills and activities. This approach is based on the mapping of typical roles and transposable macro-skills, and on the construction of pathways that include training, on-the-job learning and mentoring.

What is certainly clear is that managing talent is about looking to the future and developing our?capability in?alignment between?upcoming business needs?and everyone’s individual potential. In a business like ours, embarking on a decade of transformation with such ambitious objectives and ambitions, helping our talents to look to the future is crucial.

So, this article lifts the lid a little on the driving forces behind some of the work I have been involved in defining and rolling out over the course of my time in my current role. As you can imagine, besides the occasional LinkedIn newsletter, life at work is busy but full of meaning. I’m going to take a little time out from this newsletter project for the coming months and concentrate my efforts and energy on other things. I’d invite you to consider reading some of the earlier newsletters amongst the 42 back issues. You can find them all in one easy place by clicking here . Personally I think some of the earlier ones were the best.

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading the newsletter as much as I’ve enjoyed preparing it for you over the past two years. I’ll continue to share a curation of other people’s content and articles from business journals in the months to come so if you don’t already then feel free to follow my profile to subscribe to my regular Linkedin posts.

Alan Lambert, Fellow of the Institute of Leadership and Management, is an International HR leader currently working at the Corporate HR Strategy division of a global energy major and is a Linkedin Talent Voices Talent Advocate award winner.?