Shifting leadership culture in heavy industry

Client: Major international oil company

Problem: How to get more out of our people without relaxing the tight controls our industry needs

Enterprisecoach contribution: Mish and Ronnie took 60 senior and middle managers through three month programme to develop their ability to hear all the voices in the system, have the hard conversations in a constructive and engaging way, and add a systemic team coaching dimension to their leadership.

Situation before our involvement

What people were saying:

“If the oil hits the floor, you do what I say. There’s no time to talk – just get on with it.”

“If we negotiate, people will think we are weak.”

“You know what contractors are like. When I manage a major project on a tight deadline, I have to control them with an iron fist.”

“I wish we could get more out of our new young engineers. They are so talented, and well qualified. But some of them just don’t seem to be fully engaged. They are not bringing their whole selves to work.”

Changing leadership culture

The head of maintenance engineering leads a team of 400 engineers who in turn manage thousands of external contractors. The leader hired a diverse leadership team, gave them real authority and accountability and required them to shift the leadership culture across multiple work teams in engineering, operations and maintenance.

They came to us when they found many of the senior and middle managers struggling to change, saying “the only kind of request our subordinates understand is a Size 12 boot in their butts.”

What they asked us to help with was to respect the urgency of getting things done, getting things done timeously and well – but shift the responsibility for quality further down the organization in return for involving them more in decision making.

Our program

Over a period of three months we met each leadership team briefly for orientation, devoted two full days to a systemic leadership training workshop entitled Relationship Systems Intelligence @Work, and then met them again each month for 1-2 hours to share application stories. They brought their successes and failures in applying their learning and we collaborated to help them adjust and tweak their new learning to work better in their environment.

Participant feedback

The leader said after the first workshop “people have been constantly in my office to come and share their awesome experience with you. They are literally glowing.” More importantly, here is an example of long term behaviour changes reported three months after the program:

I convened a meeting yesterday to iron out differences in a department that reports to me. It so turned out that all of the people attending the workshop had completed your leadership training. This immediately shifted the starting point of the conversation. They themselves said, ‘lets put the issue in front of us and talk about moving to resolution’. The blaming type conversations  were completely by-passed. It was so powerful to see in action.