In a recent webinar, Tamsin Lambert – Talent Excellence Advisor at energy major, Shell – joined Aon’s Director of Global Strategic Growth, Suzanne Courtney, to discuss the evolution of the energy sector and how talent strategies are critical to accelerate firms on their energy transition trajectory.
A Focus on Talent Will Help Firms Find Their Purpose in a Changing World
The energy transition is driving change across talent strategies and human resources (HR). This is the time for HR to flex and respond to
the changing needs of the industry by shifting their talent strategy.
Both new joiners and existing employees are expecting more from their firm.
As environmental, social and governance (ESG) commitments are increasingly perceived as the hallmark of a firm’s responsibilities to its workforce
and the world more broadly, the critical challenge is to attract and retain innovative thinkers to drive this change. How can firms make employees proud
to work for them? Through policies, promises and most importantly, actions. Firms must commit to addressing gender imbalances, representation and inclusion
to create a working environment where employees can feel valued and safe.
Growth Cultures: How Can Firms Change Their Thinking?
Net zero commitments are core drivers of a firm’s energy transition trajectory. If energy firms do not have the skills, or at least, the ability to build, buy or borrow the knowledge and skills needed to drive change, they will not fulfil their net zero commitments by 2050. The implications of falling short extend far beyond commercial stagnation. Addressing climate change is a global imperative and evolution across the energy sector is critical. Skills that are important are evolving over time, but the half-life of skills is ever decreasing. Although firms have more sophisticated analytic capabilities than ever before, it is still difficult to predict the precise skills which will be needed in the future to evolve the firm’s operations. To accelerate change, firms must focus on two core objectives:
- Pushing a learner mindset. A learner mindset is comfortable with not necessarily having the answer, but remains inquisitive and confident in seeking feedback. Firms should create an environment where failure is okay and encourage employees to use their experiences as learning opportunities.
“My personal belief is that it is an essential skill that everyone needs to have in their toolkit. I think we all need to learn that things don’t always go our way and that’s absolutely okay, but we can learn and use that experience to do things differently in the future. We all need to be a bit more humble and sometimes the most powerful answer is ‘I don’t know, but I can find out’. We need to stay curious and we’re all going to need to continually evolve and adapt and invest in ourselves to have fulfilling careers.” Tamsin Lambert, Talent Excellence Advisor, Shell
“My personal belief is that it is an essential skill that everyone needs to have in their toolkit. I think we all need to learn that things don’t always go our way and that’s absolutely okay, but we can learn and use that experience to do things differently in the future. We all need to be a bit more humble and sometimes the most powerful answer is ‘I don’t know, but I can find out’. We need to stay curious and we’re all going to need to continually evolve and adapt and invest in ourselves to have fulfilling careers.” Tamsin Lambert, Talent Excellence Advisor, Shell
- Strive for cultural fluency. The ability to transcend culture and work is an important commitment to inclusion in the workplace. Diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) is the bedrock of workplace wellbeing. Firms must invest time and resources into making their employees feel included; so they can fulfil their best potential, so they can thrive.
A dynamic approach to talent will help firms understand the skills they have already and identify how they can improve to be future fit. The demands on technology roles has exploded. Digital roles which weren’t on firms’ radars ten years ago, are now critical to operational sustainability. This dependency on specialist roles is evolving rapidly as the firm innovates and grows. Firms must invest in training initiatives to enable employees to develop new skills and support the firm’s growth objectives.
How might talent risk evolve over 5, 10 and 20+ years?
Leading with Purpose: Why Leadership Needs to Commit to Change
Leadership has a powerful role to play in the energy transition and future success. Successfully navigating the challenges faced as an organisation and as an industry, depends on a cultural change from the top.
“For change to resonate at all levels of the organisation, responsibility cannot exist within the
HR teams alone; it’s got to be a leader-led identity change.” Tamsin Lambert, Talent Excellence Advisor, Shell
Identifying who the leaders are, who has the right skills and behaviours required to lead that culture change, is the critical challenge. Thousands of employees across various functions of an organisation will all have different values and perspectives, but an effective and empathetic leader will transcend these differences to connect with everyone on their reskilling journey.
There is a role for HR to be continually curious about what is happening internally and identify best practices externally, to use analytics to understand what the current and future skill needs are and to partner with the business to implement initiatives.
The best HR practices have a seat at the table at the highest level. Effective HR teams are comfortable to be provocative and poke the bear to help leaders think differently about how people can help the business strategy. HR is not policing. HR has a responsibility to create a platform for change.
Looking Ahead: Future-Ready Talent Strategies
“Identifying leadership potential is at the core of sustainability. Shell have been a strong advocate of leadership planning with a long-standing process dating back to the 1960s, which predicts the individuals in the firm most likely to reach senior leadership roles in their career. A recent project has evolved this process and brought it into the 21st century, which involved questioning ourselves on how potential is defined, how potential is measured, what’s important to the firm and how we can ensure we’re fair, unbiased and culturally aware. By reconfiguring the process, we enable leadership candidates to self-present rather than imposing self-fulfilling prophecies too early. The employee has autonomy to choose their path, and we’re there to support their career journey. How we identify a future leader had radically changed. By implementing this new process and learning from the outcomes, we are thinking about leadership in a new way which removes biases.” Tamsin Lambert, Talent Excellence Advisor, Shell
Reinventing historic succession and leadership processes must respect the old and enhance with the new. Firms which are biased toward capacity and knowledge will find it harder to implement a learner mindset. Embracing future change with a learning mindset cannot be an isolated project, it needs to be stitched into the fabric of the firm.
There is a huge weight on the leaders of the future to drive real change throughout the organisation – to support employees as they reskill, to champion a progressive workplace culture, to guide the firm towards operational sustainability and bring everyone with them on that journey to a cleaner future.
Contact
To discuss any of the topics raised in this article, please contact
Suzanne Courtney.
Suzanne Courtney
Director of Global Strategic Growth, Human Capital Solutions
London