Leadership Stories: Capella Festa

It means creating a space where people enjoy being and where they thrive. For much of my career I would probably not have called it leadership. I probably thought of it as:

• Trying to get stuff done – largely by persuasion
• Trying to avoid failures – by building trust and getting good at translating between silos.
• Inviting people to innovate – by being brave

I’ve spent thirty years in energy technology operations, sales and development, the last five working on hydrogen technology for low-carbon energy production. It’s a complex space where a high degree of innovation and co-creation are needed between the chemical, mechanical, electrical and digital worlds.

Trying to get stuff done – largely by persuasion

I turned up at my first job by helicopter. When I landed on the Sedco 712 drilling rig as a junior engineer I joined a friendly, supportive community of 80 men floating in the North Sea 150 km Northeast of the Shetland Islands. Before the chopper touched down all 80 knew who Capella was and (I was later told) most had put on a clean T-shirt. Not many women had worked on the rig and I was the first to join the crew full time. In my first year while being trained by my crewmates I also needed to get a new bulk delivery system designed and installed. With no formal authority, getting stuff done meant persuading drillers, crane operators and welders to contribute ideas, time, and chain hoists to the cause. They needed to feel their opinions would be heard and that the project was worth doing but mainly to enjoy doing it.

Trying to avoid disaster – by building trust and getting good at translating

As I moved to roles with greater responsibility, the fear of something major going wrong on my watch was a big motivator. My first global role was running information technology. The first thing you learn in IT is that most of your constituents only notice when things go wrong, and this was a company with operations in over 80 countries and 100,000 employees. From day one I was super-focused on my direct team feeling comfortable calling me at the inkling of a problem. They in return needed to know they could trust me to support them. I could not possibly be expert in everything. What the team mainly needed from me was an attentive ear and translation of jargon between IT and the business.

Inviting people to innovate – by being brave

Hydrogen technology development involves high levels of uncertainty around future markets and low technology maturity. The space is necessarily messy and means co-creating across technical boundaries. You cannot order people to innovate in a fixed way and certainly not to a fixed timeline. Extreme levels of innovation need an extremely collaborative safe space to co-create, a space where it is OK to try 10 things and have 9 of them fail.

Leading innovation like this - creating connections, mutual trust and commitment - can be deeply satisfying but demands more courage than I had anticipated. Stakeholders used to ordering people to cut timelines and ‘do things right the first time’ can find the messiness of innovation uncomfortable.

From the outset my husband and I knew that having children and being very engaged with them growing up was important to us. Balancing that with demanding careers and several international moves was challenging.

Our kids have become adults who are great to be around and I could not be more proud of them. Both of us pushed back on over-zealous employers, which we found was more acceptable for a woman to do than for a man. And both of us made compromises in our careers. I tell young women to think early about whether having a family is important, and if so make sure it factors in their decision-making.

Professionally I have moved between different business lines, technical domains and geographies and regularly been given roles or projects that are a unusual, complex or require creating a cross-discipline team.

Three important elements I have learned:

• Understand the context
• Visualise success
• Have fun on the journey

I have been asking myself this question recently, having taken over the leadership of the Faculty For the Future, an amazing network of over 950 female STEM 1 experts, innovators and leaders from low- and middle-income countries.

Like most of them I have spent my career in male-dominated environments. I used to tell myself gender makes no difference. This is disingenuous. A better understanding of the role gender plays in our own and our teams’ behaviour is useful for everyone, male and female.

One book I have recently read and recommend to women aspiring to leadership roles is ‘How Women Rise’ by Sally Helgesen and Marshall Goldsmith.

A few words of advice.

• Don’t ever say ‘I’m not technical’. Ever. Be curious and open to learning. Leadership always needs you to understand domains and contexts that you are not expert in.
• People call people they know. A boss once told me this – most people only call people they know because regardless of your nature it is much, much harder to call someone you don’t. Create opportunities for your team to get to know people. And try and be in that minority which makes the effort to call people they don’t know.
• Don’t fill your whole calendar – have time where you are at the coffee machine or take tea breaks with different people. Make the safe spaces where the team can bring things up without calling a meeting with you.
• Innovation takes courage. Not ‘one off courage’ but daily courage to work with the messiness of complexity and ambiguity. And the courage to co-create across technical boundaries.
• Deliberately connect with women in a space where you can have real conversations.
• Be Kind.