Utility Leadership Best Practices
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Utility leadership is challenging. It’s a fine line to walk when trying to please employees, regulators and customers. Whether it’s pushback from employees on working storm duty, intense scrutiny from regulators over perceived outage restoration mismanagement, or ill-informed social media posts from customers, utility leaders are constantly navigating a proverbial minefield. And that’s why following “leadership best practices” is so incredibly important.
How to Optimize Utility Leadership Success
One of the most basic best practices is for leaders to focus on the most important messages and communicate them well. In other words, focus on only the most relevant information, and present it in a way that maximizes absorption and understanding, in order to cut through the noise.
The key to identifying the most important messages is, according to best-selling book Influencer, to find the so-called “vital behaviors” which are defined as high-leverage actions with the power to affect profound change.
Of course, this begs the question of how to find vital behaviors. According to Influencer, there are 4 tactics for doing this:
- Notice the obvious – Identify the baseline information upon which all other information and decisions flow.
- Look for critical moments – Handle problems swiftly and decisively, especially small problems that could grow into something bigger if left unchecked.
- Learn from the best performers – Identify crews or departments that seem to perform at an optimal level, and probe to understand the drivers of their success.
- Spot culture bias – Figure out if any elements of the company culture are undermining the success of performing vital actions, and if so, address them.
There’s no doubt about it – utility leadership is not for the faint of heart. It doesn’t matter if you lead a small team, a crew or the entire company, the most impactful leaders adopt best practices for leadership, starting with a laser-like focus on so-called vital behaviors.
