Developing New Leaders at National Grid

Robert J. Thomas and Claudy Jules

September 2010

Case Study
Developing New Leaders at National Grid
Many leadership development programs fade
from memory on the journey home from the
workshop. Here’s what’s necessary to ensure
that that does not happen. One company
is seeing significant results from taking a
more systematic approach to expanding and
reinforcing its leadership ranks.
He was one of the least likely candi-
dates for the job. The senior manager
at National Grid—we’ll call him Jack
McLaughlin—was a gruff, no-nonsense
veteran of field services, quite at
home in the rough and ready blue-collar
world of the electricity linesmen and
technicians he usually led. But the job
in front of McLaughlin called for a
very different set of leadership skills.
And the risks of failure were very real.
Now McLaughlin had to negotiate
with several hundred white-collar
design engineers. The designers—they
design new installations for electricity
distribution to neighborhoods and
businesses—were angry and concerned:
As part of National Grid’s transforma-
tion initiative, their facilities across
the company were to be consolidated
into one large design center. Job losses
were probable; disruption was inevitable.
McLaughlin drew on skills absorbed in
a series of workshops several months
earlier. Long accustomed to giving
orders, he listened—a lot—to the
designers’ worries. He asked a host of
questions. And when responding to
the designers’ queries, he provided a
2 | Accenture Institute for High Performance | Copyright © 2010 Accenture. All rights reserved.
wealth of context for the upcoming
changes—an approach that helped to
take much of the heat out of a com-
plex, large-scale, and very emotional
change issue.
Jack McLaughlin is not unique at
National Grid. Dozens of other senior
managers at the electricity utility have
successfully tapped skills they acquired
in mid-career. But he and his colleagues
are unusual among managers in gen-
eral. They experienced leadership
development that “stuck.”
National Grid’s approach
“Some of you may want to be here;
some of you may not. But we need to
have [your full engagement]. Is that
something we can all commit to and
agree on? So we’ll check e-mail at
the break?”
That’s how Lou DeBrino, who at the
time was a director at National Grid,
introduced the first of the “action lab-
oratories” that the utility had designed
into the leadership development program
for its recently appointed extended
leadership team (ELT)—a carefully
selected group of 87 senior managers
from all across the Electricity Distribution
Operations (EDO) business.
The fact that DeBrino was leading the
action lab sent a powerful message by
itself. Like half a dozen top National
Grid executives, DeBrino had been
appointed by John Pettigrew, then the
executive vice-president of electric
distribution and generation, not only
to shape the leadership development
program but to lead key components
of the program itself. That was just
one of several signs that the utility’s
largest division was laying the right
foundations for success with develop-
ment of its ELT.
Given what the utility had to contend
with, new levels of leadership were
essential. As the second largest utility
in the U.S., National Grid delivers elec-
tricity to about 3.3 million customers
in the Northeast and distributes natural
gas to 3.4 million in the region. But it
was hardly operating as a single orga-
nization. Its UK parent had acquired
its way into the U.S. in the mid-2000s,
and its new EDO business was struggling
with an array of operating models,
systems, metrics, and cultures. It was
crucial to become one coherent orga-
nization, capture synergies among the
disparate legacy organizations, and
find new and much more efficient
ways to operate.
At the same time, the EDO business had
to perform markedly better in terms
of safety, reliability and customer sat-
isfaction. For years, it had been paying
penalties to regulators because of its
poor record of electricity outages and
its dismal record of recovery from
those outages.
Developing New Leaders at National Grid
By 2006, National Grid’s EDO leaders
had launched an enterprise-wide
journey to create a high-performance
culture characterized by a shared
sense of purpose, a focus on continuous
improvement, and premium perfor-
mance in safety, customer service,
reliability and efficiency. Pettigrew
knew that if the organization was to
realize those goals, it was necessary to
move past the company’s old “top
down” management model. “”Historically,
the leadership team was seen as being
very shallow—just one or two people,”
he recalls. There had to be a new
mindset about who our leaders are.
We had to develop what I call an
‘extended leadership team’ who would
become accountable for our results.”
Hand-picking the seven dozen-plus
managers was the relatively easy part.
But exposing them to the scope of the
changes—let alone expecting them to
lead through the changes—was a
challenge of a different order. Many of
the extended leadership team (ELT)
members were utility veterans; many
had been at National Grid and its
forebears for 20 years. None had been
through the levels of transformation
they were about to experience. To make
matters more complex, the utility was
largely a unionized, blue-collar organi-
zation, compartmentalized into discrete
operations that had rarely if ever
cooperated. Skepticism, suspicion and
territorial behavior were far more
common than collaboration and trust.
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For the ELT members, the task of lead-
ing through change at National Grid
was like trying to change the tires on
a truck careening down the highway.
A data-driven approach to
developing leaders
The job of showing the ELT how to
change tires at speed started with
Pettigrew and his top lieutenants. New
to EDO himself, he began to work
immediately with Dr. Eden Alvarez-
Backus, the utility’s recently hired
vice-president of global leadership,
learning and development. Working
with Pettigrew and his top team, she
had built a competency model that set
broad expectations for leadership
across the company. One of her con-
cerns was that the leadership develop-
ment program that Pettigrew had in
mind—a systematic mix of individual
coaching and a series of learning
forums, supported by action learning
teams—had to create value on several
levels. It had to fully engage the
senior leaders who would play key
roles throughout. It had to mesh with
the senior leader training programs
she was beginning to develop in terms
of concepts and topics and philosophies.
And it had to be challenging enough
that the ELT members felt motivated
to learn and that the experience was
worthwhile. “The experiences that
these 80-plus people have will set
the tone for how everyone thinks and
feels about learning and develop-
ment,” she said.
Alvarez-Backus was reassured to find
that the fundamentals of the develop-
ment program resonated with her
approach and her model. She agreed
that high-performance leadership
within EDO would be best achieved
through a combination of action and
reflection in the context of EDO’s
strategic and economic agenda. And
she shared the belief that the most
visible elements of the effectiveness
program would have to be led by
National Grid executives—not by pre-
senters from Accenture, the partner
that was helping to design and drive
the utility’s overall transformation.
Here’s how the program unfolded.
Beginning with a “self awareness”
phase, it involved individual assessments
using 360-degree reviews, personality
and leadership profiles (PLPs) to
complement the 360s, and inventories
of learning styles—all “foundation”
techniques referenced in “Crucibles of
Leadership.” (See Figure 1.) Each ELT
manager then went through personal
coaching with an Accenture consultant,
complete with an in-depth debrief on
the results of their PLP, learning style,
and 360-degree feedback assessments.
This phase quickly confirmed that the
ELT participants were eager to know
more about what it takes to be a
high-performance leader. And it began
signaling the importance of coaching
skills as part of the suite of essential
leadership attributes.
Developing New Leaders at National Grid

Figure 1. EDO&G Leadership Effectiveness Program: Objectives, Events, Focus

Objectives Self-awareness Understanding Planning The path

how to develop your your ahead
leadership skills actions

Individual Feedback Action Action Follow-up Action lab two

Events assessments coaching Lab One: Lab One: coaching
session Day One Day Two session

360 Leadership Experience Learning Finalizing Preparing your business

Focus legacy is the best capabilities personal for change
Learning teacher Board of
styles Leadership Storytelling Directors Thinking and problem
inventory style Practice solving as a team
trumps Resources Start-stop-
Personality Areas for talent great leaders continue: Managing to
and development mobilize behaviors performance metrics
leadership
profile Define your
PLS
Support: Feedback coach Peer coach Personal Board of Directors
Tools: Personal Learning Strategy (PLS)

The participants also learned about the
implications for ongoing development
of their leadership competencies. Their
assessment profiles gave them key
information about their leadership
strengths and areas for development and
personal insights to guide their reflec-
tion and learning over the course of the
program. Just one example: The insights
acquired by Neil Proudman—one of
John Pettigrew’s direct reports—proved
invaluable to him. The longtime
National Grid executive heard that he
needed to be better prepared before
presenting to others. The feedback:
“When you’re prepared, you’re great.
But when you’re not, that’s where
people lose confidence.” He used
the subsequent phases of the leader-
ship effectiveness program to
practice preparedness.
Moving into an “understanding” phase,
the program delivered intense and
targeted capability-building modules,
using relevant context to convey
leadership concepts and enable the
participants to alter how they think
about leadership and to practice new
behaviors in a learning forum called
the “action lab.” Based on concepts
and tools presented in Bob Thomas’s
book “Crucibles of Leadership,” the
first action lab taught the ELT managers
how to take ownership of their learning
and development in structured and
disciplined ways, learning from their
everyday experience. Whereas most
traditional methods are limited to
classroom training and exhortations to
practice what’s been learned, the first
action lab helped the participants to
see how to “practice while they per-
form” and to accelerate the rate of
learning by understanding how their
personality styles, teaming and deci-
sion-making processes affect daily
work outcomes.
The second action lab moved from
individual to team-based learning,
extending the book’s concepts and
principles to problem-based learning.
Here the leadership team worked as
an intact group to solve real organiza-
tional issues confronting National
Grid. By building capability and own-
ership at the senior leadership levels,
this “learn by doing” program help the
participants lead as a team to support
the utility’s significant transformation.
“It was a tremendous couple of days,”
recalls Proudman. “During that second
action lab, we talked a lot about what
great leadership looks like and how we
work together in teams. When you put
that together with what we’d learned
in the first lab, it moved us all forward.”

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Developing New Leaders at National Grid
Following the second action lab, each
EDO leader was expected to form
action teams based on their under-
standing of the requirements and to
ensure that mindset shifts and behavior
changes endured. Here, EDO leaders
would work collectively on a business
priority from those discussed over the
course of the program over the ensuing
months. For example, Pat Hogan,
National Grid’s senior vice president of
distribution asset management, was
the executive sponsor of a session on
the topic of how to make money as a
regulated utility—a critical theme
given National Grid’s discussions over
rates in several Northeast states. And
David Pretyman, senior vice president
of operations performance management,
headed up the action learning projects
on “Cost-Conscious Ownership Culture.”
The outcome of these action labs was
the Personal Learning Strategy—a plan
that the participants, with the help
of their individual coaches, would be
expected to use to hone their leader-
ship capabilities and to show how
they would create action plans to
extract insight from their daily work,
and transformation experiences.
Measures of success
There is evidence everywhere that the
leadership lessons have stuck with the
ELT managers. Prior to the program,
few of the nine executives reporting
to Pettigrew had been comfortable
speaking publicly about leadership, let
alone leading workshops on the topic.
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Today, the program’s success comes
across in a myriad of qualitative adap-
tations—for example, in the language
they now use and the development
mechanisms they describe when inter-
acting with each other. It’s not
uncommon to hear one manager talk
about meeting with her peer coach or
to learn about another who is assem-
bling his “personal board of directors”
with different roles in mind for
each director.
In many cases, ELT managers are putting
words to ideas that they have known
about for a while even if they haven’t
been actively practicing them. But
now they have a conceptual frame-
work that makes sense of those
ideas—that gives them context.
There’s also a marked shift in the
managers’ collective sense of identity—
a palpable feeling of pulling together
as an extended team and a greater
willingness to demonstrate that it is
their responsibility to do so. The men
and women of the ELT are also much
more prone to “create the future,”
seeking visibility of key trends, mapping
out responses to those trends, and
looking for ways to cascade their
learnings and approaches down to
National Grid’s middle managers.
Personal commitment to continued
development is more noticeable too.
National Grid’s executives report inci-
dents of ELT managers taking out
subscriptions to Harvard Business
Review, for example, or blocking out
time each week on their calendars for
reflection on leadership lessons
learned. Those mindset and behavioral
shifts are manifest in the many differ-
ent ways in which decisions are now
made and challenges are met. “We
were an organization that provided
too much direction from the top, says
Pretyman, the operations performance
management chief. “Now I see a lot
more decisions being taken at a lower
level.” On the whole, it takes less time
for teams to reach consensus. Not
only are ELT leaders more ready to
take advantage of their collective
expertise—getting past obstacles by
reaching out to others from different
disciplines with whom they might
never have interacted previously—but
they now have the personal tools to
negotiate in dispassionate, non-terri-
torial, non-defensive ways in pursuit
of shared business objectives.
The new approaches are noticeable in
the behavior of one ELT manager who,
despite his rank, had not been especially
visible and had not “stepped up” prior
to National Grid’s transformation
initiative. Essentially, he “did his job.”
But this individual ran one of the
action labs very successfully, bringing
to bear the skills, such as team-building,
that he had acquired in earlier phases
of the leadership develop program.
Today, he is flexing those skills further
on a range of special assignments
outside the scope of his original job
definition. “He’s painting a picture of
the future,” says Pat Hogan, National
Grid’s distribution asset management
executive. “He’s laying out for the
team what their direction is. And
he’s making sure he’s got the right
members on his team—the right
team composition.”
Developing New Leaders at National Grid
Other executives report that they’re
seeing more project rigor, where
thoughtful analysis, in teams, takes
stock of the current situation and the
desired objectives, and where real
planning maps out the journey needed
to get there. “This is not something
that’s been forced upon them,” observes
Pretyman. “If they hadn’t gone through
the process of learning together, they
wouldn’t have bonded so well as a team.
We would have seen some people
turning against the change model.”
The collective and collaborative ener-
gies are translating into measurable
results for National Grid. Over the last
two years, the number of “lost time”
injuries—on-the-job injuries that mean
employees must take time off—has
been halved. And the utility’s
reliability metrics are markedly better.
Just three years ago, regulators were
imposing, and National Grid was paying,
more than $40 million in penalties for
failing to comply with acceptable
standards of electricity supply. In 2008,
the utility met its reliability goals and
stopped paying penalties. Last year, it
was able to raise and meet higher
reliability targets. “We’re a different
company in terms of safety and relia-
bility than we were two years ago,”
says Hogan. “We’ve made step changes
6 | Accenture Institute for High Performance | Copyright © 2010 Accenture. All rights reserved.
in those areas.” For example, he At the same time, the leadership
attributes the gains directly to work effectiveness initiative presented
on asset strategies and capital invest- abundant opportunities to practice
ments, enabled by the proliferation of what was being talked about. And by
expanded leadership skills: “In both of working on challenges together, in
those areas—especially in safety—it’s teams, the ELT participants got well
about leadership. It’s about being past the point where they might see
visible. It’s the organization seeing you.” results. Today, top managers like
Pretyman and Hogan have a fund of
Hogan also points to markedly stronger stories to tell about ELT managers who
employee engagement, collaboration regularly exhibit self-awareness at
and resilience to lead through turbu- work and who still use action lab
lence. He notes that the utility has practices in their day-to-day activities.
been able to deliver a huge capital
plan—nearly 25 percent greater than In fact, it’s a matter of considerable
two years ago—pushing the required pride that they can point not just to
work through the organization on a one Jack McLaughlin, but to dozens
tight timetable with no increase in like him at National Grid who are dri-
staff. And he cites the way in which a ving the organization forward at pace.
safety performance subcommittee—
responsible for reducing moving-vehi-
cle incidents and violations—has been
able to arrive at recommendations and
quickly make firm decisions following
the methodologies adopted from the
second of the leadership development
action labs.
Sticking with it
National Grid used all three principles
of best-practices leadership develop-
ment. The program it rolled out was
framed squarely in the context of a
major organizational initiative. In the
utility’s case, the catalyst happened to
be a transformation necessitated by a
history of recent acquisitions, but it
could just as easily have been a push
into a new market. Furthermore, by
using the transformation as the focus
for the leadership effectiveness pro-
gram that they all experienced, the
ELT participants now had a shared
crucible that they could (and do) draw
from as a reference point.
Developing New Leaders at National Grid
About the authors
Robert J. Thomas (robert.j.thomas
@accenture.com) is the executive
director of the Accenture Institute
for High Performance and a visiting
professor at the Brandeis University
International Business School. He is
the author or co-author of several
books, including Crucibles of Leadership:
How to Learn from Experience to Be a
Great Leader (Harvard Business Press,
2007); the Talent Powered Organization,
(Kogan Page, 2007); and the
Organizational Networks Fieldbook
(Jossey-Bass, 2010).
Claudy Jules (claudy.jules@
accenture.com) is a senior manager in
the Accenture Talent & Organization
Performance service line, focusing on
organization effectiveness. He is one
of the co-architects of the firm’s
executive assessment and development
approaches, where he works with
senior leadership teams on complex
organization and leadership issues.
He holds a Ph.D. in organizational
behavior from Case Western
Reserve University.
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