A quick search for books on leadership will quickly show there are thousands – maybe over 100,000 books on leadership. New ones with new ideas and insights are published at a frightening pace. There are so many schools of thought out there on what it takes to be an effective leader, from communication and delegation to empathy, honesty and critical thinking.
That landscape of leadership advice tells us a few things. Firstly, that being a leader is incredibly difficult, and that if it was easy we’d have all found the secret by now. Secondly, it tells us that leadership culture has changed considerably over the decades, and will continue to change for decades to come.
But most importantly, it says that effective leadership in one space doesn’t always equal effective leadership elsewhere – and nowhere is that more true than with technical leadership.
In the oil and gas industry, generic leadership skills simply reach their limit. This industry runs on the integration of engineering and geoscience, and its leaders have to know how to bring technical skills into their leadership process. But what does that look like in practice, and what should a skilled subsurface leader ideally look like?
Translating data for non-technical ears
In 1986, the Challenger disaster saw seven astronauts lose their lives when a space shuttle disintegrated just over a minute after launching from Cape Canaveral. The mechanical cause of the disaster was a failure of two seals in one of the shuttle’s solid rocket boosters.
But the subsequent investigation also found fault with the lines of communication in the Challenger team. The scientists had been raising concerns about the booster seals before the launch, but they presented them in the form of complicated diagrams and equations that the decision makers didn’t fully understand. Under time and cost pressures, those decision makers went ahead with the launch when they needed someone to clearly say “Something’s wrong, we need to stop”.
We might not be dealing with solid rocket boosters in subsurface leadership, but we are always dealing with uncertainty, risk and decisions driven by science and engineering. Part of the skill of a subsurface leader is learning how to take the data you understand and present it to non-technical decision makers in a way that doesn’t leave them bamboozled.
For example, you might be working in tandem with the commercial side of the firm to work out the business case for a new development, or you might be brought into discussions with government officials. How do you explain the importance of an NMR log to people who don’t know how to interpret the data or see why it matters?
The answer is to focus on the story behind the data, not just the figures themselves. To take the time to understand what information non-technical roles will need to know from your discussions, and how that connects with the why behind the technical tests and analysis you do.
Part of a subsurface leader’s communication skill is also dealing with pushback and setting boundaries. Management will always want you to justify why you need to conduct extra tests or reevaluate data, especially if it leads to delaying a project. And they are right to do so. Your role as a subsurface leader is to know where your hard boundaries lie and be able to say “We need to do this right and here’s why”.
A great subsurface leader isn’t a technical professor
With engineering teams there’s often the perception that they should be run like an academic department, where the person overseeing everything is the most accomplished expert in the room. But in an ideal scenario, a subsurface leader should deliberately not be the expert.
Instead, they should be leading a team of experts and using their skills as a subsurface leader to coordinate that expertise.
If you try to lead as a technical expert, you can often get too wrapped up in actions that should be delegated out. It might be that your team has made a mistake calculating a field’s oil in place, but this doesn’t mean it’s your role as the leader to recalculate it – even if it was your responsibility before you led the team.
As a subsurface leader, your role is to sit down with the team and get them to own the problem with the current calculations, and to connect what they need to do with the business reason for it.
And sometimes, the role of a technical leader is actually to say “That sounds interesting, but we don’t need to do that”. For example, you might be working on a development with the aim of delivering 40 million barrels in its first year of being online. If your team of experts say they need to recalculate the seismic, you need to have the strength of leadership to explain that those calculations won’t influence whether or not those barrels get delivered.
The skill here is to find a way to say “we can’t do this” and still leave people feeling engaged and focused on the key business objective of the project. Don’t just say “no, we can’t” and leave it at that – be clear on the reasons why, and keep everything tied to what the firm needs to achieve.
When dealing in technical detail, general leadership doesn’t go deep enough
Communication, delegation and keeping the team focused on the bigger picture – all sound like classic leadership skills in any industry. But it’s the details that a subsurface leader is dealing with – the nuance of combining engineering and geoscience mastery in a world of uncertainty and business risk with commercial and financial pressures – that mean generic leadership advice is always going to fall short of preparing excellent technical leaders.
You need the wisdom to sift between evidence and assumptions, to know what you don’t know, and piece together the contributions of immensely complex disciplines, whether that’s the work of geomodellers or geophysicists dabbling in the black art of depth conversion.
At Rockflow, we offer training and coaching for subsurface leaders who need to bridge the gap between their technical knowledge and the business processes they’re supporting.
Whether you need to help teams of leaders to think more strategically about what their processes should be or offer an experienced coach to younger leaders, we can help build the capabilities that underpin quality decisions.
For more on how we can help, take a look at our organisational development services.
