S.P.R.A.Y. T.A.N. to Sustain Success
S.P.R.A.Y. T.A.N. to Sustain Success: (๐)trategic (๐)etroleum (๐)eserve (๐)nalogies (๐)our (๐)alent (๐)pproach (๐)eeds 2 Sustain Success
With President Biden expected to announce that the United States (and perhaps other nations) will be making Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) withdrawals, what better time than now to explore a few energy-themed leadership analogies so that you don't find yourself making short-sighted, politically expedient decisions on behalf of your organization that MIGHT look good on the surface, but that merely mask serious issues that will eventually catch up to you and your stakeholders?
Because even though you might argue that high gasoline prices aren't enough of an "emergency" to warrant an SPR withdrawal, when it comes to oil and gas companies facing talent "emergencies," you might also argue that industry leaders are missing opportunities to fully leverage their existing talent reserve as they battle the โGreat Resignationโ and other personnel challenges.
So, if you're part of an organization tempted to spend (or already spending) 7 figures on some dubious and disruptive third-party "solution" to your company's culture, talent, and engagement challenges, check out this live episode of The Energy Detox, where we make sure you're tapping into the wealth of resources you already have so that your human resources team can produce faster, cheaper, and more sustainable solutions than the over-priced, short-lived, spray-tan approaches far too many organizations are defaulting to.
The goal: to (๐)๐ซ๐จ๐ฐ, (๐)๐ซ๐จ๐ญ๐๐๐ญ, ๐๐ง๐ (๐)๐ฎ๐ฌ๐ญ๐๐ข๐ง success by pondering these 3 questions throughout your day:
๐ก In what ways are you stifling growth by under-utilizing your existing talent reserve?
๐ก Why are you protecting the strength of your minor league system at the expense of your major league team?
๐ก How much time, energy, and money do you waste trying to sustain an unnecessarily draining talent withdrawal and acquisition strategy?
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Transcript
(AI training in progress; please excuse any errors)
Hello and welcome to the energy detox a petroleum based blend of leadership conversations guaranteed to boost your professional and personal output by flushing away the hidden and often toxic barriers to peak performance. I'm your host, Joe Sinnott, a chemical engineer, executive coach, talent strategist, and 16 year energy industry veteran helping you tap into the same resources fueling today's most successful and sustainable leaders. And today, we're going to talk about how those leaders tap into not only generic resources, but specifically the talent reserved that they've built within their teams and within their organizations to maximize results, and how those leaders avoid the temptation to look outside or at least to default, looking outside for expensive, clunky disruptive solutions that promise to solve their their talent issues, to solve the great resignation challenges that companies are facing. And to face quite frankly, the emergency that many oil and gas companies are seeing when it comes to existing and future talent. And as has been a theme on many episodes of the energy detox, we're going to talk about ways that again, you can utilize existing resources, existing talent, existing mindsets, existing experience that you have within your purview, in order to achieve results, and to achieve results faster, better in a more sustainable way than looking outside to again, expensive, clunky, disruptive and time consuming solutions that often don't deliver results. Beyond you know, the short term. And to drive this conversation, we're going to look at a short term decision that is being made later on today by President Biden with regard to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. And his decision, as it's being confirmed by various sources, is to release and withdraw some of the crude oil reserves that we have in an attempt to eventually lower the rising gasoline prices that we're seeing. And again, there's a lot of people casting stones at this decision because of one the reality of how things work, right. We, as the United States, at the end of the day are a relatively small player in the global oil market. And quite frankly, it's almost laughable that we think that we're going to be able to move the needle significantly, when of course, OPEC can go ahead and move the needle much more quickly make decisions that are going to drastically offset whatever release of hydrocarbons we have, and whatever other countries do with their own strategic petroleum reserves. And again, there's no shortage of talking heads, we're going to analyze this pending decision and cast stones added or praise it or whatever the case might be. So we're not going to add to that conversation, or at least not in tremendous detail. But we are going to use this morning's headline as we do every morning here on the energy detox to help drive conversations for you as a leader so that you can make better decisions so that you aren't making perhaps short sighted politically expedient decisions that seem good that seemed like they might win you favor with your stakeholders, but in reality, you're going to cost you in the long run. And so the theme or the title, if you will of today's episode is spray paint, spray tan to sustain success. And of course, spray tan if you look at the show notes or the any of the the commentary regarding this article stands for Strategic Petroleum Reserve analogies. I can't even remember my own forest analogy here. Strategic Petroleum Reserve analogies, your talent approach needs to sustain success. And of course, when you're trying to come up with forest analogies on the fly at six in the morning, sometimes your brain doesn't work so well. And quite frankly, sometimes when you're in an attempt to to deal with quote and emergency, which is what President Biden will be claiming today. Again, your brain might not work too well, you might be suffering a bit of cognitive dissonance and decline as you try to force solutions that are going to try to achieve short term results. But again, the reality is you might come up with some cute analogy or some cute solution or something that sounds good and again, might make it seem like you're doing more for your constituents or your stakeholders than you really are. But at the end of the day, it's not going to be sustainable. So that's the warning today is are you making decisions regarding your talent strategy or talent approach that are not sustainable? Are you mistakingly looking outside to third party solutions regarding talent when you already have an existing reserve or conversely Are you over relying on your existing reserve your existing talent base and you know, not finding yourself in a system stainable position to continue growing, which leads us to the first of the three questions today. Because
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again, as we've been doing here on the energy talks, we're going to ask you three questions, we're not going to answer them for you. Because, you know, your business knew you know yourself, you know, the state of affairs within your organization better than anybody. So we're going to ask these questions in an attempt to help you grow, protect and sustain success. And that first question this morning is, in what ways are you stifling growth by under utilizing your existing talent reserve. And again, President Biden today regarding the Strategic Petroleum Reserve here in the United States, and again, encouraging other countries to withdraw with you already have has some pros and cons, there's certainly benefits to tapping into, you know, the, the, the oil that is under our feet that can essentially our country's already paid for. But again, there's also some very big downsides that people are pointing out. But for you, as you try to grow your company, and you try to sustain momentum, and you try to maybe stop the bleeding, especially if you're a bigger company like Exxon, who is seeing a pretty big bleeding, if you will, of talent. Question for you is, are you appropriately tapping into your existing talent reserve? are you ensuring that all of the time and energy and investment that you've made in your people is being fully utilized, are you again, for lack of a better term, you're squeezing every last drop out of these people before they walk out the door before you force them out the door, because what I see when I'm engaged with, especially human resources, leaders who are frustrated by the state of affairs, is that many people are walking out the door, who really don't appreciate how well connected they are to the organization, and who don't appreciate the long term opportunities that they can have at a given oil and gas organization, especially when it comes to some of the technical roles or some of the support roles, like accounting, and it and other roles that, again, are very transferable. And that leave people wondering, Well, why do I want to continue working for what some people might describe as the dinosaur of a company, dinosaur of an industry, when of course, in reality is the industry is at the cutting edge in many ways in terms of technology and contributions to mankind and humanity and all of these things. But in many cases, people are leaving, again, consciously or unconsciously forced or on forced, who are leaving so much on the table, and who, quite frankly, are not going to be able to contribute in the same ways and to make the same contributions to the world and to society into their own career when they move on. And that's a tremendous loss of talent. It's a tremendous shame, because, again, there is existing talent and existing resources. But it's very easy for company leaders, whether they're in human resources, or whether they're an executive leadership, and they're making decisions that sound good. They make it sound like they're okay with people leaving, if they want to leave that make it sound like they're almost conceding that yes, we're in a dying industry that you know, is has seen, it's, it's, you know, time to shine, if you will, and now it's time to fade, and you know, we're going to deal with it. And we're going to bring in some outside town, and we're going to figure out the best way to head towards insolvency or bankruptcy or, you know, irrelevance, if you will. And again, if you find yourself in that mindset, and that approach will snap out of it and ask yourself how you can revitalize and energize your existing talent pool and not even give the impression that your content with people leaving your content with people checking out figuratively, even if they're still there collecting a paycheck, because, again, what I see time and time, again, is an engagement issue. And again, this is nothing new. In fact, it's somewhat cliche when you're talking about talent development and talent acquisition is is fighting against the disengagement issues that we're seeing in our industry. So the question for you is, well, how can you fight against it? And the number one way to ensure continued momentum to ensure continued growth is to make sure that you are tapping into your strategic talent reserve, if you will, you are asking yourself and all the leaders within your organization, if you're getting the most out of your people, that doesn't mean getting the most in terms of their output? But are you getting the most engagement? Are they fully aware of everything that they can continue contributing to you and your mission? Do they even know what your mission is? Because if they don't know what your mission is, well, how the heck do you expect to withdraw the most potential out of them possible? So ask yourself today again, are you stifling growth by underutilizing? Your existing talent reserve? And are you stifling growth? By looking outside for outside solutions? Are you looking too far outside of your own company or your own industry for ways that other people are doing things that might seem sexy and might sound good and might might appear to to, again, have some aesthetic appeal or some improved optics? But again, is it just a spray tan, if you will? Is it still masking what's actually going on beneath the surface? And if so, ask yourself, what are the resources? What is the approach? What is the strategy you can use to undo some of that damage that that faulty mindset may have been causing for you and your organization? The next question is, what are you protecting? Why are you protecting the strength of your minor league system at
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the expense of your major league team at major league results. And as I note here, on the screen, if you're watching, or if you're looking at the show notes, this is indeed a bit of a reference or very strong reference to the Pittsburgh Pirates. Because if you're not familiar with the Pittsburgh Pirates organization, they have historically had a very strong farm system, they've produced a lot of homegrown talent they've invested especially recently in their, in their, in their recruits in their in their draft picks, if you will, and they're building this talent. But at the end of the day, it doesn't translate into results from the major league team. At the end of the day, a lot of their talent that they have within their within their reserve within their farm system is if they reached the major leagues, is ultimately going off to play for other teams after maybe a year or two of playing with the pirates. And what that means is the pirates is not able to sustain success, where it matters. And what does that lead to? Well, it leads to a decrease of morale from the fan base and leads to disengagement. And so the question for you or your organization is, are you doing something similar? Are you spending time and energy and money growing your minor league system growing your farm system, bringing in interns and, and spending lots of money on training and all of these resources only to have those resources fizzle out, and for you to continue just repeating the cycle, and not actually elevating these people into positions of authority and power and influence and maximizing their potential in a way that actually produces bottom line results. Because from a baseball standpoint, at least I measure bottom line results in terms of wins and championships at the major league level, it might be great that you are the most competitive minor league team or, or have a minor all of your minor league teams might be competitive, but it doesn't matter if the Major League performance isn't there. And so to where the organization, are you spending all this time and money and energy on your talent and growing your talent internally, only to watch that talent fizzle out and get disengaged as you bring in external talent. Or as you bring in external consultants or advisors who are coming in and trying to have you you tweak your approach to employees and engagement and leadership, while people sit on the sidelines who have been with you for 510 1520 years, and who are watching this happen who have insights that aren't being extracted. So again, ask yourself even go going back to the first question, are you putting yourself in a position to grow and develop your company by leaning on the people who have grown and developed with you? Or again, are you over reliant on outside influences that only serve to actually improve the performance of outside influences. And coming back to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve headline from today? Again, there's a lot of naysayers out there who were saying whatever moves that we undertake as a country to withdraw some of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve might actually benefit. Other countries might actually benefit other parties, as some of this extra oil actually might flow outside of the United States. Again, it's it's a, it's a complicated, you know, scenario, if you will, and there are complications that again, we're not going to dive into. But the funny thing is that this could in turn actually help oil and gas companies who are, you know, very often, the facing the brunt of President Biden, and many of those on the left, who are who weren't treating the oil and gas industries as an enemy. But yet, you know, some of these moves here, that might be undertaken over the next couple of weeks that actually help those, suppose it enemies of the administration. And so too, you need to ask yourself, is your approach to your minor league system and your underutilization of your minor league system or the trading away of your talent, if you will, or the allowance of your talent to walk out the door isn't actually helping your competitors? And if so, well? What the heck are you doing? And how might you actually better leverage? And that could mean obviously improved benefits and compensation and whatever the case might be. But at the end of the day, it's up to you to ask yourself, How can you better maintain your existing talent so that you don't help your competitors win? How can you ensure that all the time and energy and money you've spent on your minor league system doesn't go to waste? So that's the question, why are you spending time protecting and growing this, this internal resources only to go ahead and look outside in a way that demoralizes your existing employees, disengages your existing employees and will cause you to fall behind and lose as a company as a as a country as it may be? And certainly for you as an individual leader? And with that, we'll move on to the third question today, which is, how much time energy and money do you waste trying to sustain an unnecessarily draining talent withdrawal and acquisition strategy? It's very long question. But again, if
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you visualize what's going on for many organizations, you're seeing talent in and out, right? You're seeing all of this time and energy and money spent on talent acquisition, while at the same time you're watching people walk out the door or while you're dismissing people and you're dismissing talent and more important and perhaps are difficult to measure, you're dismissing ideas, you're just missing the creativity that you have within your existing workforce because you're too focused on the numbers and the individuals who are filling boxes. And as all of that intellectual knowledge goes out the door, all of that creativity, all of that experience walks out the door, of course, what are you trying to do, you're trying to backfill. And obviously, again, if you are in human resources you're in, quite frankly, if you're in a leadership position of any sort, you realize how disruptive and how damaging and how costly this can be. So the question for you today is, how much time and energy and money are you wasting on all of this on data that's being caused because of the constant injection and withdrawal? From a talent standpoint? How much is that costing you? How much could you save, you know, turning this into a positive, if you can maintain more of a steady state, if you're not constantly making deposits, and then making withdrawals. And again, we can look back at the Strategic Petroleum Reserve news from today, or maybe the pending news, if you will, since it's it's not officially been announced? And you can ask yourself, Hey, what is this going to do? What is the impact of withdrawing from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and then having to fill it back? Well, again, from a pricing standpoint, you might see some lowering of gasoline prices or in the short term, at least crude prices, and then in turn gasoline prices, or at least that's that's the hope that's the intention, whether or not it actually pans out like that is remains to be seen. But that being said, what are the long term implications? Well, of course, as many have pointed out, while the long term implications are if you have a decrease in prices now and you reduce the incentive for oil and gas producers to continue producing hydrocarbons, well, in the long term, you're going to continue to have a shortage. And what is the shortage lead to well leads to higher prices, basic rule of supply and demand. So while you might see some short term impacts directly in terms of the price of the pump, or at least in terms of the favor that President Biden is trying to gain by at least, quote, trying to do something, although, again, the naysayers are going to say that, you know, he's going to claim that he tries to do something, but the big bad oil and gas companies are are going to fight back against that to screw over the consumer. But again, taking a step back from the commentary that I promised I would not offer today, the question for you is, are people seeing your attempts as thinly veiled spray tan attempts that are basically fake attempts to improve morale, improve engagement, improve the performance of individuals, when in reality, they're not sustainable, when in reality, the things that you're doing in the short term are simply costing you time and money and quite frankly, costing you your reputation, because they're not going to work. Or if they work, it's going to be so short lived, that people are going to look at you and they're going to get tired of waiting for the next gimmick to come along the next spray tan approach to try to make things look better than they actually are. So again, the question for you is how much time and energy are you wasting on these short sighted attempts? And again, on the flip side, how much time and energy and money can you claw back by actually focus on sustainable solutions to engagement and morale. And with that, again,
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if you're interested in having conversations about this, I enjoy clearly talking about not just the the global, the macro oil and gas maneuvers that our country and other countries will be undertaking here today and over the coming weeks. But clearly, I also have a passion for helping employees remain engaged. And that's not just some glowing, again, spray tan fake and authentic, you know, claim, but it's true. It's what I've been doing for my career, both in the corporate world. And now for the last two plus years as an executive coach as a talent strategist, which is not a term that I use too freely. But again, given the the forest acronym today about talent strategy and strategic talent reserves, I figured it was an appropriate time to make a new title for myself, at least for this one episode. But again, if you're interested in talking about talent strategy that blends very real oil and gas themes and challenges with professional coaching and professional talent strategies, and blending that together with actual results that have been achieved, again, both in corporate careers on the service side and the operator side, and now helping a whole host of different energy themed companies. I welcome those conversations. I welcome your feedback. And I appreciate the feedback for those of you who have been engaging in these energy detox conversations. For those of you who have been engaging offline via LinkedIn or email or contacting me through website, wedding partners calm. Again, I appreciate this engagement because there is nothing there is nothing that is more likely to increase your odds of sustained success, then by having these conversations by asking the tough questions by asking yourself some of the dozens of tough questions that we've asked over the last 20 episodes or so of the energy detox in this in this new this new daily format. And so again, I encourage you to continue asking questions, particularly the questions today around whether or not your strategy with regards to your existing talent reserve is actually leading to long term results. Or if you're following the same short sighted, high level, fake spray tan approaches that far too many companies that I'm engaged with are using to try to stem the bleeding to try to stop the flow of talent to try to inject some short term boost. But in reality, those things are just not going to work. And they're going to cost you time they're going to cost you money, they're going to cost you energy that you just don't have no matter how high oil and natural gas prices go. No matter how much momentum it feels like the industry might have at times regarding commodity pricing, the reality is, all of those things just like pricing are temporary. And if you're taking temporary solutions, and you're making temporary withdrawals that are going to have long term implications, then you're setting yourself and your organization not up not just up for failure, but you're setting all of your stakeholders up for failure, including your investors, including your board members, including everybody who has a vested interest in you making clear concrete decisions. And so with that, again, I encourage you to look at today's headlines, I encourage you to continue looking at headlines as we head into the long Thanksgiving Day weekend, I look at them with a bit of a mirror. If you will look at these energy industry headlines, look at these global political headlines and ask yourself how they relate to you. That's what we've been doing here on the energy detox. And as we head into the long weekend, and as I take a break from these daily episodes, again, I encourage you to take the same approach that I've been taking each morning, which is looking at the news around you looking at headlines, looking at press releases from other companies, looking at your peers, and again, flipping it and asking questions and saying how might that apply to my challenges? How might that apply to the things that I'm trying to do as a leader? How might that apply it to the things that my company is stating is trying to do? How might that apply to the mission statements that have been crafted over the last year or two to respond to COVID into the changing energy landscape? How might those things apply to me? And how can I use that information? How can I force in some analogies again, perhaps not going so far as forcing in spray tan analogies and spray tan acronyms as as we created for today's episode, but at least ask yourself questions and look for those parallels so that you can think more creatively, think more innovatively and so that you can avoid making potentially catastrophic mistakes that those around you are going to continue making. And so with that, again, I sincerely appreciate and offer my thanks here as we as we head into the to the long Thanksgiving Day weekend for all the time and energy you've given to me and again, listening to engaging with and devoting some some time and energy attention to the daily energy detox. And with that, I wish you your team, your organization the very best. I hope you have an excellent rest of the day. And thank you again for tuning in.