Sustainable Leadership 101: Prevention vs. Treatment

Does it make sense for an oil & gas operator to spend $1 billion to prevent $30 million in costs associated with fishing, sidetracks, screenouts and other unplanned—yet manageable—events?

Does it make sense for leaders like you to place all your faith in a "foolproof" plan that makes you look like a fool when you're unable to adapt to some unforeseen issue?

While you're likely to answer "no" to each of those questions, you're also likely to spend more time than you should today worrying more about perfecting plans than about perfecting your ability to adapt to changing conditions...especially when it comes to talent management within your organization.

So in this live episode of The Energy Detox, we draw upon recent industry news, a recent controversial Joe Rogan podcast, and a few sports analogies to help you ask the questions needed to appropriately balance the PREVENTION of personnel problems with the TREATMENT of talent troubles so that you—and your company—emerge as a more sustainable leader.

The headline: 𝐎𝐦𝐢𝐜𝐫𝐨𝐧 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐮𝐞𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐃𝐫𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐍𝐞𝐚𝐫 𝐓𝐞𝐫𝐦 𝐕𝐨𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲 (Rigzone)

The goal: to (𝐆)𝐫𝐨𝐰, (𝐏)𝐫𝐨𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐭, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 (𝐒)𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐢𝐧 success by pondering these 3 questions throughout your day:

💡 How might your small and stale playbook be limiting your growth potential?

💡 Are you worrying more about your competition than your customers?

💡 Have you unwittingly become over-dependent on offense, defense, or special teams?

Related Content:

Episode 11: Leadership PPE and the Hidden Benefits of Safety-Driven Decision-Making

SUBSCRIPTION OPTIONS:

Listen on Apple Podcasts Listen on Google Podcasts Listen on Spotify RSS Feed

Transcript

(AI training in progress; please excuse any errors)

Hello and welcome to another Live episode of 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, 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 appropriately balance treatment and prevention, how they recognize that, of course, a plan to deal with the constant volatility of an industry like oil and gas requires leadership that balances a desire to make sure things don't go wrong any more than they need to. But also the ability to deal with things when they do go wrong when problems do arise, because that is the nature of our industry, and quite frankly, any industry and quite frankly, the world that we live in, especially with the ongoing issues presented because of COVID. And to drive today's conversation, as always, we're gonna look to some energy industry headlines, many of which are tied to Omicron. And the development and the proliferation of this new variant and in particular, the implications that it will have on our industry. And the headline that we use to drive today's show comes from Riggs zone, which has a a weekly piece of interviews, and I think they actually call it hits and misses. Because, of course, when it comes to predicting how the industry will continue to respond to COVID, there are no shortage of misses and the occasional hit when it comes to predicting how things will happen. Which really brings us back to you as a leader and your ability to predict how things will happen. Because nobody's crystal ball, of course, going back two years ago could have predicted how things would have played out and nobody would really expect you to have a crystal ball to predict how things will play out. But as cliche as it might sound, the differentiator between leaders who are successful and sustainable and able to withstand things and those leaders who aren't, of course, is their ability to adapt to deal with problems to treat problems, if you will, once they arise. And the other kind of impetus for this conversation today is a recent conversation on the Joe Rogan podcast a slightly more famous and prolific Joe than this one and a slightly longer podcast than this one. Although this one can go on for a little bit. But the episode in question the episode that prompted Today's episode was a recent sit down that Joe Rogan had with Dr. Peter McCullough, this was a relatively controversial episode, I don't think you're gonna find too many clips on YouTube because of its controversial nature. And I'm not going to dive into the details of it. But in essence, this Dr. Mercola has been out there for the last year and a half saying that there hasn't been enough of a focus on treatment of COVID on coming up with treatments to deal with people who get COVID, before they wind up in the hospital before they wind up, you know, to sick and before they wind up quite frankly, on ventilators or die that there's things that can be done in the interim from the time they know that they're diagnosed to the time that again, they're they're so sick that they show up in an emergency room. And this conversation again, which is nearly three hours long, brings to mind a number of different Okay, controversial takes regarding COVID that we will not go down the path of but most importantly, it brings up a question of treatment versus prevention. And this Dr. Mercola spends a lot of time talking with Joe Rogan about the idea that in at least in his opinion, in his opinion, people government bodies, you know, big players in the in the, you know, dealing with COVID, if you will the the Dr. Fauci is of the world, they are too focused on coming up with a plan that is going to prevent the proliferation of COVID. With, of course, the biggest one being vaccinations. And of course, again, we could talk for hours about vaccinations and the efficacy of them and the importance of getting them and getting boosters and you know how well they work and what ways they work who they're intended for the importance of preventing community spread all those different things, which again, we're not going to go down that path for many different reasons. But it is important today, I think to extract from that conversation between Dr. Mercola and Joe Rogan, the idea that it is possible for you as a leader to get too fixated on either a prevention strategy where you put all your eggs in one basket and when you're singularly focused on one thing, which again, according to Dr. Mercola is the development and the proliferation of a vaccine and in turn vaccine boosters and and adapting to the virus that way, or becoming so focused on treatment and allowing the virus to run its course but making sure that you have treatments available to ensure that it doesn't get too far with people that you have ways to mitigate the impacts of COVID and again, we're gonna Stop there when it comes to the COVID conversation in this conversation between Joe Rogan and Dr. McCulloh and bring it back to you as a leader within the oil and gas industry, because of course, much like the constant variants that are coming across in the constant challenges that COVID face, you in the energy industry are faced with constant challenges, constant volatility, hence the headline, again, that we chose to, to drive today's conversation from Rexona things are constantly changing. So for you as a leader, the question is, are you have the mindset that you can mitigate some of these things that you can prevent them from happening in the first place, that you can have a plan that's able to withstand changes, whatever they might be, or a view of the opinion that things are gonna happen anyway, you're going to kind of let them play out, and you're going to differentiate yourself by being in a position to treat these problems better than any other leader? It's a big question. And it's a fairly common question when you get into leadership and strategy development. But today, I want to focus not just on developing big corporate strategies, and and business plans, many of which, of course, have been ironed out and settled upon here as we approach the end of the year. But most importantly, I want to focus on this question of prevention versus treatment from a personnel standpoint, from a talent standpoint, because the reality is, there are some cases to sort of schools of thought that are at odds with each other. And the one school of thought is that you can set a pipeline, you can set a plan that's going to ensure an influx of good solid talent, that you're going to be able to over time, you know, turn over your talent and, and continually improve the bar and, and set yourself and your organization apart from others. And that's a plan that's a talent development and talent strategy plan, in some cases, that companies have going out 510, in some cases, even longer for some bigger companies. Or you have an approach, if you will, that says you know what, we're just going to deal with things as they as they come along, we're going to deal with problems, we're going to deal with individual problems. From a talent standpoint, we're going to deal with the need for potential mass layoffs, and rehiring. And we're just going to be a little bit more dynamic and more agile, if you will, and we're going to be able to muddle through, but we're going to be the most flexible company. And we're going to have the most flexible approach. And again, we're not going to worry about setting ourselves on some plan that's inevitably going to go by the wayside. And again, that's one extreme, this is another extreme. And of course, for you as a conscious leader, as a sustainable leader, the goal is to avoid extremes and avoid those times where you might obviously not see yourself as being in one extreme camp or the other, but that you might be slipping towards one extreme or the other, and therefore causing yourself unnecessary harm causing your organization unnecessary harm. And most importantly, from a positive standpoint, missing opportunities to level up if you will, to improve the the long term sustainable talent pool, if you will, that you have existing within your company. So to dive right into this conversation today, we're going to start with the first of our three questions, which is how might your small and stale playbook be limiting your growth potential.

07:53

And of course, as is often the case here on the news detox, we can weave in a couple sports analogies here, because what is the key to a successful coach, you know, take a football coach on the sidelines here on on Monday morning, you know, you can go and you can analyze all the various performances of NFL teams yesterday. And again, you can see coaches who had to adapt, adapt to, you know, in game conditions. And of course, the bigger your playbook, if you will, in some cases, the, you know, the better off you are when there's some unique situation where you can call upon some specific play that is rarely used, that kind of comes to the treatment scenario, right? Things might not have gone as planned throughout the game. But now you have this bag of tricks that you could draw upon. Whereas others might say that a simple playbook, a playbook that doesn't have a bunch of plays that is just, you know, based on execution, and the prevention of the other team from doing what you don't want them to do that that might be more successful. But in reality, of course, what makes for the most successful coach will somebody who has a big picture, who has an appropriately sized playbook that isn't stale, that isn't fresh, that is you know, dynamic. And again, those to you know, to finally use this two by two, if you happen to be watching this, and if you're not watching, again, I have a very simple two by two diagram with prevention on the on the x axis and treatment on the y axis, or maybe I just flipped those anyway. And clearly, from a leadership standpoint, you want to be up here where you're able to have a plan, you set a plan in motion going into the game, you know, going into each week's contest, you have an idea of what the other team is going to be, you know, attacking you with, but you balance that with the need to be dynamic to have a couple you know, trick plays in your pocket, if you will have a couple, you know, scenarios where you know, you're bringing a different quarterback, you're on a wildcat, unexpectedly, whatever the case might be. And that can place you up here in this, you know, upper right quadrant where, again, is where you want to be as a sustainable leader. But the question for you is especially coming back to a talent standpoint, are you over reliant on the same playbook on the same tools on the same tricks, we can go back to the last episode, Episode 50, where we talked about this idea of whether you you might unwittingly be banning certain approaches to leadership development to employee development to recruiting that could be worthwhile, or you banning certain approaches and certain development schemes that could actually add an influx of talent to your organization? And if so, why? Why are you leaning too heavily on this, perhaps this, this prevention approach, instead of being more dynamic and allowing yourself to treat problems as they arise, whether they're problems related to the great resignation, whether it's problems related to, again, in certain industries, of course, the you know, the supply and demand, if you will, of talent and the need to raise your compensation, if you will, or to attract them in different ways and to throw different benefits at them to compete with the desire to, frankly not work, in some cases. Are you adaptable? Or are you sticking with stale approaches? And what do I mean by stale approaches? Well, in some cases, it's the standard employee development program. In some cases, it's the standard feedback loop. And it's the standard, you know, annual review process that may have served a purpose at one point may have generated the results, but just quite frankly, doesn't work anymore. And maybe you do need to shift to more of a quarterly review process that is a little bit more formal, and that requires maybe a little bit more or headache from a human resources standpoint, but ensures that you catch problems before they arise, so that you can treat them so that you find yourself again, here in this upper right quadrant, instead of just fooling yourself into thinking that you know, what you can live here on the prevention, access set in motion some sort of, you know, employee development plan or employee feedback loop or, or, you know, performance appraisal plan, and actually kid yourself into thinking that you know, what, just by going through those motions, it's going to work and when things don't work, you don't look to treat the problem and address things differently. No, you double down and you say, Well, no, we, we really need to adhere to this, you need to complete this more, you know, fully, you need to spend more time you need to have, you know, more of these meetings that follow the same darn script, instead of flipping the script and going with, again, a treatment approach and saying, Well, what else can be done to, again, prevent people from getting pissed off and getting angry and wanting to leave? Or, more importantly, from decreasing their performance? So ask yourself today? are you limiting yourself to the same old playbook when it comes to employee development? When it comes to motivating people? Are you falling back on the same traps and just trying to do them more and do them, you know, more forcefully instead of actually just looking for perhaps different tools and different approaches?

12:15

Because if so, again, you're limiting yourself, you're not going to grow as a company, you're going to find yourself stagnant. And quite frankly, you're going to find yourself chasing, you know, the same variance, if you will, of employee disengagement that are always out there. Instead of being proactive and saying, Look, employee disengagement is a thing, you're not necessarily going to be able to prevent it. So how can you deal with it? How can you treat it on the fly? How can you be more dynamic? How can you have that mindset and in turn, wind up saving yourself more time, energy and money, because you're not locking yourself in to some long term way that we're going to keep people happy for the next five or 10 years, when in reality, things are shifting too much for you to find some, you know, crystal ball and some, some golden solution that, quite frankly, doesn't exist. The next question is, are you worrying more about your competition than your customers. And again, this can apply to a full strategy for any company, right. And we're not talking necessarily about big, full business plan strategies. But if we were, we can point out the fact that in many cases, companies are too worried about their competition. And sometimes there's direct competition, you know, two companies produce a widget and you're worried about the other person producing a widget and you lose sight of the fact that look, you have customers that you're trying to please you have internal stakeholders, employees and suppliers and, and board members and investors that you're trying to please you lose sight of them and

13:34

you become too focused on the competition and too focused on being reactive, if you will, you're gonna run into trouble. So the question for you now from a talent standpoint is, again, are you too focused on what your competitors are actually doing? Are you too focused on how they're attracting talent and and how they're helping, you know, companies grow, and employees, you know, become attracted to them? Are you too focused on all of the tricks and different things that they're doing that are quite frankly, fleeting, instead of focusing on, again, some sort of long term strategy that actually aligns with what your values are and who your customers are and who your internal stakeholders are. Because if you're not, you run the you run the risk, of course of falling into the same cycle of, you know, layoffs, and rehires of performance improvement plans that actually don't come with good authentic communication about why and employees on a communication plan, you run into the same trap of again, worrying about pleasing people and not hurting their feelings instead of being authentic and saying that look, you're not doing your job, and we're going to test you we're going to push you or quite frankly, not being authentic and saying look, we're going to try to manage you out we're going to try to or or we're going to offer you you know, X amount of dollars or something or time or we're going to offer you some off boarding services to you know, to to help you exit the company in a you know, in a in a more smooth manner, if you will, so that it doesn't be as disruptive for you and your career and of course to the company. There are things you can do that still protect your desire to be good manager. Protect your desire to not open yourself up to to litigation and harm. But you could do it in a thoughtful manner instead of again, following the same script, doing what everybody else is doing, following the competition, how many companies out there fit into the same mold over the last year and a half, two years of, again, layoffs and uncertainty and working from home and not working from home and shifting messages? How many are following the same darn script? Instead of taking a step back and saying, Look, forget about what everybody else is doing? Forget about all of these surveys, forget about all of that. And ask yourself what do your customers want your internal customers or external customers so that you don't fall behind their simple questions. They don't require large undertakings and 360 degree feedback forms and company surveys, sometimes they just start with a simple conversation. And if you are an upper management, senior leadership, you're leading a company with hundreds or 1000s in some cases, 10s of 1000s of people, you can still take that informal approach and have a handful of conversations with a handful of employees. And I guarantee you, you will get more feedback to help ensure that you're doing what your customers want you to do, or at least your understanding what your customers needs are, instead of spending all of your time and all of your people's time worrying about what the external trends are. I'm not saying you shouldn't follow the external trends that's important. But again, conscious leadership and living in this, you know, upper right quadrant, where you have an appropriate blend of prevention. And treatment requires you to step outside the box, step outside the standard mix of tools, step outside the you know, the standard approach, if you will, of leaning on outside consultants and advisors, and use your internal resources in your God given ability to communicate with other people and simply ask the questions of what your customers internal and external, are looking for what they're feeling what they want to see, have, you know, half a dozen anecdotes, if you will, that come out of those conversations. And I promise you from what I've seen, those anecdotes, those real life stories that you can then in turn, share with others and kind of trickle down will do far more than some 70 page report that you've paid seven figures to have produced that quite frankly, falls in the camp of this long term prevention squishy, you know, game plan that is about as solid as a, you know, 30 year Net Zero target that we all know is going to shift and change. Instead, have those dynamic real human conversations, have them on a regular basis. And you will come up with a treatment plan that adapts to changing conditions with employees far faster than any sort of long term plan that you might be putting too much stock in. And the final question today is related to your ability or your inability, if you will, to balance your offense or defense in your special teams, if you will. And the question is have you unwittingly become over dependent on offense, defense or special teams, because of course, in the sports world, clearly, you need to balance all facets of your playbook, if you will. But from a company standpoint, it's very easy to slip into the trap of hey, we're going to address disengagement. And we're going to pour all of our resources and our time and our energy on you know, being offensive, if you will. And we're going to throw all of this this fun and excitement stuff at our employees without realizing again that you know what, sometimes you just need to be a little defensive, sometimes you need to look at those individual employees and the individual problems that they're having and play a little bit of defense and step in front of them and say, Hey, wait a second, you know, what is your current challenge? What

18:22

do you you know, what do we need to address here, you know, they're going full steam down the field, in some cases in the wrong direction, you need to stop them, right. But from a leadership standpoint, it's very easy, and especially in a volatile, you know, industry like ours, and in a volatile environment that we're living in here with, with obviously, you know, the challenges of COVID, it's very easy for leaders that I see, to get into one mindset or another to say we're going to go all in on offense, they're going to get excited again, usually it prompts some sort of corporate, you know, some rollout of some big corporate program, some big sexy program with balloons, and clowns, and cake and everything else. And again, they feel like boom, they've done it, they've set themselves in motion with, you know, while losing sight of the fact that you also need to play some defense once in a while, right? You need to recognize that you're not going to solve again, these disengagement problems, you're not going to deal, you're not going to cast aside all the enemies of your company, if you will, whether they're conscious enemies or unconscious enemies, whether they're employees or whether they're outsiders, whether they're people that are looking to poach people from your organization, or whether they're people within your own organization that are toxic, and they're going to be toxic. If you're not on guard against them, then again, you're asking for trouble. And again, from a special team standpoint, you need to recognize those times where you do need to bring in outside help you do need to bring in those who can come in and see things a little bit differently and attack things a little bit differently. By and large, you're not going to win a game solely on special teams. Yes, you might win you know, a game three to nothing by only a field goal. And yes, in a defensive struggle, your punter might be the all star of the game and then you know field position is king and and perhaps Yes, it is special teams that lead you on to victory. But by and large, that's not what's going to win the game right? It's going to be an appropriate balance between offense and defense. Fancy having special teams there and available to do their job to do it well to do it efficiently when the time calls for it? So the question again for you is from an offense defense special teams standpoint, are you being too defensive? Are you relying too much on again, just treating things as they come at you and, you know, not having control of what, obviously, what plays the other team calls and just trying to step in their way and intercept passes, if you will? Or are you too far on the other side, and feeling like you know, what, you're gonna execute this perfect game point, you're gonna score enough points, that you're not gonna have to worry about defense, and you're not gonna have to worry about special teams. Because if you're falling into that trap, and you're finding yourself again, on one of these extremes, while that is the antithesis of sustainable leadership, where you want to be is up here in the upper right quadrant, where you have an appropriately blend appropriate blend of prevention and treatment, where you appropriately you know, recognize, if you will, that sometimes it makes sense to put in place a long term strategy, I hope, if you run a company, you have some sort of long term strategy, but I also hope that you're not so over reliant on that strategy. So in love with that strategy, that your neglect the need to again, have treatment plans to spend a little bit of money if you will, on, you know, the occasional problem that arises. And again, the the headline, the title of today's podcast episode that I haven't even addressed, of course, calls to mind the idea that from an oil and gas standpoint, it is possible for you to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to prevent virtually any issue from happening while you drill wells while you complete wells, of course, but there is a point where he of course, you can spend too much money, because problems will arise. And there's plenty of services out there to help when problems arise. If you have a pipe that stuck in a hole and you need to sever the pipe or fish it out or pump cement and sidetrack you know what that's going to cost you money that's gonna cost you time, again, there's gonna be a lot of people that are uneasy and might be, you know, worried about their job. But the reality is, you know, even if you spend $2 million to rectify a problem like that, it's far better than spending $100 million over the course of the year to prevent that one problem, not for spending $100 million to prevent $500 million of those types of problems. That's a different story. But again, far too many leaders fall into the trap of being too focused on prevention, too focused on spending money to prevent anything from happening, and they lose sight of the fact that they're called to be adaptable, they're called on occasion to spend a little bit of money on fishing, and sidetracking and, and flowing back, uh, well, after a screen out whatever the case is. And again, that's what leadership is, leadership is the ability to make those decisions to put yourself in a position to make those decisions, to be agile, to empower your other people to be agile. And when it comes to talent and hiring, it's no different from operations, you need to be in a position where you have a long term talent strategy, you have a pool of interns and perhaps schools that you look at, and you have some you know, good benefits, packages, and all those type of things. But you're also willing to be adaptable, you're able to think outside the box, you're able to look for people that don't fit the mold, you're able to look for resumes that you know, might not check all the boxes, you're able to look at GPAs that are again, quite a bit lower than maybe what you would have liked before, but are balanced out by

23:07

experience, whatever the case is, if you're not instilling in your people and your human resources, people and your talent development people, your talent management people and your strategy people, whatever titles they have, if you're not instilling in them a desire to balance treatment, and on the fly conversations and training and coaching, whatever the case might be, with some of the more traditional long term preventative, slower, but proven approaches, then again, you're asking for trouble. So hopefully today though, these questions help you you know, ask yourself where on this, you know, two by two diagram, again, if you happen to be watching this, you fall, and if you're not watching, if you're just listening, then again, close your eyes. And imagine you as either, again, a defensive coordinator or an offensive coordinator magine yourself falling into one of those two extremes. Or imagine yourself as a head coach who's able to see the big picture who's able to appropriately balance prevention and treatment, who's appropriately able to balance again, an offensive strategy that's aimed at scoring points and growing and setting yourself apart from your competition with the desire or the need to react when the other side when your enemies are attacking you. And when they're coming at you with plans and game plans and approaches that quite frankly, you didn't predict. Because we live in an unpredictable world, we work in an unpredictable industry, and the leaders that are going to differentiate themselves as sustainable leaders are those who quite frankly, are able to live again up here in this upper right quadrant, and can balance prevention and treatment to come up with a full blown plan that will achieve success for you as a leader for your company, for your organization for all your stakeholders. And so with all that I appreciate you tuning in this morning, I appreciate you listening. I appreciate your feedback. And again, I encourage you to ask yourself whether you're you know, running the risk of falling into one extreme or the other. And with that, I hope you have an excellent Day an excellent rest of the week, and I thank you again for tuning in.