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Lessons For Hiring and Developing the Next Generation of Energy Transition Leaders
Article
The energy industry is entering a new phase.
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The energy transition executives whose psychometric profiles we analyzed lead companies operating in the following industries (among others): wind, solar and geothermal power development and operations; renewable fuels; electricity generation, transmission and distribution; energy management solutions; bioplastics; electrified transportation. Some assessed executives were leading a new energy business line within a traditional energy company.
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While corporations and investors alike continue to prioritize actions that improve the global energy system’s environmental sustainability, recent geopolitical and technological developments have brought energy security concerns to the forefront.
Energy companies today – be they utilities, privately backed renewable energy developers, national or international energy companies – are facing challenges at every turn including through:
- Economic uncertainty,
- A lack of government clarity in some markets,
- Potential supply chain disruptions,
- Accelerated AI-driven growth in electricity demand, and
- For many oil and gas companies, a return to reliance on fossil fuels production as a way to satisfy shareholders’ expectations.
In a context of elevated uncertainty, hiring and developing outstanding leaders is more important than ever. But how can CHROs, CEOs and boards at energy transition companies (and the private capital funds investing in them) identify the next cohort of executives who will lead their organization through today’s uncertainty and into the future? What personality and leadership traits do top-performing executives within these organizations most typically display?
To answer these questions, Russell Reynolds Associates analyzed the Hogan psychometric profiles of 54 energy transition leaders and conducted interviews with a subset of these leaders, contributing to the quotes used throughout this piece. Executives in the sample are distributed across global geographies and hold roles such as CEO, COO, president, and other N-1 operational or commercial roles. We collected their data from recent executive assessments and a proprietary outreach effort that took place in 2024.
Hogan’s assessment tools score individuals across 28 metrics including: their day-to-day behavioral tendencies (HPI), how they perform under pressure (HDS), and their motivations and drivers (MVPI). Through the lens of an industrial-organizational psychologist, the quantitative and qualitative data provides rich insights into an individual’s core preferences, derailers, and interests.
Via this analysis, RRA has identified six key characteristics that are consistently found among energy transition leaders. Read on to learn more about these common characteristics, as well as recommendations for managers looking to hire, retain, and develop top energy transition leadership talent.
What’s powering energy transition leaders? An exploration of six key characteristics through their Hogan profiles
1. Informed Innovator
Energy transition leaders demonstrate an informed and innovative leadership style, as evidenced by their scores on measures of continuous learning, self-reliance, and curiosity. These leaders are more likely to stay informed on market and political movements, external customer needs, and what’s required to drive leading/best practices. Additionally, they are comfortable breaking from tradition when industry trends signal changing winds. They don’t feel beholden to the ways of the past and enjoy being recognized for their willingness to challenge the status quo.
Recommendations
Explore how your candidates have approached innovation in the past. Look for signs that they have successfully applied their knowledge of cutting-edge market trends to discover improved and novel solutions to traditional problems, and ask for examples of how they’ve shared that knowledge with team members, keeping them both engaged and informed.
Once in role, consider how a disruptive innovator is likely to be received by your organization’s culture. Ensure that you are creating meaningful space for these leaders to drive change, while also supporting them on how to build followership in your company. This balance is critical for energy transition leaders to achieve their fullest potential.
Digital transformation is one of the big problems to solve, and in the Renewable Energy Industry, we are years behind other industries. Today, if we consider the data available in the assets under generation, we are not even taking profit of 3% of it. Having access to data and organizing it under industrial standards will allow us to conduct proper analytics, implement preventive solutions, and develop ML/AI codes to continuously improve asset performance and increase the renewable capacity connected to the grid.
Energy Transition Executive Assessment Participant
The leader must be a pioneer in data and AI. If digital transformation is not one of your top priorities, your company is not going to be in the game. To possess both this knowledge and the ability to drive it as a leader is unique; perhaps you need someone willing to take the risks.
Energy Transition Executive Assessment Participant
2. Drives Engagement
Energy transition leaders inspire engagement, as evidenced by their psychometric scores on measures pertaining to networking, pleasure-seeking, and visual appeal. They are observant and persuasive communicators who create compelling environments that invite others in and foster engagement. Through connection, clarity of mission, and magnetic appeal, they drive buy-in and inspire authentic passion for the work.
Energy transition leaders often lead with inclusivity and are open to a wide range of perspectives. They are thoughtful about how information needs to look and feel to influence both internal and external stakeholders.
Recommendations
Watch for examples of a candidate’s ability to bring others together and assemble diverse perspectives. Explore how their passion and mission-focus has influenced and impacted others around them in the past. To understand how they might approach and influence stakeholders, ask candidates to present a vision they’ve aligned with others around, or how they would drive strategy in their future organization.
Establishing a “continuous learning culture” and empowering people and teams is critical to developing the dynamism needed to drive success in a highly competitive environment.
Energy Transition Executive Assessment Participant
The people attracted to our industry want to work for a purpose, to change the planet. The directive, authoritarian leadership style of the past no longer works well. Our employee population wants to be engaged; they want to be heard. In this industry, more than others, if you don’t lead with collaboration first, you will not be able to attract and retain the scarce talent.
Energy Transition Executive Assessment Participant
3. Politically Savvy
Energy transition leaders exhibit high political savviness through their scores on measures of interpersonal style, trust in others, and social skill. They typically possess the strong relationship-building skills needed to navigate legacy ecosystems that may be resistant to change – if they can demonstrate patience.
Motivated by big ideas and industry disruption, their action orientation may appear as rule-breaking or lacking consideration for their organization’s practical limitations. They can occasionally grow frustrated if bureaucracy slows the pace of change.
Recommendations
Explore how your candidates approach stakeholders and systems that are resistant to change. Candidates who express high levels of patience and a willingness to accept some strategic compromises are likely to fare better in more complex or bureaucratic environments. Ensure that referencing provides a clear perspective on the candidate's ability to build strong relationships, adapt to new cultures, and approach change mandates with an appropriate long-term view.
Credibility, strong role model behavior and transparent communication are the key leadership elements that create the right team spirit, allowing the organization to find the best solutions and answers for today’s questions.
Energy Transition Executive Assessment Participant
We see many leaders coming from large energy companies who say they are frustrated by bureaucracy. What they don’t realize is they will still have major investors who need a lot of data before approving decisions, and they won’t have carte blanche to make decisions.
Energy Transition Executive Assessment Participant
4. Optimistic Experimenter
Energy transition leaders tend to be highly optimistic around experimentation, as evidenced by their scores on measures of resilience and consistency. They maintain a hopeful tenacity in the face of adversity. With a “glass half full” personality, they are motivated by uncovering new solutions when they encounter novel problems, rather than becoming complacent.
Energy transition leaders are well-versed in constant market evolutions, new technology development, volatile government sentiment towards subsidies, and frequent changes in the cost of capital. As a result, these leaders must be comfortable “failing forward,” modelling the resiliency to try again. High-performing energy transition executives are likely to nurture team environments that champion this experimentation mindset and boldly venture into unfamiliar commercial opportunities.
Recommendations
Seek to understand a candidate’s ability to drive experimentation under uncertain macro or business conditions; for example, ask them for evidence of where they have forged new partnerships through first-of-a-kind commercial agreements. Listen for situations in which they faced a significant setback, assessing their response and whether they maintained forward momentum. Reflect on how their approach is likely to resonate with other senior leaders in these high-pressure moments.
Our success factors are so volatile and sometimes things change overnight. It is important to have the right organizational set up that meets the high skills and high expectations of your employees.
Energy Transition Executive Assessment Participant
The next leaders will need to be innovators and experimenters. To be successful, we are constantly developing possible solutions and everything is new. Everything is experimenting and not giving up.
Energy Transition Executive Assessment Participant
5. (Too) Big Picture
As indicated by their scores pertaining to ideation and delegation, energy transition leaders are often big-picture thinkers who operate with a long-term industry-wide view. They tend to enjoy operating at 40,000 feet, and are less inclined to become mired in details, nitpick errors, or micromanage reports.
Energy transition leaders tend to forge ahead in ambiguous situations, even when ideas may seem eccentric or unfocused to others. Their ability to envision efforts holistically allows these leaders to engage stakeholders and “sell” them on ambitious projects. However, they are most successful when complemented by detail and process-oriented partners who can ensure that technology and commercial strategies are delivered, and milestones are achieved with appropriate attention to timeline and cost.
Recommendations
Driven by their focus on big ideas, energy transition leaders occasionally introduce risk by overlooking the importance of process and the due diligence that investors or stakeholders may require. Investigate how your candidate has carried a strategic plan through to implementation, and probe how much detail they can recall and relay. Delving into their self-awareness will be critical to understanding how they intentionally balance their strengths and gaps with complementary talent to build a well-balanced and competent management team that can deliver, as well as articulate, performance against specific KPIs.
Once in role, big-picture leaders will benefit from a hands-on board, as directors can lend strong sector knowledge and the judgement and business acumen to appropriately challenge strategy. In combination, this kind of strong support system helps de-risk energy transition leaders’ vision, translating big ideas into concrete results over a realistic period of time.
You must find balance in your organization too. You need operations leaders who can push, but the pragmatic voices in functional roles – CFO, legal, etc. – are critical to ensure focus and structure.
Energy Transition Executive Assessment Participant
The CEOs are so good at selling and strategy but their ability to drill into the details is not always there. You ideally need to hire structured operators to counterbalance the externally facing, visionary CEO.
Energy Transition Executive Assessment Participant
6. Impact Over Comfort
Energy transition leaders are often motivated by impact over personal gains, as evidenced by their scores on measures of variety seeking, generosity, helping others, and risk-taking.
Driven by the mission — rather than personal financial security and wealth — energy transition leaders tend to place higher value on market impact, innovation, and ability to drive change at significant scale. They emphasize changing the world over individual legacy and are willing to risk personal financial reward – even failure – for the sake of pioneering a new technology or market in support of decarbonization. As a result, they may see profitability or immediate value creation as secondary to global impact.
Recommendations
Striking a balance between impact and financial performance is critical to the success of energy transition leaders, particularly those backed by funds and investors who seek more rapid financial returns. Explore how your candidate has balanced these priorities while maintaining the confidence and support of investors. Review their business performance track record and consider seeking reference points from investors with whom the candidate has previously worked.
Identifying talent that shares a passion for long-term impact is one of our most important challenges. Renewable businesses are focused on value creation but have a different operating style compared to traditional energy organizations. We must deliver value with more agility and speed.
Energy Transition Executive Assessment Participant
Typically, CEOs in the renewable industry want as much financial alignment with the business as possible. They are willing to go so far as risking reinvesting part of their end of year bonus into company stocks.
Energy Transition Executive Assessment Participant
The right leader for a new phase of the energy transition
Transitioning to an environmentally sustainable energy and industrial system remains an inescapable priority, which means energy transition organizations need executives who are big thinkers and mission-driven. However, the current economic and geopolitical context also requires businesses and investors to empower leaders who can find balance between idealism and practicality.
As hiring managers and boards work to identify and develop the next generation of energy transition leaders, we hope that this analysis serves as a guiding reference. Organizations should look for leaders who demonstrate the ability to keep individual goals and motivators in line with an environment that often requires reliance on process, metrics, and results presented through careful analysis.
As the energy industry resets its expectations, passion and financial returns need to be more strictly linked. Simultaneously, organizations are likely to attract and retain the best talent if they demonstrate patience: delivering on an energy transition strategy is a process that often requires a multi-decade investment.
Authors
Abigail Skerrett co-leads Russell Reynolds Associates’ Energy Transition practice in EMEA. She is based in London.
Stephen Schoenberger co-leads Russell Reynolds Associates’ Energy Transition practice in the Americas. He is based in Boston.
Katy Schawe is a member of Russell Reynolds Associates’ Leadership Advisory practice. She is based in Houston.
Francesco Menonna is a member of Russell Reynolds Associates’ Industrial and Natural Resources Knowledge team. He is based in New York City.
Randy Octuck is a member of Russell Reynolds Associates’ Assessment and Development Knowledge team. He is based in San Francisco.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to give particular thanks to Eduardo Medina, CEO at RES Energy, and Barbara Flesche, Executive Vice President Europe at Statkraft for their time and valuable perspectives in addition to all the industry leaders who lent time to this effort.
The authors would also like to acknowledge the following RRA colleagues for their contribution to this paper:
Mauro Gimenez leads Russell Reynolds Associates’ Global Industrial and Natural Resources sector. He is based in Houston.
Erin Marie Collins is a member of Russell Reynolds Associates’ Assessment and Development team. She is based in Melbourne.
Marc Baca co-leads Russell Reynolds Associates’ Power & Utilities practice in the Americas. He is based in Houston.
J. Hewins co-leads Russell Reynolds Associates’ Leadership Advisory practice for Industrial and Natural Resources in the Americas. He is based in San Francisco.