Statoil Exec: Effective Leaders Should Empower People and Machines

Statoil Exec: Effective Leaders Should Empower People and Machines
Statoil's Jim Claunch shares his insight and advice on what will make effective oil and gas leaders during a time of rapidly advancing technology.

Leadership within the oil and gas industry is more critical than ever before. That’s the message Jim Claunch, Statoil’s vice president of operational excellence for development and production for U.S./Mexico, communicated to attendees of the Houston Energy Breakfast March 24.

He said leadership is critical to the success of a company’s team and people. And it falls on leaders to inspire and motivate their team members.

“The culture change that’s coming for engineers is huge. [Engineers] have got to let go of their data,” said Claunch, addressing the engineers in the room. “We’re not going to live just on spreadsheets anymore.”

With the increasing prevalence of disruptive technologies such as automation and data analytics in oil and gas, the idea of diversity within companies will take a different shape. In fact, Claunch said through automation and analytics, the Great Crew Change takes care of itself.

“We’re going to redefine what the word ‘collaborative’ means because a lot of the collaboration will be done with analytics,” he said. “Diversity will look different. We need people who understand data – data scientists – those people who think differently and really love data. We’re going to have to deal with some people that think way differently than we do!”

Claunch also gave an unconventional piece of advice to leaders: fail fast.

“We don’t need long drawn-out projects where we’re waiting on results. I don’t even use the word ‘failure’ anymore. I call it ‘when you don’t get the results you expected,’” he said. “We need to fail fast and we need to learn faster.”

With technology changing so rapidly, leaders should act as a safety net for employees – to encourage them to experiment.

“These guys don’t have it all figured out, but they’ve got to keep experimenting and we need to encourage that,” Claunch said. “When they don’t get the results they want, we need to catch them.”

And just empowering people is not enough, said Claunch. Leaders also have to empower machines.

“As a leader, ask yourself ‘what decisions do I really need to make? What can the machine learn? What can the machine decide better than I can?’” he said. “It’s about empowerment of our people and empowerment of machines … and that can be scary.”



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