Our operations and functional leadership had a good week in Pasadena recently during our Q3 Leadership Meeting. Our theme for the week was moving our company and employees from Good to Great, remaining Field Focused, and delivering Excellence. We have work to do this Fall.

We spotlighted our divisions, regions, and functions, reviewing best practices and lessons learned from every corner of the business. You will see a tight focus this fall on our most critical deliverables – EHS, Quality, and Integrity. We identified the below points as critical to improving our performance this fall – we call them Critical Xs.

Human & Organizational Performance (HOP) … We will focus on HOP education and tools that drive disciplined performance. These tools enable us to influence behavior – to fight inexperience or overconfidence – and deliver a superior culture and results on our job sites.

Field Procedure Compliance … We will ensure field procedure availability and utilization. We will take a strong stand for compliance in this expectation.

Open Reporting … We will re-educate on reporting expectations, with a focus on quality versus quantity, and use recognition to model the reporting behaviors we expect. We will also provide monthly feedback regarding reporting trends to apply learnings from cross-business peers.

Leadership Training … We will provide leadership training in August as part of our Superintendent Conference. This training will include practical tools to be used on the jobsite to engage and coach each and every craftsman in our culture.

Audits and Visits … We will have a stronger presence this outage season with leadership at jobsites. These jobsite audits and visits will also empower our leadership to engage and coach our jobsite leaders on what we expect to deliver excellence and the “Pinnacle” jobsite.

Our leadership teams now are finalizing this Critical Xs Improvement plan – how we will define, communicate, measure, and audit the Xs. The Critical Xs Improvement plan will be completed by August 17 in time for review during our Superintendent Conference and execution in the Fall Outage Season.

We also spent time on other valuable and important priorities.

We discussed the vision for our Leadership Development Center – a facility that produces site leaders and teams, and how we develop, retain, and evaluate their excellence. Our particular focus was re-mapping the Superintendent and Keyman competency matrixes. We also reviewed our progression cycles from apprentice to Superintendent and our protocol for evaluating craft talent to identify our future site leaders.

We reviewed the status of our 3 Strategic Goals (or WIGs) for 2018.

1. Becoming ONE organized craft labor solution … We have made strides here, and have a few key focus areas in the second half to deliver this goal.

2. Relationship development with our GE and Fieldcore peers … We are focused on continuing to develop relationships with multiple GE groups at multiple levels, seeking opportunities for alignment on strategy and listening for opportunities to provide solutions, while highlighting our capabilities.

3. Further development of our AirTime platform and other data analytics tools … AirTime has been a successful game-changer for us. We will continue to build this and other data analytics tools.

We looked past the immediate present and into the horizon of 2019-2020 and beyond. We discussed the future of the power services market and how we can leverage our competitive advantages to win in the future. The leadership team provided insight on future areas of growth and investment needs that will shape our strategy for 2019 Blueprint, 2020 Vision, and 5 Year Roadmap.

In closing, allow me to highlight another activity in the meeting. A majority of our leaders were asked at some point during these 3.5 days to stand up and succinctly state why safety, quality, and integrity were important to them, i.e., provide their own “stump speech” for our values and our “WHY”. There were many moving and compelling stories shared – personal experiences that were “wake up” calls; the influence of parents, other relatives, and even peers on their journey as leaders; moments in history that provided inspiration to live our values.

What struck me from this activity is that we all are aligned on the outcomes we want in our business (the Big Ys). We all align on the vision that every one, every day goes home safe, is proud of their work, is improving their skills, and is respected as a professional. We all align on every one, every day being able to look in the mirror, holding their head high for a job well done / a day well lived, and peacefully laying their head on the pillow.

What we must do now is align on how we deliver those outcomes to our employees, our customers, and our shareholder. We must focus on the Critical Xs – the daily actions, behaviors, commitments, disciplines – that lead to an excellent day and an excellent job. We must align on our Critical Xs Improvement Plan, for this plan is critical to our success not only this fall but also beyond, into the future.

This meeting was a good start to align on our strategy. The success of this meeting will be measured over the next 6 months as we follow-through and execute on the actions developed during the meeting. I am confident we have a strong team and a strong plan that will deliver.

- APM President, Jake Locklear