Reflections...Embrace Candid Feedback

APM Team, 

 

This past week we had the opportunity to engage with one of our most important stakeholders – our Customer (Exelon). The conversation provided an opportunity to give and receive candid feedback on things we do well and things we can do better. Below I share a few reflections from our conversation.

We (along with our partners GE & FieldCore) hosted Exelon at our LDC in Pasadena, TX. The purpose of the conversation was to reflect on the spring work we did for Exelon on their 7H units here in Texas. These were challenging jobs for a number of reasons – the 7H units are new so the job scope was a learning event; much of the work was emergent, arising in late March / early April in the middle of outage season; this, along with the lingering effects of the Texas freeze on craft labor availability, had us scrambling to identify talent to deploy to these units. Overall, we delivered well. The units started back up on time. There were no quality issues. And most importantly, the Exelon reps commented that we had “an outstanding safety culture of commitment”. Very proud to hear those words!

For the first two plus hours of the three hour discussion, you would not have expected the Exelon feedback to ultimately be positive. We were challenged to provide more transparency regarding our crew competency, experience, familiarity with Exelon; our contingency planning for emergent issues on new technologies; our planning and scheduling discipline and “granularity”; our ability to learn across the Exelon fleet, applying lessons from nuclear to gas. All things we can improve. Yet in reflecting on the three hour discussion, two things became clear to me.

  • Embrace candid feedback as the gift from someone who desires to continue the relationship.

Exelon invested a good bit of time, energy, money into this meeting. They brought 8 leaders to our LDC, from plant managers to fleet and engineering executives. They were prepared with good, tough questions specific to their outage experience. If Exelon was interested in simply telling us we suck and they were looking somewhere else, I think their investment would have looked different. Rather, the Exelon investment in this meeting told us that Exelon cares about their units and about their partners. They want to see us succeed, and thus invested the time, energy, and money to spend half a day with us sharing candid feedback (tough coaching) on how we can improve. A true gift.

  • Make the Customer part of your problem solving and you will find mutual solutions.

Similarly, we invested a good bit of time, energy, and money into this meeting. We brought in our OPS leadership – Dan Reinhardt, John Collins, Matt McCrary, Matt Kunzelman – to the meeting in person. We too were well prepared, knowing our performance both at Exelon and overall, with both data and experiences. And most importantly we were equally transparent about our successes and our struggles. By being well prepared and transparent, we brought Exelon into our challenges. This trust in turn led Exelon to join us in problem solving. The most striking example of that was our transparency around our struggles in Texas. A customer who didn’t care would have taken that note and found another partner. Instead, Exelon raised some interesting ideas regarding long term outage staffing across the Exelon gas fleet that would help us rebuild our Texas strength. Turning an APM problem into a joint Exelon-GE-APM solution. A potential win!

Finally, as our three hours ended, I watched the room. We were told Exelon had to leave at 11:00. 11:00 came and we were still talking. Once we formally ended the meeting at ~11:15, Exelon continued to talk informally. Small group and one-to-one conversations (6 foot apart of course) were occurring. Matt McCrary & Matt Kunzelman were talking with plant managers. John Collins & Dan Reinhardt were talking with engineering and fleet leads. Numbers were shared, and future discussions were planned.

This is the spirit of “infinite relationships”. We continue the conversation. We win together.

And as our GE partners were leaving later that afternoon, I was asked, “Could we do this with Entergy?” YES! Let’s continue the conversation.