CEO Reflections... "White Week" Learnings

APM Team,

  These past two weeks were shaded as “white” per the 2022 business calendar. The goal during this time was to minimize all calls, meetings, and emails to the extent possible while maintaining any business critical operations. Allow me to share a few learnings from the past two weeks.

  First, the “white” week goal is easier said than done. Entering these two weeks, we still had ~1300 craft working ~60K hours. That’s a lot of work still going strong in the middle of summer. Thank you to our field teams for continuing to work safely, and thank you to our support teams who help our field teams stay safely on the deck.

  That being said, I do hope each of you were able to break away to focus on personal projects/work tasks and maximize time with your loved ones. I did, and in the process I had a few important learnings (or reminders).

Ask Don’t Tell Toolbox Talks & STA + CBS on a soccer field

I got to break away a couple of mornings and watch our daughters train soccer. What immediately caught my eye was the first and last 15 minutes of the session. No running, kicking, etc. Rather, the young ladies sat in groups, heard a brief message from a coach, then had cards they wrote on. I texted Missy to ask what this was about. She sent me an email from their organization, TTi Soccer, with the following statement, “We collect information both before and after practices to get an idea of the state of “readiness” for a young soccer player.” Wow!

  A brief message to stimulate engagement and reflection. A few minutes to reflect on the past session and the session today. Look familiar? To me it did. Our disciplines like the APM Field Leadership Tools (Balmert) and STA + CBS are used across multiple industries, including sports. Why? Because they help experts, whether craft or athletes, reach top performance. As leaders, I exhort us to use these disciplines with our teams to help all of us be excellent, experts in our chosen craft.

  Tension between continuity and change

A couple of months ago, a friend of mine encouraged me to read the book, How the Mighty Fall by Jim Collins. I finished it this week. In the book are golden nuggets of wisdom for leaders. One of those nuggets is in this sentence, “Like an artist who pursues both enduring excellence and shocking creativity, great companies foster a productive tension between continuity and change.”

  I desire APM to be great, to be best-in-class in our market, and to sustain that greatness. I believe you do to. If so, we must embrace the healthy tension of maintaining our disciplines that have helped us deliver excellence (Safety Keystone) while also continuing to learn and improve (the Lean mentality).

  “It’s not the plane, it’s the pilot.”

Our family went to watch Top Gun: Maverick over the past weekend. I give it two thumbs up! In the movie this line, “It’s not the plane, it’s the pilot.” is repeated – when a leader starts to rely too much on the plane technology or when a top gun pilot (the best of the best) starts to doubt himself or herself.

  We have invested a lot in technologies like AirTime and Live Outage to enable our Field Leaders to be successful with better processes and tools. We will continue to do that. Yet we must remember that it’s still the Superintendent and Crew on the deck that deliver the outage.

  Although the “white weeks” may officially end today, I hope the spirit of them continues for each of you, in your own time, over the remainder of the summer. Over that time, I would love to hear or read what you have learned, whether it be from reading a book, watching a movie, or being with your kids.