Leadership Training

Wayne Davis is the Manager of Organizational Development for Sierra Pacific Resources, a holding company whose principal subsidiaries are Nevada Power Company, the electric utility for most of southern Nevada, and Sierra Pacific Power Company, the electric utility for most of northern Nevada and the Lake Tahoe area of California. Sierra Pacific Power Company also distributes natural gas in the Reno-Sparks area of northern Nevada.

• Please give us some background on your career and how you came to work for Sierra Pacific.

Initially, it was purely by accident that I came to Sierra Pacific! I had spent the early part of my career in Salt Lake City, and then I moved to Southeast Michigan, where I resided for six years. For that move, my wife followed me, but when we made the decision to come back west, I was following her! She had a job opportunity in Las Vegas, and I started up my own human resources development company, working for small to mid-sized companies.

I was contacted by a headhunter about an opportunity with Sierra Pacific. At the time my business was just picking up, so I basically ignored the call. They called back a week later, so I figured, oh what the heck? This might be a great way to get a new client in the utilities industry! But as the conversations began and went on with Sierra Pacific, I realized that for the first time I was going to have the opportunity to work with an organization where, for lack of a better term, the senior leadership “got it” when it came to organizational and leadership development. It really excited me, and I was very impressed with the different leaders I met within HR, operations and support. Then when I visited with Steve Wood, the Senior Vice President for Administration, he started using terminology that I had believed in all along, and the two key phrases that hit me the strongest were, (1) one of the company’s values was stewardship, and that’s a principal that I’ve been teaching in leadership development for years, and (2) Steve is a retired captain in the U.S. Marine Corps, and one of the key guiding principals in the Marine Corps is servant leadership. Those two points were key driving points for me realizing that I had discovered an organization where I can truly provide value because we were already on the same fundamental page regarding organizational and learning development.

• Can you tell us about your current role with Sierra Pacific, and what some of your most important day-to-day responsibilities are?

The key focus of my day-to-day activities involves the current culture shift that Sierra Resources is undergoing regarding our core values, as well as aligning ourselves with what the company has rolled out as our 5-year strategic plan. I work in concert with our strategic planning group relative to driving the culture shift that will be necessary to support the direction that we are headed.

Everything draws back to the company’s vision; we want to be the best utility company for our employees, our customers, our communities and our investors. The underlying definition of our business statement can be summed up in a three-letter acronym: B.D.U., or Best Darn Utility. That phrase really epitomizes the vision of the organization. When you change the process, you can’t just re-establish the goals; you need to change the norms, or how people behave. You’ve got to move the organization not only from their capability but with everything we’re doing from a performance management standpoint.

So from an organizational development standpoint, my team and I have departments who call us in because they may be struggling with getting their team online to the direction that the organization is trying to go. So we advise and consult with them on understanding what outcomes they should be looking for, what results they’re looking for, and what steps they can take going forward. We also make sure to help them facilitate and master those skills, so they don’t need us anymore. Now they and their team have figured out what they need to do to march forward, and they now have those inherent skills within their group.

We are also responsible for the performance management system of the organization, ranging from building up the strengths of our leadership group, to the learning and development of our apprenticeship programs and diversity education. In addition, we oversee career action planning and succession planning, which ties in closely with our leadership development programs.

• Can you talk a bit more about some of those programs, along with some future leadership programs you’re planning on?

First off, my recommendation to any organization (and the step that we are taking) is to identify and define your core competencies first. You have to understand these competencies, and more importantly, the model in which you are going to apply those competencies in your organization. That is going to drive what training you do, because you’re going to be assessing your leaders against those competencies. That will help you target and identify the most impactful and meaningful training and learning programs that you can provide.

In the coming months, we will be laying out a matrix that has all of our competencies across the top, and the different levels of leadership along the left-hand side. The blanks will be filled in to provide each supervisor and manager with a visual indicator of where we need them to be in each of our fifteen competencies.

Now, do we honestly believe that every individual at any given level is going to be at 100% in all 15 competencies? No. But that gives them a target to know what they’re striving for, and it gives us a benchmark for what the minimum standards should be as far as where they should be along the matrix. Perhaps some competencies will have a different weight value depending on the level of the individual.

That feeds into our succession planning; we can assess our potential replacement candidates relative to these competencies. That in turn drives our performance management, because it enables us to take those competencies and work them into their annual individual performance objectives.

Some of the training that we’re tying into those competencies is in our diversity program, which we call Diversity Champions. The name is almost a misnomer, because it’s part diversity, but to an even greater extent, it’s about leadership. It is both personal and organizational, and that is a core piece of our leadership development.

Beyond that, we also have our leaders involved with programs such as The Center for Creative Leadership, which has a couple of different levels of leadership development programs for managers and directors. Our executives and senior officers have a great program entitled Leadership at the Peak. In addition, we also use management assessment tools such as John Howe’s personality profile tools, as well as tools that teach leaders on how to coach up-and-coming leaders, and our learning and development roundtable of the corporate executive board.

Industry specific, we are tying heavily into programs offered by colleges and universities (like the University of Idaho and the University of Michigan), such as utility management courses. These intense two-to-three week programs talk about all aspects of leadership, from the people to the operational to the financial to the strategic. Most importantly, all the class participants are from the utilities field, and that gives our people a broader view into other people and companies within our industry.

• I noticed that you are a member of the Sierra Pacific Resources Diversity Council. Can you tell us a bit more about this council and what its primary goal is?

We believe diversity goes way beyond the traditional view of race, nationality, gender and lifestyle. It goes to a broader definition: diversity is about problem solving approaches, different communication and leadership styles, and different educational and industry backgrounds. So the Diversity Council continues to expand on this definition and serves as a resource and link between management and employees to educate and promote an atmosphere of acceptance and understanding.

Even more powerfully, with the company releasing the most robust five-year strategic plan I’ve seen, the council has gone through a process of (1) defining a diversity strategic plan that links into the five-year overall strategic plan, and (2) developing a business case that clarifies that diversity is not just an initiative, it’s indeed a business imperative if the organization is to effectively achieve our B.D.U. vision.

They’ve also gone through a process of reorganizing, so that the council is very driven by projects that support what the business unit side (i.e. operational side) is doing relative to diversity. Diversity Council leader Chrystal Harry and others have gone out and coached, counseled and led our individual business units to go out and find their own diversity plans that tie in with the overall diversity strategic plan. So each of the business units are able to tackle tangible and measurable actions (such as incorporating mentoring programs), and are able to reach out and do a more effective job of embracing and implementing a more diverse approach to their business.

Also, the Diversity Council is piloting the Diversity Effectiveness Index, which is an overall index that is a combination of leading diversity indicators, which will help to measure whether or not we are making the strides we want to and need to in becoming a more diversity aware organization. We feel that this pilot should be completed later this year. So, if all goes well in 2008 that Diversity Effective Index will become part of our organizational matrix to help measure our overall success. It will cover everything: succession planning, career action planning, recruitment, supplier diversity, diversity education, promotion and progression opportunities. It really tackles all the different aspects of diversification that we could come up with.

• What type of presentation and communication skills training do you provide for your employees?

We take a few different approaches. One, we have a homegrown program called New Leadership Orientation, which focuses on core capabilities and fundamentals of leadership. One of the key aspects of that program involves effective communication, ranging from 1-on-1 feedback to meeting management to group communications.

When it comes to presentation skills, we have embraced having Toastmaster chapters on-site at our two headquarters offices. When a leader recognizes that they are not comfortable in that setting, my immediate response to them is that there’s no better learning process than practice. This way, they are able to practice with powerful tools to be able to overcome those fears and build confidence around good public speaking practices.

Finally, regarding written communication skills, we are again partnering with local colleges that offer written communication classes and business writing classes. In general, we are doing more of this kind of partnering in order to avail ourselves of existing organizations, whether it be educational institutions or private enterprises so we can tap into what they already specialize in.

• Would you like to close on anything else?

Just the thought that the success of these programs is driven from three directions; top level management, the front line employees, but also from another very important group that works as a key bridge to the first two groups.

Back in the 70’s, 80’s and part of the 90’s, many organizations (through ‘right sizing’, ‘re-engineering’, or whatever they may have called it) really gutted their middle management layer. But the reality was that even though the title may have been pulled, that bridging role still needed to exist, and other individuals needed to step up and take on that role. They are the key link between the ‘top down’ and ‘bottom-up’ levels, and they are the key aspect to what has really given fire and life to what we’re going. Our senior leaders get it, our front line employees are antsy for it, and it’s because our middle management is walking the walk & talking the talk. They not only buy into it, they own it.

NOTE: Sierra Pacific is planning on launching their new core competencies matrix in August. We are planning on a follow-up with Mr. Davis at that time to talk more about that initiative.

Sierra Pacific Resources, Wayne Davis, Interview, Organizational Development, Human Resources