Ask an energy sector chief executive why they want a higher profile in press and you’ll usually hear one word – visibility. Ask what’s holding their business back, though, and you get something far more useful. Maybe it’s a grid connection date that keeps slipping, or a consent decision that’s been sitting with ministers – as Jackdaw and Rosebank have for two years – while investors ask questions nobody can answer yet.
This second answer is where positioning should start. A leader’s public voice really earns its keep when it helps shift this kind of problem. It might get them in front of the officials redesigning a policy, or give a nervous investor base a clearer sense of where the business stands.
A lot of sector commentary doesn’t quite get there. ‘We need a balanced approach to the transition.’ ‘Industry, government and communities must work together.’ Nobody disagrees, but nobody remembers a word of it by the end of the week.
The good news is that most energy leaders already know enough to do this well. Here are six ways to make it count:
It’s tempting for executive thought leadership to summarise the debate, setting out the challenges and the trade-offs and explaining why it’s all complicated. Journalists and policy officials know all this already. What they can’t get elsewhere is a clear view on one part of it, such as which planning reform would do most for delivery, or which grid constraint is costing projects more than the ones in the headlines, or what a stable fiscal regime would mean for North Sea investment. A view like this invites argument – and that’s no bad thing. It gives people a reason to come back.
An executive who speaks with authority on connection reform and stays out of retail pricing will build a stronger reputation than one with a passing opinion on everything. When journalists are on deadline, they call people who’ve been right on a subject before. So do civil servants putting together a consultation. Own one subject well and you become the first call on it.
Let the commercial need choose the subject. If connection timelines are what’s costing the business money, then that’s the ground to own.
Energy policy runs to a calendar, with consultations closing and regulatory decisions published on known dates. A point made the week before a consultation closes can still shape the outcome. Two weeks later, and the moment has passed. Leaders who track this calendar and have a considered view ready in advance get quoted more often, and officials want them in the room.
Jackdaw and Rosebank are live examples. Public consultations on both fields closed in August, but their paths have since split. A decision on Jackdaw is expected any time soon, while Rosebank looks set to take longer. The leaders who have already set out a clear, evidenced view on what the outcomes means for supply chains, jobs and energy security will be the ones journalists call when it lands.
Pointing out what’s wrong is the easy part. Credibility comes from saying what should change: the mechanism that would clear the connections queue, the threshold that should move, how downstream emissions should be weighed in future field consents, the clause the next draft needs. This makes a leader far more useful to a journalist and to the policy writers.
One pattern comes up again and again in our crisis and reputation work – the organisations that come through a difficult moment best are the ones whose leaders were trusted before it happened. An outage or a delayed project lands very differently when the chief executive already has a record of straight, specific commentary. Building this record while things are calm costs far less than trying to build it in the middle of a crisis.
Counting coverage is one way to measure this, but the better test is whether the positioning moved the problem you started with. Did it get you a seat on a consultation working group, or make investor conversations easier? If so, it’s working. If not, it’s worth rethinking the angle rather than chasing more coverage. Start with the problem and the profile tends to follow.
If there’s a problem holding your business back, get in touch with BIG to find out how your leaders can own the conversation and help shift it.
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