Leading Change Through Trust

Connected Worker technology aims to connect workers with real time data and technology that can keep them safer, improve quality and take operational efficiency to the next level.

However, workers can sometimes be skeptical of the benefits or, worse, wary that the company has ulterior motives for implementing connected worker technology.

Trust is everything when you’re leading change, says Sean Barnes, VP, Corporate Operations, at Nine Energy Service.

“There’s a lot of really good technology out there to help with engagement, keep your employees safe, and give you improved data that you can use for training purposes,” he says. “But you have to overcome that fear of Big Brother watching.”

In this interview, Sean discusses what it takes to successfully lead change, why soft skills are like superpowers, and his thoughts on winning over users with connected worker technology.

Diana Davis, IX Network:  Do you think it's possible for organizations to get better at dealing with change? What would that look like?

Sean Barnes, Nine Energy Service: Organizations can get better at change, but success comes down to senior leadership.

As business cycles continue to compress, you need to have the ability to adapt quickly; you must become an agile organization focused on performance. Otherwise, your business won’t survive.

People, in general, don't like change. They've got to understand the “why” of any change. As a leader, that means you’ve got to convince people of the benefit: how is this going to make their lives easier?

When I look at the oil and gas industry, for instance, there is a heavy weight put on hard skills. You've got engineers looking at well data and log data; those hard skills are very important to the success of the corporation.

However, soft skills, such as kindness and empathy, are like superpowers. This is especially so now because of the shifting power dynamics between employer and employee. People want to work for a boss that genuinely cares for them. They want to work for someone who is going try to help them be successful and accomplish great things in their careers and that is especially true during volatility.

We've got to start having serious conversations about how to build these soft skills within our organizations.

Diana Davis, IX Network: You talk a lot about leadership on your excellent podcast, the Way of the Wolf. Your industry is confronted by a huge amount of disruption from digital transformation, the energy transition and oil price volatility. What does it take to lead during such volatile times?

Sean Barnes, Nine Energy Service: I think that leadership skills are a bit like a spider web. All the different capabilities - such effective communication, delegation, change management, and trust - are interwoven with one another.

During times of disruption, it’s important that leaders be well versed in these different leadership areas, but they also must understand operations and business support functions, but that is a unique combination of skills that take time to develop.

What normally happens is that business leaders move up through the ranks within a functional domain. They grow up in the IT ranks, for instance. That means that they know technology inside and out, but they don’t really understand the business and they don’t know HR.

I feel extremely fortunate to have my career path grow in the way it has as far as leading in IT for 15 years and then adding in HR for the past five and then safety and transportation for the past one and a half. I've had the opportunity to gradually learn these additional functional domains over time.

My takeaway is that I think more businesses need to start operating that way and giving their employees exposure to other areas.

The military operates this way. You get stationed in one place for a period of time and then moved on to a different location. That gives people the opportunity to have a more holistic understanding of the business on instead of being siloed by function.

I think more business leaders need to be open to the idea of giving people the opportunity to step out of their comfort zone and put them in a new area. That benefits the growth of the individual, but also the effectiveness as of the team and the corporation as a whole when dealing with rapidly changing markets and situations.

Diana Davis, IX Network: Many workers have transitioned to remote work during the pandemic. How do you keep those opportunities to learn and grow when people aren’t in the office?

Sean Barnes, Nine Energy Service: During the pandemic, business leaders quickly learned that leading a remote workforce is very different from leading a team in the office. You can’t go the route of micromanaging people; that approach doesn’t work.

You must focus on the results.

What I saw when the pandemic hit was that high performing teams performed even better because of strong leadership. The teams already had a strong culture in place, and they trusted one another.

Alternatively, poorly performing teams performed even worse. Working from home made their fragmented state even worse and the leaders didn’t know how to pull them together.

As natural attrition has occurred over the course of the pandemic and you start bringing in new employees into the organization, what we’ve realized is that it is challenging to assimilate new team members in the same way.  

Trust is not built in emails firing back and forth. Trust is built in water cooler conversations. Trust is built when you're waiting for the meeting to start and having small conversations about families. Online meetings don’t replicate that to the same extent as it in person ones.

So how do you overcome those limitations?

The leader must make a concerted effort to bring the team together. It may take the form of online happy hour or online lunches where it’s delivered to people's houses and everybody gets together on a virtual call.

It sounds little cheesy, but it works. All these little efforts bring people together and help them see that they're more than just transaction makers in the business.

Every organization is different but it’s also helpful when you have a hybrid schedule and people have one or two days in the office together. I find that works well because you get that in person interaction, but then you also can have highly productive time to work from home.

Diana Davis, IX Network: We've talked about the difficulties leading change, and we've talked about remote working. How does the connected worker tie into all of this?

Sean Barnes, Nine Energy Service: Since the pandemic, the labor dynamic has been unlike anything we've seen in history. As people started to come back to work from the pandemic, we noticed that there was a power shift. The power dynamic had changed from employer to employee.

People have come to realize that they have options if they don't like their boss or their company.

Remote work means is employers are no longer constrained by geographical zones. A great employer in Houston can hire somebody who lives in Fort Worth, and they can do their job remotely and be successful.

How do you retain talent and making sure that you've got more than just compensation to throw at people?

I think that Connected Worker technology ties into this because there’s a lot of good technology out there to help with engagement, keep your employees safe, and give you improved data that you can use for training purposes.

But you must overcome that fear of Big Brother watching.

This is where these agents of change are so crucial. If the person leading the change has a strong brand and is trusted by the individuals who are going to be wearing the technology, it will be easier to convince users that the technology is about keeping them safe and collecting data to train them more effectively.

You must also be able to figure out what is the value proposition for users or the employees that are wearing this technology? What’s in it for them?

Once you have that value proposition, the next step is being able to effectively communicate to users the benefit to them.

Diana Davis, IX Network: What are your biggest lessons learned along the way when leading change within your organization?

Sean Barnes, Nine Energy Service: I’ve said it before, but I would like to reiterate. Trust is everything.

If you don't have trust, you're not going to be able to get anything across the finish line. It’s going to feel like you're pushing a rope.

You build trust in those water cooler conversations. You chat with people and genuinely care about the people your team. It’s difficult to trust somebody that you feel only cares about themselves.

When you start building a culture of helping others as opposed to only focusing on yourself, that shines through.

Imagine if you had an entire corporation where everybody was trying to help everyone else out instead of focusing on themselves. How incredibly powerful that would be.

Interested in Learning More About this Topic?

Join us at the Connected Worker Summit – where the world’s leading Connected Worker experts gather to share use cases and showcase trailblazing technologies.

Taking place November 15-17 in Chicago, the program has been designed to help you understand how to leverage connected worker technologies to improve operational efficiency, training, asset management, quality, and safety.  Download the agenda for more information.