A leading energy company in the UK and US identified a need to create a development program for their top performing, Executive Potential population. The program objective is to strengthen executive succession, equipping senior leaders with the skills they need to progress to Board / C-suite roles within the organization, and guide the business through change to achieve future strategic ambitions.
The program brief was to encompass three key areas of focus:
- Leadership signature
- Enterprise-wide leadership
- Leading through change
As part of the enterprise-wide leadership focus, this utility recognized the importance of equipping these leaders with a better understanding of financial concepts to elevate their performance and relationships, both internally and externally. The goal was to provide targeted training that would enable the leadership team to:
- Understand the basics: accounting principles and financial terminology.
- Read and interpret financial statements (balance sheets, income statements, and cash flows).
- Understand the essentials of corporate finance.
- Understand the financial mechanics of the regulatory frameworks in which they operate.
- Understand their investment appraisal processes.
- Articulate and discuss investment cases both internally and externally.
This utility chose to partner with Wealthvox to deliver these core skills, as one element of the overall program.
In partnership with the utility, we developed a bespoke learning pathway for the cohorts on the program encompassing:
- A contextualized version of our Let’s Talk Finance course, incorporating their specific content and business linkages.
- A contextualized version of our Corporate Finance module.
- A bespoke module developed specifically to explore and explain the complexities of their Regulatory models, incorporating our unique Color Accounting approach.
- Two bespoke sessions focusing on reviewing their Financial Statements.
- A bespoke session focused purely on exploring, explaining and understanding the methods they use to assess and appraise investment opportunities.
- A role-playing exercise, based on a real case study, to practice investment appraisals and presentations, to embed and activate all the learning from the pathway.
- Individual 1-1 coaching as required on an ad-hoc basis to support the executives learning journey and development requirements.
All training was interactive, featuring case studies, group activities, and real-life examples relevant to the energy sector. The hands-on approach helped participants relate the financial concepts to their day-to-day activities.
We deployed a blended approach to learning, with courses delivered both in person (London, New York, Boston) and virtually.
The training has been rolled out to the first cohort of leaders, including executives from the UK and US, from engineering, operational, functional and project roles.
All feedback from the client has been outstanding, praising the course for its practical and engaging content. Quotes include:
This is absolutely brilliant - I can now make genuinely educated financial decisions in my role.
For the first time in living memory my business unit is going to hit budget this year. I've managed to save $3.7m of OPEX directly as a result of this course.
The CFO has been telling me this stuff for years, but now I finally get it.
This course is making a real tangible difference for me back at work. I'm now armed with enough knowledge to ask finance questions, and to understand the answers that come back.
I can’t believe how good the facilitator is, delivering highly complex content in a simple and engaging way, handling all our questions, responding to us individually and managing the group collectively. I’ve never seen anything like it.
The feedback is fully consistent with the impact we have at every organization we partner with.
As the course has been such a success, the utility are now planning to deploy our Color Accounting training approach across their entire Senior Leadership population. We’ve also started discussions about making it available widely through the organization, potentially through using our upcoming online training product.
This company’s investment in our unique approach has resulted in a highly tailored, powerful program that empowers its non-finance executives to upgrade their financial conversations.
