Solution delivered by our Consultant

Matrixx Solutions provided an experienced Consultant to support the company’s office-based management team and offshore leadership team.

The company recognised the importance of having visible and felt leadership presence in the workplace: to engage workers, and to promote inclusion and care for people. They needed Matrixx Solutions consultant to provide coaching to managers and leaders, to help them excel at this.

The company also wanted to change existing working practices, to free up managers and offshore leaders to spend more time in the workplace. They needed the Matrixx consultant to help reduce the time of existing meetings and make them more effective.

Our Consultant quickly built a good relationship with the office-based leadership team. He used his experience from previous engagements to help introduce a “standard calendar” of meetings into the organisation. He also introduced the practice of blocking out “golden time” into the work week: time when the offshore leadership team would be free of meetings and be able to “get up and get out” into the workplace. As the new standard calendar was being introduced, the Matrixx consultant provided 1:1 coaching to leaders: helping them prepare to hold a successful meeting, providing feedback to them on how to further improve meetings, and helping leaders reflect on their own performance during each meeting.  

Once the standard calendar was embedded, our Consultant went offshore to one of the company’s North Sea oil and gas platform’s. The Matrixx Consultant worked on a rotational basis on the offshore platform for a number of trips, enabling them to interact with each leadership team that worked on the facility.

Their primary role was to provide coaching support to the Offshore Installation Managers (OIM) and their offshore leadership teams. This required the Consultant to undertake the following types of activities:

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• Conduct “Observation tours” with each of the leaders as they went about their day-to-day activities. They observed how the leader interacted with others, then used a coaching style to help them improve, where required.  

• Attend key meetings and help the team improve their meeting behaviours. This led to more effective meetings that took less time than before.

• Complete one-on-one coaching sessions with each of the offshore leadership team. The objective of these sessions was to help the leaders further improve their leadership skills. Our consultant primarily used a coaching style in these sessions, but also gave leadership training and mentoring when required.

• Perform safety coaching, to help the platform improve it’s safety performance. This consisted of attending, observing and giving feedback to Safety Coaches and Heads of Departments who were conducting Tool Box Talks; conducting safety conversations with platform work parties; and providing coaching to Heads of Department and Supervisors on their safety leadership behaviours.

• Act as an intermediary between the offshore leadership team and the office-based leadership team, helping them further adjust the standard calendar to make it even more effective.

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The regular coaching and support led to tangible results.

One of the OIMs had been struggling to make space to get out of their office and interact with the workforce. After spending time with the OIM, the Matrixx consultant realised that their reluctance to get outside was not wholly to do with time pressures. The OIM also needed to deal with some fears associated with previous interpersonal interactions that hadn’t gone well. Our consultant helped them positively confront and address these fears.  

Soon afterwards, the Operations department were undertaking an operation to change out 60 Gas Turbine filters, with each filter weighing 18kg each. The operation was very manual handling intensive and had been done the same way for 25 years. The OIM displayed his safety leadership by engaging the workforce in finding a safer way to do the operation. He enrolled his leadership team to implement the necessary changes and “got his hands dirty” by physically helping out with the activity.  

The OIM commented afterwards that he’d forgotten how much he actually enjoyed spending time with the workforce, and that he regretted “hiding away” at his desk. After that he was a transformed person and sought to spend as much time outside as possible.

Each member of the platform leadership team created their own personalised action plans to improve performance. These were initially created in conjunction with our Consultant, but over the course of the engagement had started to become embedded into the leader’s trip objectives.  

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The platform leadership team continued to increase the amount of time they were out interacting with the workforce. This was especially noticeable during one outage, when a lot of additional “transient” workers arrived on the installation. The new workers positively commented about seeing so much visible leadership presence, and fed back that this helped establish a strong safety culture throughout the duration of the outage.

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Business Outcomes

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Testimonials

"I’d like to say thanks to you for the coaching and feedback. I know at times I maybe seemed burst by it all but given space to reflect I loved it. I can’t believe I’m going to say this,  but I’ve gained a lot this trip alone by skipping meetings and emails and getting out with the teams. Thanks for all your help and hopefully see you next trip!" _{Colin, Operations Supervisor}

"Thanks very much for all your support to help us embed our new ways of working. I also discussed with Stuart [OIM] who was again very positive regarding your own contribution and engagement, so thank you for this." _{Donald, Asset Manager}