Orient Energy Review Vol 9 no 6

Pursue diversity, inclusiveness with considerable sincerity of purpose - LAME VERRE Lame Verre, a petroleum economist with 20 years of experience working across the oil and gas industry value chain has worked in several geographical locations, currently she works with Halliburton as the Senior Regional Manager Treasury for Europe, Eurasia, and Sub-Saharan Africa (EESSA).

In this interview with the Publisher, Orient Energy Review magazine, Nneka Ezeemo on the sidelines of the Diversity and Inclusion Summit in London recently said that organizations and stakeholders in the industry should show commitment to the call for diversity and inclusiveness by designing strategic plans and policies that will address already identified pain points, barriers and challenges while new ones should be fixed as they emerge. Excerpts

Could you give a peep into your person and career journey?

I’m a petroleum economist by background, and I currently run the Treasury function for credit and collections at Halliburton, I look after Europe, Eurasia and Sub-Saharan Africa region.

I manage all of our customer financial relationships, with my team of eight spread across the region. We are responsible for managing account receivables and DSO; we make sure that the cash gets through the door.

My 20 years in the industry has been predominantly upstream. I spent 15 years in upstream space with companies like ENI where I started my career in Milan and Lagos before moving to the UK and working for Sterling Energy and E.on before transitioning into upstream consulting with Baker Hughes (Gaffney, Cline & Associates) a service company. I then spent two years running my business post my MBA and a tour of Houston as you do when working in oil and gas. I have now spent the last two and a half years

in Halliburton running this function.

You have a vast wealth of experience in the corporate setting, which is an excellent asset for private practice, so are you still running your business?

My business came out of necessity. After over a decade years of being a petroleum economist, I got to that point where I had enough of doing the same thing even though I was growing in my capacity, scope of responsibilities and leading high functioning teams, it didn’t feel fulfilling enough, so I decided to go and do my MBA while also moving into consulting with Baker Hughes.

I came out of my MBA programme right in the middle of the downturn. I was in Houston at the time. So, with the 2015 downturn walloping companies, all the expatriate’s contracts were cancelled. With the contract nullified in Houston, the UK role ceased to exist, and so I had to make a choice.

At that time, my second son was on the way, so we waited and then we moved back to the UK after he was born and that was when I decided to monetise my skills and set up my consulting firm where I did contract work as a petroleum economist. And in the meantime, I also joined forces with a friend to set up a pipeline company where we were looking to sell High-density Polyethylene (HDPE) plastic pipelines into the oil and gas industry.

It was a great concept, and companies liked the project, but because of the downturn, we were swimming against the tide, no one had a budget for any pilot project. I did that for two and a half years, and it was quite a refreshing experience because I was doing all sorts of activities ranging from Finance, business development, to putting together contracts, client development, IT, HR and everything in between. So, it was quite intense and at the same time, a great experience. The only difficulty there as a start-up was the irregularity of income as we were still building up the company and also working round the clock

When baby number three was on the way, I had to make another call; I needed something more stable and structured. I then chose to go back to the corporate sector in the summer of 2017. I was actually 8 months pregnant when I got offered the role, so I started the role 5th of June and had the baby a month later.

That is how I started my own business, it was fun, and I enjoyed the flexibility that came with that. I owned my time, I could do school runs, go to games, do anything with the kids, and it was good. But then, when you have three kids living in London, you need to have another conversation. Things were changing and elicited the need to make those choices on how to manage time, income, family and all the things in-between.

With your years of experience in the oil and gas industry, could you share an experience that resonates with you that you hope to address?

It is important to me that I make a difference to my team because coming into the industry without visible role models, sponsors or anything similar, it is important that people coming behind me don’t have to go through the same hoops. So, if I can give someone a shortcut on how to navigate this industry, then, I will be delighted to share that experience.

I think given my personal experiences and the lack of support thereof, it has also made me a different type of leader because my experience shows me what not to do. If something happened at work, the negative effect it might have had on me tells me that probably that’s not the right or the best practice and so, I do the exact opposite. If I have an absentee leader, I know that the feeling of abandonment is not something I want to live with and so I make sure that I’m there for my team.

I show up and always give them my time because that helps them to be the best version of themselves. People can’t come in as human beings and be expected to become just a human resource. Organisations need to understand that, and as individuals, we need to know what our strength and weaknesses are, and we should try to play more to our strength because if we spend so much time trying to fix the weaknesses, we lose valuable time we can use to do something meaningful with an impact

I like your concept about developing people, so do you, coach? How do you give back to society?

No, I don’t coach because I’m not trained to be a coach, but I’m very generous with my time. There is a young lady here; she is a student who I met her through work. I’ve given her a lot of my time and try to steer her in the right direction, offering some guidance. When I heard that there’s an offer for students to attend this event for free, I invited her to come out here to see if she can meet people here that may help her as she has just finished her MSc. I encouraged her to make those connections, make those friendships because it can turn out to be something. And so yes, I do try to give back.

I speak at the Society of Petroleum Engineers SPE, where I do a one-day seminar on the intro to E&P. I take the economic and commercial session even though I’ve not worked as an economist for a while. But it has been a big part of my career, that is where my passion lies, and I share that with those coming up the ranks, making sure that the knowledge does not get put in the box and underused.

I have realised that I have got a very unusual background in the oil and gas space, which makes me unique. I am not a STEM person as a petroleum economist, but my role is a very technical and integral part of the value creation and interdisciplinary workflow, I did that for 15 years, and I have enjoyed passing that knowledge on. I do the SPE training once a year, and I have done it for the past four years enjoying every minute of it. I also try to give back through other speaking engagements like this conference and act as a mentor to several individuals.

What is your take on today’s conversation about diversity and inclusiveness?

This conversation is good, and I’m proud that the industry is focusing on it but like I said in the panel session, it has to be discussed at the right level in the various organisations with a considerable sincerity of purpose. The industry and the organisations involved need to make that conscious decision that this is something they want to do because it’s the right thing to do and because the world has changed. Therefore, we also have to adapt and make sure that everyone is included in the organisation. People’s needs, pain points or challenges will be diverse and so whatever policies that are designed should address these pain points.

Indeed, we cannot fix them all today, but the pain points that we know today should have strategic plans designed to meet them, and as new ones come, we adapt.

I overheard you say that the Key Performance Index (KPIs) are in the wrong place, what does that mean in this Diversity context?

It means that a lot of organisations measure their diversity hire targets. They have set a diversity target of say 20%, 22%, 25% or whatever that number is but it’s only on the hiring side of things. What companies are not looking at is this, in that same time frame, if I made my 20% of diversity hires, how many diversity candidates did I lose? The attrition of diversity and in this case, gender diversity specifically, how many women did I engage in a time frame and how many women did I lose in the same time frame? There is no point hiring 80 women, but you lose 79 across the organisation, that to me is a clear case of having the metric in the wrong place.

In my personal opinion, I think the KPIs need to be across the whole spectrum of hiring and retention; measuring recruitment without measuring retention does not count. I see it as paying lip service at the door while neglecting what happens in the room. Whatever that is considered to be important in this regard must be measured.

Where should the priority be in determining the diversity KPIs?

Across the pipeline, both at the entry point, retention and promotion. The question is, what policies do we have in place, and how do we frame those policies? We have heard about organisations taking away maternity policies and putting parental policies in its place. So, it doesn’t matter whether you are a biological mother, you have adopted, you are LGTBQI, you have the option to take time off because you want to be a parent.

So, having gender-neutral policies is more relevant as we now know that men are more inclined to take parental leave than paternity leave. It comes down to how it is framed. It’s about thinking of creative ways to make the industry friendlier to diverse people, and it’s not just about gender. Disability, ethnicity, religious and cultural norms should be taken into consideration as well. We must remove the barriers and hurdles that people have to face in an already difficult industry and a complicated world!

Can diversity help the transition in the energy industry and do you see it playing such a significant role?

It is difficult for me to ascertain if it will help or maybe accelerate the transition because the energy transition is a big topic with a unique challenge specific to it. To go from carbonised to lower-carbon energy takes a lot of investment and who makes that investment is yet to be ascertained and while companies and countries are saying, they want to do more to have less carbon in our energy mix. If we are not investing in it, then it’s a struggle, and it’s the same thing about diversity. There will be some investment to be made to ensure that your diversity hires can stay within the organisations. You have to give them specific training, and you have to provide them with the tool kits that will help them to understand themselves, the industry, how they fit and how they can navigate their way through.

Staying on the issue of money, let’s consider an area like the pay gap. Negotiating salaries as you know don’t come naturally to women, but it’s a known fact that if a woman did not consult her salary, she would probably get a lesser pay than her male counterparts. Yet, many women still don’t negotiate their salaries; we take it; we are grateful for the opportunity to even have a job. So, for diversity to be an accelerator, we should see a situation where the pay structures are transparent for every role. It doesn’t matter if you are male or female; as long as you are competent enough for the job, you will have the pay for it, and this will smoothen out the barriers for those who are not comfortable negotiating salaries.

What impact would you like to see attributed to this Diversity and Inclusion Summit?

I think the summit was excellent and a successful one in the sense that the topics are at the forefront of every conversation within the industry. We have shared a lot of ideas, and I hope everyone takes them back to their organisations or take it upon themselves to make a change no matter how small and we have to keep the conversation going.

Sooner or later, it will bubble to the top, and if we can’t drive it from the top, we steer it from the bottom, or somewhere in the middle, for the change to happen. This change is inevitable because we cannot continue in a world where we are not making it easy for women to participate. It’s a case of chicken and egg, which comes first. In the absence of a silver bullet, we have to keep the conversations going.