Building enterprise thinking across the utilities leadership pipeline

Client need

A leading U.S. electric company was preparing hundreds of leaders to lead through a more complex business environment.

The company was navigating major shifts across the energy landscape: the transition to new energy sources, evolving customer expectations, regulatory complexity, significant investment decisions, and a rapidly changing workforce. Leaders needed to understand not only their own areas of responsibility and how that aligned with the organizational strategy, but also how their decisions affected the broader business, customers, regulators, investors, and long-term resilience.

The catalyst for this program happened when the company identified a consistent opportunity: strengthen enterprise thinking and strategy alignment across the leadership pipeline. Leaders were highly capable within their functions but needed greater fluency in areas such as capital versus O&M tradeoffs, regulatory mechanics, customer outcomes, and the connections between operational decisions and enterprise performance.

The goal was to help leaders move beyond a functional lens and make better decisions for the whole business.

Solution

BTS built a connected, simulation-based learning ecosystem to strengthen enterprise thinking and strategy alignment across three levels of the leadership pipeline.

Across all three levels, the experiences used a common business framework and language, adapted to the decisions and responsibilities of each audience.

BTS grounded the design in the realities of the energy business and the specific strategic tensions facing the company. Before designing the experience, BTS conducted structured interviews with leaders and stakeholders across the organization. Those conversations surfaced the real capability gaps and strategic tensions leaders were facing and shaped the simulations and learning experiences that followed.

Directors & senior leaders

3-day Enterprise Simulation Workshop | Top 300 leaders
The most senior leaders at the company worked through the business model and strategic challenges, including balancing customer, regulatory, and investor priorities, navigating the transition to new energy sources, and addressing workforce needs.

Senior managers

2-day Enterprise Simulation Workshop
Using the same strategic framework, this experience, tailored to mid-level leaders, focused on implementing a strategy for future success by managing strategic tradeoffs across the business, putting customer outcomes first, and balancing short- and long-term performance.

Frontline managers & supervisors

1-day Enterprise Simulation Workshop
The same strategic framework, tailored to operational leaders and the decisions they make every day, focused on helping them understand how the business creates value and see how operational choices affect customers and regulators.

Results

The company moved strategy alignment and enterprise thinking from an aspiration to something leaders could actually practice.

By putting leaders into the kinds of strategic tradeoffs they face in the business, the experience helped them move beyond functional decision-making and understand how choices around capital allocation, customer outcomes, regulatory requirements, and operational performance affect the broader enterprise.

• Stronger enterprise business acumen: Leaders developed a clearer view of the business model and the interdependencies between functions, financial performance, and stakeholder outcomes.
• More disciplined tradeoff thinking: Leaders practiced balancing near-term operating performance with longer-term strategic priorities, rather than optimizing for a single function or metric.
• A common decision-making framework: Leaders across the pipeline built a shared language for evaluating business decisions and understanding their downstream impact.
• Enterprise capability at scale: The company embedded this way of thinking across multiple leadership levels, creating greater consistency in how leaders approach complex business decisions.

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