Client need
A large electric company was at a pivotal point in its evolution. It was investing in solar, battery storage, and grid modernization while responding to changing customer expectations and regulatory demands across a geographically diverse service territory of more than a million customers.
That complexity was changing what leadership required. Leaders needed to make decisions that balanced financial performance, customer outcomes, regulatory considerations, and long-term investment, but many were still operating primarily within functional silos. They didn't always have a clear view of how their decisions affected the broader business.
The company needed to build stronger business acumen and enterprise thinking across its leadership population, helping leaders understand how the business works, see the connections between their decisions and broader outcomes, and make better tradeoffs.
BTS brought deep energy-industry fluency and a simulation-based approach to make those dynamics tangible. Rather than applying a generic business-acumen curriculum, BTS worked with the company to translate its business model, financial drivers, customer dynamics, and strategic priorities into experiences leaders could practice.
Solution
BTS designed and delivered two linked learning experiences for managers and directors, creating a common business framework that could be applied at different levels of leadership.
The journey began with the directors program and then moved to managers, creating alignment at the senior-leader level before extending the work to their teams. Insights from the directors experience also helped ensure the manager program focused on the most critical topics and gave directors a foundation to talk with their managers about the simulation experience, since they had already been through something similar.
Directors
3-day Enterprise Business Simulation
Directors stepped into a simulation of the company’s business model and strategic environment, working through the kinds of decisions and tradeoffs they face as enterprise leaders.
Across three rounds, they practiced:
- Operating the business: Understanding the principles and economics of running the company.
- Balancing stakeholders: Navigating competing customer and shareholder needs.
- Managing for the long term: Weighing near-term demands against long-term resilience and investment.
The experience was co-created with the company’s executive leadership team and functional subject matter experts to reflect the realities of the energy business. A leader lab component paired coaches with every simulation team to observe their behaviors in real time, and included role plays that put leaders in the pressure seat, for example, running a community forum where community members pushed back on rate increases, clean energy plans, and other high-stakes issues. The experience was also paired with an expert assessment diagnostic, 60-minute one-on-one debriefs, and a cohort-level theme report, giving leaders and L&D deeper insight into individual and shared development needs.
Managers
Three-part financial simulation experience
Managers built business acumen through three connected experiences that helped them understand the company’s financial model, practice business tradeoffs, and see how decisions in their areas affect enterprise performance.
- Enterprise what-if calculator: Managers tested different scenarios to explore how business decisions affect the company’s broader financial picture and how different parts of the business connect.
- Manager competition: Managers put that understanding into practice through realistic tradeoff scenarios, weighing competing priorities and considering the broader implications of their decisions.
- Budget planning calculator: Managers connected the day-to-day decisions to enterprise financials, seeing how choices within their areas can ultimately influence broader business performance.
Together, the experiences helped managers understand how the business works, how decisions affect the numbers, and how to think beyond their own function.
Together, the manager and director experiences used a common strategic framework, with the complexity calibrated to each audience. This created a connected approach to building business acumen as leaders took on broader responsibility.
Results
The company created a more consistent approach to building enterprise business acumen across its leadership pipeline.
- A shared business lens: Managers and directors developed a common framework for understanding the business, financial drivers, customer dynamics, and strategic tradeoffs.
- Business acumen made practical: Leaders practiced navigating the financial and strategic consequences of their decisions rather than learning business concepts in isolation.
- Greater insight for L&D: The director experience generated individual assessment data and cohort-level themes that could inform broader leadership development priorities.
- A connected leadership architecture: Two distinct experiences reinforced the same enterprise perspective, creating continuity as leaders move from managing within a function to leading with broader enterprise responsibility.
A pre- and post-program survey captured meaningful gains in leader confidence:
- Confidence in knowledge of the company’s business and financial level went from 2.96 before the program to 4.11 after.
- Confidence articulating organizational tradeoffs when making decisions went from 2.89 before the program to 4.04 after.
- Confidence discussing the key challenges and tradeoffs the company is facing today and will face in the future went from 3.33 before the program to 4.26 after.
