According to Pistrui, Kleinke, Naylor, et al. (2023), the utility sector is faced with 3 critical challenges that are forcing a transformation of the industry and its culture:

1. The current state of the aging power grid cannot match capacity with the increasing demand for power driven by initiatives to expand clean energy and combat climate change.

2. The velocity, breadth, and depth of change brought on Industry 4.0 technologies like cloud compute and Internet of Things (IoT) is disrupting the utility sector and organizations struggle with building a technically competent workforce with the capacity to keep pace with change.

3. A multi-generational workforce with an aging of the "Baby Boomer" population is creating a generational transition that is dramatically changing the dynamics, culture, and technical landscape of the utility sector.

To address these challenges, formal personal and professional development is needed.  Research from Pistrui, Kleinke, Naylor, et al. (2023) focused on development of executive team and high potential employee development used the TTI TriMetrix DNA assessment suite to discover the following:

1. Leaders have strong competencies in conceptual thinking, decision making, and problem solving but lack in interpersonal skills, appreciating others, and conflict management.

2. Leaders tend to have strong behavioral orientations toward analysis and an organized workplace.  They are also persistent, consistent, and tend to follow policy.  They do not favor interaction and struggle with versatility and frequent change.

3. Leaders behavior is strongly driven by being intentional, commanding, intellectual, and objective.  Being altruistic, harmonious, and instinctive are not typical drivers for leadership behavior.

So why does the utility sector, and organizations in general, struggle with change?  According to the leadership profile above, leaders are good at making decisions that are grounded in some authoritative source such as policy.  This reference to some authoritative source allows them to be objective as they can point back to a source of truth to justify their decision and it provides bounds to the problem so they can better apply their intellect / expertise (defined experience and education) to conceptualize, decide, and execute.  The reality, however, is that transformational change is not driven by some authoritative source.  For an organization to differentiate itself and keep pace with change, it needs to be creative and anticipate.  This starts with the leaders being versatile and open to change.  Then the open-minded leader needs to have the interpersonal skills to really understand the desires and point points of their various market segments to creatively apply new technologies in innovative ways that provides value (design thinking).  In most cases, there is no "right answer" and thus leaders need to rely on instinct.  It requires conflict management to help organizations make hard decisions as culture will be resistant to change.  Finally, it requires leaders who are ethically and morally responsible.  They don't need to be altruistic but they need to understand the impact of their decisions on people, cultures, and economy.  Educating leaders to overcome their weaknesses in versatility, agility (i.e., frequent change), interpersonal skills, instinct, conflict management, and responsibility will certainly help prepare organizations to tackle the ever-changing landscape of technology.  Another approach is to help amplify the natural tendencies of leaders by generating more authoritative content for them to make objective, data-driven decisions that will help them navigate the complexities of change.  This includes helping policy keep pace with change and providing more content around frameworks and best practices so these leaders can stay current with industry best practices.

This assessment on the strengths and weaknesses of leaders is consistent with Kotter's (1995) assessment of why organizations fail to adapt to change and transform themselves because they:

1. Don't establish a great enough sense of urgency

2. Don't create a powerful enough guiding coalition

3. Lack Vision

4. Under-communicate the vision by a factor of ten

5. Don't remove obstacles in achieving the new vision

6. Don't systematically plan for or create short-term wins

7. Declare victory too soon

8. Don't anchor changes in the corporation's culture

The shortfalls identified by Kotter (1995) can be easily aligned to the weaknesses exhibited by leaders according to the TTI TriMetrix DNA results from Pistrui, Kleinke, Naylor, et al. (2023).