Change Management and Systems Thinking training system for SUEK managers

SUEK, or Siberian Coal Energy Company, is one of the leading coal producers in the world with facilities located in Russia and an extensive international sales network.

Mission: Develop and improve managers' strategic thinking and change management skills, thereby preparing them to implement the company's vision of optimized production and rapid innovation.

Background:

SUEK is the number one heat- and power-generating company in Siberia, with 24 stations serving over 5 million of the country's consumers.

The company maintains its own corporate training program for managerial staff development. The initiative is mainly focused on personnel reserve formation in two areas: procurement and regional management.

With serious attention paid to regional growth, SUEK seeks to ensure that the administrative apparatus of each regional unit corresponds to the level of the central one. With the geographical dispersion of the company's enterprises hindering certain important decisions and tools from reaching the remote regions, a need arose for a centralized leveling of managerial literacy. In pursuit of this, the company's leaders have scheduled a series of measures to be implemented in each region, with Krasnoyarsk selected as a pilot site.

The Krasnoyarsk experiment proved to be a success: in 2018, the ManGO! Games team held managerial staff training within the program elaborated. The further plan is to cover the whole Krasnoyarsk Krai, including the town of Borodino, housing Russia's largest open-pit coal mine.

Solution:

The best option was to adapt the managerial staff training program for initial regional conditions and differences between management approaches in administrative offices and in workplaces. To this end, we studied the existing experience in the field of regional management, then devised and implemented a training program that would best fit the company's needs.

Our initial efforts were mainly focused on working with regional managers. ManGO! Games representatives examined the peculiarities of their activities right up to visiting the cut pit and going down into the trench. We ended up with model cases to be further used to revise the program. Only after passing these cases through the prism of the future trainees' job tasks, we could embark on its implementation.

The training restored the balance of managerial knowledge and experience between the company's central office and the regional unit. The special emphasis was placed on issues of responsibility and decision-making mechanisms, with the sophisticated elaboration of procedures for inter-level managerial cooperation.

Following the training, the participants were offered to draw up individual action plans.

As the pilot training bore rather fruitful results, it was decided to extend the practice to other branches of the company.

Our main achievement was that Krasnoyarsk Krai managerial employees reached a common terminological and administrative level with those from Krasnoyarsk and Moscow offices. From now on, all company managers, regardless of their geographical location, can participate in joint discussions on company goals and challenges and do so "in the same language".

Two months later, the company executives reviewed the performance of the managers we've trained and noted an increase in mutual understanding, communication, and performance. Inspired by this experience, the company made plans to extend the initiative.