Employee and Leadership Development

We offer ongoing programs to help employees develop the skills, behaviors and competencies necessary for organizational success and employee career advancement. We do this through mentoring, skills and leadership development, and work rotation. We incorporate this into our performance management program. Through our performance management process, we identify strengths and needs of individual employees, and tailor action plans and progression paths.

Managers and their direct reports collaboratively design personal development plans, monitor competency development and measure performance. Our learning systems track individual development needs and include more than 3,600 self-study, web-based and instructor-led courses.

Special leadership development programs are designed to meet the needs of employees in various levels of their careers:

• Our senior leaders participate in Leadership Strategy Sessions that focus on building business acumen and leadership skills. Information from these sessions is cascaded throughout the organization.
• High-potential mid-level managers participate in the Rising Leaders program, developed in partnership with the Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University. Focus includes developing trust, change management and building a high performance organization. In 2008 and 2009, 45 managers participated in this program.
• Promising individual contributors are prepared for supervisory and management roles through the Emerging Leaders program, which had 137 participants in 2008 and 2009.
• Through our Commercial Associates Program, groups of high-potential MBA graduates go through a rotation program designed to develop varied skill sets and prepare them for management roles.
• The Leadership Development Network and Business Women’s Network help to develop leadership skills through networking with leaders, mentorship and knowledge exchange, and informative presentations by subject matter experts.

Demographics within our workforce and across the energy industry include a number of employees who are eligible for retirement. This underscores the need for leadership development and strategic succession planning. In 2009, we began to accelerate development programs to support leadership succession.

In 2009 we partnered with Towers Watson and conducted an employee safety and engagement survey (ES2). Our purpose was to solicit employee feedback to gauge our organizational effectiveness, and to identify our strengths and areas of opportunity in our operations. We are using the results of the survey to formulate action plans to address areas identified as opportunities. Employee responses ranked Spectra Energy 21 points higher than benchmarked North American Energy companies when asked if we are doing a good job of developing people to their highest potential.