DRAFT
Developing Leadership Candidates
Overview
Among the largest producers of energy in the world, Beyond Petroleum (BP) is a leading global corporation based in London and Houston. With annual revenues in 2008 of $361B and more than 92,000 employees worldwide, the company’s many divisions are ultimately responsible to its 1.2 million shareholders. Strong leadership to drive growth and manage effectively within each BP business unit is not only expected throughout the company, it is essential for the entire organization to succeed.
Challenge
BP recognizes potential leadership candidates through the company’s Human Resource channel with its Career Advanced Program (CAPS). Individuals demonstrating high leadership potential need to become optimized leaders and managers who can interact better, communicate more clearly and execute the company’s directives more efficiently.
Talent Managers from different business divisions in CAPS needed well-defined concepts and tools to support the CAPS participants.
Finding an effective model to inspire such actions is always a challenge that is faced by even the most seasoned HR practitioner. But once Melissa Debowski, BP’s Director,
Leadership Development & Learning, discovered through a professional colleague at
Microsoft in 2007 the Peer Coaching Groups strategy offered by Authenticity Consulting, LLC, the task seemed less daunting — at least theoretically. But how would it play out in real time at her organization?
Solution
Debowski teamed up with Carter McNamara, co-founder of Authenticity Consulting and the father of the Peer Coaching Group method to do a pilot program of three CAPS groups in
2007. The pilot included face-to-face groups and international virtual groups, with Carter facilitating. The groups included highly diverse people from different cultures. The engagement got off on a good foot right away with a rapid adaptation of Authenticity’s materials for BP’s culture and the CAPS participants. Debowski says she was “impressed with how easily the manual for the peer coaching training could be quickly customized for us.”
Later, once the sessions were underway, “I was also surprised at how fast peer coaching built a level of trust within the groups.” By the end of the session, participants — and Debowski — were pleased: “The positive feedback about the experience — always voluntarily offered — was extremely high,” she noted. “People went out their way to fill in their comments and rate the program at the top.” The pilot in fact was so successful that BP rolled out eight more Peer
Coaching Groups in 2008, which included employees in the US and UK. Another BP division,
Tax & Remediation Management, added two groups. The founding partners and other highly trained colleagues facilitated these groups in 2008.
BP Embraces Peer Coaching Groups to Grow and Manage Talent Page 1 of 2

DRAFT
Benefit Highlights of Peer Coaching Groups at BP include:
• Peer Coaching encourages participants to communicate more openly with each other about shared experiences
• It creates an environment of greater trust for critical problem solving
• It enables individuals to learn how to lead
• The model and hands-on training helps make people more accountable
• Peer Coaching Groups at BP, designed to stay together for six months, have stayed together for a year or more – some still meeting
Result
The past two years inside BP’s Career Advanced Program, where Peer Coaching has been implemented, have delivered results that exceeded expectations.
In 2009, Debowski will expand the model to 13 additional CAPS groups, including the company’s largest divisions, Expansion and Production and also Refining and Marketing. The attributes of Peer Coaching Groups since the first pilot in 2007 have had a powerful residual impact inside the energy-producing organization: “Big companies like ours don’t often get as much coaching as they need,” Debowski explained, “so learning about how to coach peers is really valuable, especially among our leadership groups who can do their own mentoring with their people once Authenticity has taught them how to do it.”
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