Diversity can drive excellence and exceptional performance says Valerie Layan

In this edition of Power Women, a Q&A series highlighting women across the value chain in the energy sector, Kamogelo Motse talks to Valerie Layan.

Valerie Layan is Vice-President Power & Grid Europe at Schneider Electric. She is responsible for developing the power & grid market in Europe for Schneider Electric. 

What attracted you to work in the energy sector?

After 20 years in the telecommunications and Colo industry, I chose to join the energy sector as I believed I could bring my in-depth and long-standing experience and knowledge of end-to-end digitised and cloud-based solutions, to that sector, facing a huge challenge and where I could contribute to impact positively. Indeed digital technology can help this sector to be more efficient, more reliable, more flexible and sustainable.

With both a technical and commercial leadership background, I can bring my competencies to develop profitable and sustainable strategies, serving our customers, the market and our shareholders. With the push towards renewables and the recent energy crisis, this is even more key for this sector to leverage leaders capable of driving such smart strategies, based on digital technologies end-to-end.

It’s proven to be successful as I was able to grow the transportation segment globally by 3 in 4 years and more recently the power and grid sector in Europe by more than 50% in one year.

Who is your role model in (or outside of) the energy sector?

One of my first role models was Laurence Parisot, at the time when she was President of the Movement of French Enterprise. Indeed, in a very male environment, she was able to lead and influence hundreds of male CEOs toward taking revolutionary decisions for the French Industry.

She indeed pushed for modernisation of labour law, diversity in industries, leading to reduced unemployment rate. She also was fostering entrepreneurship, fair competitiveness and more social values in industries. Some of the flexible work’s laws in France have been the result of her contribution and drive.

She was really inspirational for all women leaders in France - showing that it is possible to be a woman leader in an industry-male environment and bring impact and influence by diversity.

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What do you love about your job?

I’m passionate about the energy transition and how to help different industries on this challenging journey. It gives unique opportunities to build and lead teams in an innovative environment, leveraging diversity to better serve our customers, bringing value to them and to our shareholders. It all starts by listening and understanding our customer's pain points and then bringing the best of our company to accompany them.

I love leading and participating in this journey with our customers and leading diverse teams in our organisation to support them. With my in-depth and diverse experiences, I can coach, educate and grow the skills of the people community I lead, to ensure their capability in front of customers.

I’m also involved in developing C-level relationships and ownership with our customers, in support of the front office sales team, to explain to them our vision and solution and guide them for an efficient energy transition of their business.

Why is diversity important for the energy industry?

In a growing sector, facing the challenge of the energy transition, innovation is key and all types of diversity are a must to ensure the most comprehensive and unbiased contribution and impact.

You need to build this kind of diversity if you want to succeed in innovating which is required in the above-mentioned context, as this is not a standard and usual way, not a walk in the park clearly, this requires diversity to avoid being in one moulds angle and having only one-directional view, that at some point may lead to failure.

Diversity can drive excellence and exceptional performance. You get more richness and excellence in performance by bringing people with different and diverse backgrounds and perspectives into the teams. On gender diversity, we need to facilitate and enable women to remove their own barriers. As an example, I took two upper grades while I had two children, this was not standard.

As leaders, we need to accompany women in their career journey, so they don't have to choose between being a mother/wife and being a leader, leveraging a fair work/life balance is key to enable this.

What is the biggest challenge and opportunity for the energy transition in the next year?

Probably one of the biggest challenges is to make our European grids smart(er). To develop and expand an efficient grid, we usually need a one-for-one investment between renewables spend and grid infrastructure: the measured ratio is more like 1 euro on renewables compared to 0.75 on grids so far – so grids need to step up in their investment.

Thus the only way is to make the Grids smarter/more digital to enable efficiency and reliability, and we need to make it more sustainable too. For example, ADMS can reduce network technical losses by 1 point, which can lead to greater, reliability and sustainability, saving ~€10 million on DSO bottom line per year (in the case of an Italian DSO, thanks to ADMS, they saved 144GWh per year eg 50K household consumption per year, circa 20M€/year).

To integrate these renewables farms we need flexibility at the edge. So digitisation and virtualisation also at the edge and secondary substation is becoming crucial to aggregate these assets and make the grid flexible.

If you could go back to when you started work, what career advice would you give to your younger self?

Looking back I don’t regret any step in my career path. Indeed I started with a more engineering-type role, which I believe is crucial to understand the digital and technology challenges our world is facing. It is a great asset to rely on.

Then I followed a programme at the London Business School which allowed me to evolve to more business and strategic leadership roles. I was always interested to go to sector with massive disruption, this I started in the Telco (2G, 3G, 4G and then cloud service provider), and once that sector was more mature and started to be commoditised, I chose to leverage my skills and experience to make impact into the becoming challenging sector of energy.

It is important to mature each step in the career to build a grounded experience before moving to the next step or the next ladder. I wish anyone to be courageous in choosing their career step and move to challenging areas requiring our past experience and in-depth skills.

THIS OR THAT

Travel to the past or future?

Future

Read fiction or nonfiction?

Both

Be the smartest person in the world or richest person in the world?

Smartest