4Liberty’s CEO, Sharelynn Moore, recently celebrated her one-year anniversary at the company. We sat down to discuss her journey as a woman leader in the energy and technology sectors to learn more about her experiences and how they have propelled her to leading a fast-growing woman-owned technical and professional consultancy.
Moore spent nearly 20 years with Itron, where she focused on smart grid and advanced metering technologies as the head of one of the company’s largest businesses. She also worked at Bloom Energy and Avista Utilities before joining 4Liberty, a woman-owned, San Diego-based firm that helps utility, commercial and government clients plan and run initiatives and major programs to deploy and secure critical infrastructure, meet regulatory mandates, hit sustainability goals and deliver capital projects on time and at or under budget.
Traits of a Leader
Moore, a natural leader, has been managing teams throughout her career, having to balance work and life in challenging ways.
“Early in my career, I found myself managing a team of 35 customer service and business analysts at just 26 or 27 years old, all while expecting my first baby,” Moore said, adding that she truly appreciated the women mentors who helped steer her through her early days.
Throughout, Moore said, listening to her instincts has always been important, as has cultivating talented people who know how to collaborate.
“I think there were moments in my career where I recognized that I brought something different. Was it because I was a woman, or was it because I’m me? How do I really know? But I do know there were moments in my career where my empathy and my intuition served me well,” she said.
Following one’s own intuition is a theme that has run through her career, Moore said.
“There were moments where I felt more in tune with what was really going on, simply by reading the room. I have been participating in board meetings for more than 15 years, well before I had to run a board as a CEO and that was an invaluable experience,” she said.
“I think my ability, whether it’s sitting across the table with customers, in a leadership meeting, or back when I worked as a product manager with engineers, being able to read that room and recognize when I needed to adapt or pivot, whether it was the direction we were taking the solution, the strategy, or the way we’re messaging something, I could tell if we were on point or off base,” she said.
Working in the energy sector and driving the energy transition requires engaging people both within and outside the industry, she said, and carefully cultivating people within our organizations is important regardless of gender.
“I value strong relationships regardless of position. As a leader, I recognized that my job wasn’t just to do what my bosses asked me to do and make them look good. My job was to pull the right teams together to accomplish business objectives. My job wasn’t to think I already knew better and do things my way regardless of what was asked. My job was to collaborate with my peers and their teams, ensuring we were all working towards a common goal” she said.
The ability to be flexible and adaptable is a workplace trait that serves workers at every level, she said.
“In my various roles, I have always worked well across functions with different leaders across a range of personalities and workstyles. And later in my career, working for CEOs, that practice of adaptability served me well. I wasn’t locked into my one work style, and I was able to adjust when I needed to drive results. And, I could get the sense of when to change a strategy early,” she said.
When running an effective workplace or smaller group of workers, carefully cultivating people, including their on-the-job skills and interpersonal relations is a recipe for building a successful company and culture.
“Aligning my team in my organization has been my superpower. A high-performance team isn’t just about hiring the right people. A lot of times you don’t hire them, you inherit them. But it’s how you knit a team together. It’s important to pull out the best in people. It is about holding a high bar and ensuring accountability. And making tough decisions when you need to make a change for the sake of the performance of the team,” she said.
As her career progressed, Moore said she didn’t think much about the fact that she was a woman or about the identities of her colleagues. But after taking a year-long leadership program at Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern, she picked up some interesting, science-based tidbits about how women and men can navigate workplaces in subtly different ways.
“I was one of the very few women at the table many times. It just wasn’t something that I thought about. I didn’t worry about it,” Moore said. “One of the things I learned was that women roll up their sleeves and we do the hard work, but some of us don’t tout our achievements or build a professional network in a way that gives us the shortcuts. And, behavior science has proven that men often do these better than most women.”
Learning about these differences led Moore to want to mentor more women throughout her career.
“I ended up being in a position where I could hire some amazing early-stage career women. And I, to this day, follow them through their entire career. And when they make that next move, I’m the person that they’ll call for coaching,” she said. “That’s really rewarding to me because I’ve seen them grow over the course of quite a long time and see them successfully drive their careers.”
For transmission and distribution projects, 4Liberty provides a consultative approach to solving tough problems, identifying solutions, and then implementing solutions with turnkey project management, construction management, design and engineering oversight and vendor management services. The company also does project planning for power grid modernization projects, low voltage installations and distributed energy installations, as well as expertise on physical security of critical infrastructure.
Thoughts on Diversity and Attracting the Next Generation of Workers
Fostering greater diversity is something that needs to be done deliberately, so that it is built into how a company functions, Moore said.
“Diversity isn’t just a certification. At 4Liberty, women represent more than half of our company, 51% of us are women. And we have more than 23 different nationalities represented. And, as a result, diversity is exactly who we are, without it even being a goal. It is actually the company that we are. I believe that this diversity allows us to listen to our clients more carefully, craft creative solutions, and deliver better results”.
Leaders in the energy industry need to recognize there is power in bringing all kinds of people and ideas to the table, she said. This may begin with attracting younger workers to the field.
“As an industry, we need more people than we ever have had to solve more complex problems than we’ve had in the last two decades,” she said. “To attract a more diverse population of workers, we have to talk about our purpose... We are working on climate goals, we are electrifying transportation and advancing AI, and we are keeping the lights on in some of the toughest conditions, all of which keeps our economy thriving. And we need to do all this with affordability top of mind.”
Younger people in particular want to feel like the work they do is creating change, she said.
“They want to feel like their work has purpose in the world, that they’re doing good,” she said, adding that teaching prospective employees about the work utilities are doing toward decarbonization can be valuable for cultivating the kinds of people you want.
The utilities are making important strides in representing the communities they serve, Moore said, and diverse workplaces will become self-sustaining at a certain point.
“I’m proud of the steps utilities have taken to enrich the careers of women in the industry. If you look at the number of women CEOs, the women in directors’ seats, and the women you know that are up for the next generation of leadership—it’s attributed to the opportunities and their hard work,” she said. “It serves as evidence that once we’ve overcome those initial challenges of ensuring diversity, it just happens organically. It’s encouraging because it does become a bit of a virtuous cycle. I think that’s pretty satisfying and where we want to be going forward.”
A Collaborative Industry
4Liberty will be exhibiting with T&D World Live 2024, Oct. 1 – 3 at The Hilton Atlanta. At the show, 4Liberty is hosting reception events and CEO Sharelynn Moore will speak on a panel at the T&D World Live Women’s Empowered Breakfast Session.
Moore said her company wanted to get involved with the show because they believe in collaboration and knowledge sharing.
"A hallmark of our industry is we like to learn from one another. We’re not really a competitive industry. In fact, many of the utilities share common challenges and opportunities. So, sharing best practices and collaborating are inherently designed into our culture as an industry. Organizations like T&D World enable that, whether it’s through publications or events, we can come together.”
Editor’s Note: Register for T&D World Live at https://events.tdworld.com/2024.
