Published April 20, 2023 | Updated November 28, 2023 | 3 minute read
The August Team was incredibly lucky to partner with Pivot Energy in 2022-2023. Pivot is a national leader in renewable energy services and software and has been growing rapidly over the past two years, tripling in size and extending their impact across the U.S.
As Pivot Energy has grown in size, scale, and complexity, the leadership team has been focused on ensuring that the organization's effectiveness and employee retention scales with it. They identified decision making as an area of improvement, and sought August’s partnership to help them seed new habits across the organization.
Working with Pivot Energy was a values-alignment dream for August. We were proud to support Pivot's mission of accelerating the transition to decentralized and cleaner energy, as well as supporting more equitable access to clean energy.
The Challenge: Translating Big Ideas Into Actionable Practices
Pivot Energy has a strong foundation of trust, collaboration, and innovation. The company was seeking to mobilize those values within its decision making processes. Its goal was to design and adopt a more streamlined and efficient method for making excellent decisions, and then converting those decisions into focused action for maximum impact.
The Strategy: Simple, Specific Practices for Decision-Making Moments
Pivot decided to partner with August because of our expertise in decision making, our approach of co-designing custom solutions, and our belief that effective habit building should start with leveraging existing strengths and adding in small everyday practices that everyone across the organization can use.
Together, we designed a multi-pronged approach to scale empowered decision-making mindsets and practices across the organization, including:
- Coaching intact business teams to improve their decision making on a daily and weekly basis through their regular work
- Building the capacity of a cohort of internal decision making champions
- Coaching the senior leadership team
- Redesigning committees to have clearer goals, roles, and decision rights
- Facilitating leadership team offsites
- Leading short, live trainings for all staff at company retreats
- Integrating decision making practices into onboarding, committee design, and manager training
"We were thoughtful about how we rolled out the decision-making training, leveraging champions throughout the organization. Every Pivot employee is responsible for making decisions at some level, and we found it important to offer our staff support to help them successfully navigate those moments."
-Laura Geiger, Internal Business Operations Director, Pivot Energy
The Impact: Organic Adoption and Sustainable Scaling
The habits that August seeded with Pivot Energy have continued to grow and evolve with organization long after the formal conclusion of our partnership. Empowered decision making pervades Pivot’s daily organizational life, and is now firmly embedded into the company culture.
“Our company culture relies on transparency and accountability. It was important for every team member to understand how decisions are made and how they can take initiative in the workplace. I'm thrilled that we have the tools to make that happen.”
- Tom Hunt, CEO of Pivot Energy
August and Pivot Energy: Building New Skills for a New Era
Many of Pivot Energy’s leaders have spent their careers in the startup spaces of the solar industry. For many of them, Pivot’s recent rapid growth represents their first time leading bigger teams within a scaling and growing organization.
These leaders wisely recognized that the capabilities that got them this far were not the same capabilities they needed to reach tomorrow's goals. They needed new leadership skills and work habits to promote agility and innovation at scale.
Pivot’s partnership with August helped them bridge this gap between past achievements and future growth. Leaders learned how to make high-quality decisions efficiently within complex teams; to effectively empower others to lead the work; and to communicate clearly across a large, matrixed organization as opposed to a small startup.
These skills have supported Pivot Energy’s launch into a new era of growth and innovation, and opened the way for even greater growth to come.
Learn more about August’s empowered decision-making practices in our Decision Making Whitepaper.
