Comanche Peak Nuclear Power Plant: An Impressive Record Linking Servant Leadership and Superior Team Performance.

What if you learned that there was only one nuclear power plant in the nation practicing servant leadership? Would you be curious about how their performance stacks up against their industry competitors? We had just such an opportunity during the recent International Greenleaf Conference on Servant Leadership in Dallas, June 8-10th. Rafael Flores, Chief Nuclear Officer, gave a keynote presentation sharing the history of a significant culture change at Comanche Peak that is beginning to catch attention in the nuclear industry.
He told the story of bringing our team in 6 years ago to coach the top leaders in the paradigm shift from top-down, command-and-control traditional leadership to servant leadership (SL), a very different leadership style which puts serving and growing others before self. Instead of power over direct reports, SL shares power and coaches each Employee to think and act in terms of what is most beneficial for the whole. Rafael helped us understand that a great deal of the talent pool feeding the nuclear industry is the nuclear navy. So it’s no surprise that they would bring the military leadership style.
The results are stunning. CPNPP has the lowest cost per kilowatt, one of the best safety records and top plant performance in the nation! In a recent refueling outage, they have the second best record on schedule in the nation. What makes this even more remarkable is that they are competing with fleets of nuclear plants, which gives those plants a significant advantage.
Rafael noted in his presentation that, “Servant leadership is the reason we perform so well and the way to sustain top performance is through a culture based on mutual trust which in the foundation of servant leadership.” He told of a time four years ago when the plant culture hit a “pot hole”. There was a large issue that had seriously impacted morale and broken the trust with upper management. His response was to invest four months meeting with every Employee in small groups of not more than 12 or so to simply listen deeply to their concerns. Following over a 100 meetings, he worked with the Directors and appropriate work groups to address as many of the concerns as possible. He used this as an example of seeking first to understand and then rebuilding trust by doing the best he knew how to resolve these problems by engaging the Employees to help with solutions.
Is Comanche Peak a perfect example of servant leadership? No organization is. But they are a highly inspiring example of why more and more leaders are beginning to learn about and adopt a culture that engages every member to take ownership and become accountable for creating the kinds of workplaces where we all long to participate. CP returns often to the Test for SL as posed by Robt. K. Greenleaf, “Do those served grow as persons; do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And what is the effect on the least privileged in society; will they benefit, or, at least, will they not be further deprived?”