Case Study · OEG · Integrated energy solutions · Developing technical specialists into managers

OEG developed the technical specialists it had promoted into management, built around offshore operations rather than a classroom. It worked in Subsea, so they took it into Topside.

Divisions, one after the other

OEG Subsea first. Topside was commissioned on the strength of it, and is running now.

32 managers

developed across marine, subsea, blades, logistics, technical services and the training centre

22 months

of continuous partnership, and still running

5 focus areas

built from OEG's own values: responsive, collaborative, progressive, excellence and care

Executive Summary

Sector: Integrated energy solutions
Buyer: HR Manager (Renewables), Subsea Division

The Brief

OEG is an integrated energy solutions partner, running end-to-end services across the full energy value chain for the global offshore energy industry: cargo and logistics, offshore equipment, fabrication, aviation services and training, from 65 locations across six continents. It has worked on around 97% of the world's offshore wind farms. The managers 10X worked with sit in its renewables business, running subsea survey and inspection, marine operations, blade campaigns, generators and logistics. Like much of the sector, OEG grew fast and grew by acquisition, and it promoted its best technical people into management as it went. Those managers were running crews on rotation, absorbing last-minute client changes and holding delivery together, and almost none of them had ever been given any management development at all. OEG wanted to close that gap without handing its people another generic course.

The Outcome

Over 22 months OEG developed 32 managers across two divisions, on a programme built around its own values and its own operating world rather than a standard course. Managers came back with things they had actually changed: weekly one to ones that stopped small problems festering, a daily project meeting cut from ninety minutes to thirty, a recurring request that disappeared once someone showed what it was costing, and a plan to turn weather days into development time. OEG started in Subsea. It took the programme into Topside on the strength of it.

01 / Specialists, handed a department

OEG promoted its best technical people into management, then set out to give them the development almost none of them had ever had.

OEG is an integrated energy solutions partner to the global offshore energy industry, and it has spent fifty years building the range that phrase implies: cargo and logistics, offshore equipment, fabrication, aviation services and training, delivered end to end across the full energy value chain. Its renewables business, where these managers sit, has worked on around 97% of the world's offshore wind farms. That work runs on rotation, offshore, against weather and client schedules that change without much warning. The business grew quickly and it grew by acquisition, and as it grew it did what technical businesses almost always do: it promoted the people who were best at the work into the jobs that manage the work. OEG recognised what that quietly creates, and chose to do something about it before it became a problem rather than after.

When OEG's managers were asked about their own development before the programme started, the answers were strikingly consistent. Most of them said they had never had any formal management development at all. One had got most of the way through a leadership qualification before it was cancelled during Covid. Another had two decades of military training behind him and nothing since. These were people running real teams and real delivery, and the only management model any of them had was whatever they had absorbed from being managed themselves.

They were also clear about what they did not want. Asked what would make a programme worth their time, one manager wrote that a lot of training is about ticking the box of running through a PowerPoint and some light practical work, and that he would rather see something task focused where people genuinely have to do the thing. Another asked simply for something tailored to the company and how people work, so that it is readily employed and put to good use. A third wanted real conversations rather than theory on a screen.

Underneath it sat the pressure any growing energy business will recognise. OEG was winning work faster than it could hire. Managers described themselves as full. Work with a deadline or a penalty attached always got done, and the same things always waited: the admin, the rotas, the improvements to how the department runs.

02 / Built for the energy industry, not a generic group of managers

The programme was shaped around OEG's values and OEG's week, and it kept being reshaped while it ran.

10X did not arrive with a programme to install. The work was built around OEG's own five values, responsive, collaborative, progressive, excellence and care, and each one became a focus area with real management behaviour attached to it. That mattered more than it sounds. It meant the language in the room was already OEG's language, and that a manager could connect what they were being asked to do on a Tuesday afternoon to something their own business had already said it believed.

How it worked

An embedded Performance Partner, a rhythm of learn then apply then troubleshoot, and content rebuilt when the cohort needed something else.

Rather than a trainer who turns up, delivers and leaves, OEG had a 10X Performance Partner embedded across both programmes, reachable between sessions and working on the problems already on managers' plates. The examples worked in the room were OEG's own: a request for equipment approval that arrived with no recommendation attached, a project team standing up a new function from scratch, a technician population spread across sites on rotation who are genuinely hard to develop because you rarely see them.

The rhythm was deliberate. A focus area was taught in a Prime session, managers took it back into the job and tried it, and weeks later the group reconvened in an Elevate session to work through what had actually happened. That second half is where the evidence on this page comes from. It is the difference between a manager saying what they intend to do and a manager reporting what they did and what it cost them.

Every 10X programme is built to move while it runs. A plan agreed in month one is a starting point, not a contract, because the problems on a manager's plate in September are rarely the problems they had in January. So the Performance Partner keeps listening between sessions and reshapes what is coming next around what the cohort is actually carrying. At OEG that happened in the open. The session in the plan for September was emotional intelligence. What the Topside managers were really wrestling with, gathered from discovery calls and emails beforehand, was the sheer volume of work landing on them and no way to push back on any of it. So the planned content was dropped and a model built for them was run instead: five questions to put to any incoming piece of work, ending in how to renegotiate it upward with options rather than a flat no. Within the hour, managers were redesigning meetings, pushing sign-off authority down and costing out requests that nobody had ever costed.

03 / What they worked on

Five focus areas, one for each of OEG's values, each taught and then put straight to work on a real offshore problem.

Responsive

Agile and adaptive leadership

Leading through constant change in a business where project cycles all start at once, mobilisations move, and a client can reshape a schedule overnight. Managers worked on explaining the why behind a change rather than announcing it, and on reframing a resourcing shift as an opportunity rather than a problem.

Collaborative

Building team culture

OEG had grown by buying companies, and each one arrived with its own way of doing things, its own habits and its own idea of what normal looked like. This focus area was about building a single OEG culture across all of it, rather than letting each acquired business quietly keep its own. Managers worked on where their divisions genuinely differed and where they only thought they did, across teams split between offices, sites and vessels and across the UK and the Netherlands. The room landed on a just culture rather than a no-blame one, where the response is proportionate to what actually happened.

Progressive

Coaching and developing talent

Developing people when the constraint is not willingness but access: technicians on rotation with no fixed local contact, teams split between one office and another several hundred miles away, and the hard economics of development that is required to go offshore versus development that is merely valuable.

Excellence

Driving performance through feedback

Naming the behaviour rather than praising the result, asking someone what they think they could work on instead of telling them, and separating a manager's own assumptions and history with a person from the feedback itself.

Care

Deciding what actually gets done

The focus area built specifically for a business winning work faster than it can hire. Deciding what does not get done and saying so, separating what is genuinely outside a manager's control from what has only been treated that way, and protecting the improvement work that makes next month easier.

Every focus area was paired with an Elevate session weeks later, where managers brought back what they had actually tried and worked each other's live problems.

04 / What changed

The proof is in what managers went away and did, and in what it gave them back.

Because every focus area was followed by a session where managers reported what they had actually tried, the programme could see what landed. None of what follows is what people said they would do. It is what they came back and said they had done.

What changed in the work

Weekly one to ones, deliberately light

One manager put a short weekly one to one in with every direct report, specifically so small things could not sit and fester. Everything else followed from those meetings: goals, performance conversations, coaching, and people feeling supported. They also asked the team to score their own contentment, and when one came back low it opened a conversation that would otherwise never have happened.

Coaching instead of deciding

The same manager was sent a request to approve a piece of equipment with a quote attached and no recommendation. Rather than making the call for them, they asked the questions that drew the missing thinking out, then followed up so the person would bring the recommendation themselves next time. Their own view of it: every part of this is basic subsea operations, well within the team's grasp, so the job was framing the problem, not solving it.

Ninety minutes down to thirty

Another leader cut a daily project meeting from an hour and a half to half an hour by turning it into a straight yes or no check on whether anything was blocked, and put a plan in place to stop it creeping back up as more projects joined.

Showing what a request costs

A recurring request for data was quietly costing support teams around eight hours a month every time it landed, and nobody had ever counted it. A manager stopped simply absorbing it and instead put the cost and the timeline back in front of the person asking. The request disappeared.

Explaining the why, not the what

One manager stopped issuing process changes as instructions and started explaining what sat behind them. Walking a colleague through a financial tracking process, they got back the thing every manager wants to hear: that the person now understood it was vital, because it is how the business gets paid.

Stretching people on purpose

Another ran a deliberate experiment over three to four weeks, pushing team members onto work slightly beyond their comfort to find where the stretch becomes unsafe. They saw real results, and learned something they had not expected: the thing that separated the people who took it on from the people who took longer was mindset, not skill.

Handing the sign-off down

With sixty-two sign-offs waiting in a single week, a manager worked with senior management to change the delegation of authority so project managers could approve their own project invoices. The fix was to take themselves out of the middle rather than to work harder in it.

And the time nobody had counted

The biggest thing the programme turned up at OEG was not a new behaviour. It was time. Offshore crews work 14 days on and 14 off, in 12 hour shifts, and when the weather turns a manager can find the crew stood down at seven in the morning with the whole day gone. Those hours had always been treated as lost.

11 days offshore, 12 hour shifts

3 days stood down for weather, now 30 minutes each on training and development

Working the problem in a session, one manager landed on the answer: put a supervisor on site across roughly thirty technicians and use those stood-down hours for half-hour one to ones on training and development. It costs nothing beyond the supervisor's time, and it reaches exactly the people who are hardest to develop, because they are always out on rotation. The development time was already in the rotation. It took someone asking a different question to see it.

And where it moved

The programme measured twelve management behaviours at the start and again at the end. Among the managers who completed both assessments, the behaviours that moved were the ones the focus areas were pointed at.

Responsive

Agile and adaptive leadership

+19%

Collaborative

Building team culture

+9%

Progressive

Coaching and developing talent

+18%

Care

Deciding what actually gets done

+19%

Care

Deciding what actually gets done

+18%

In their own words

Engaging and interesting, with clear passion for the subject. I enjoyed the discussion on personality types and appreciated the content about concise, structured messaging. Already planning how I say things differently.

Bob Kingdom, Head of Projects, OEG Subsea

05 / Then they took it wider

The clearest verdict on the work is that OEG bought it again, for a different division.

OEG started with the Subsea business, the part of the group formed out of three legacy companies and working through an integration across the UK and the Netherlands. Fourteen managers, from survey and inspection to engineering, procurement, crewing and finance.

Before that programme had finished, OEG commissioned a second one for Topside: the marine, blades, generator, logistics, technical services and offshore technology side of the business. Eighteen managers, including the division's most senior technical leader. It launched in December 2025 and runs to the end of October 2026.

Nothing about the second programme was a copy of the first. The five focus areas were rebuilt around what the Topside managers were dealing with, which is how a focus area about deciding what gets done came to exist at all. But the decision to go again, into a different division with a different operating world, is the part that matters. It is the only verdict on development work that cannot be talked up.

OEG Subsea

Feb 2025 to Apr 2026

14 managers

Survey and inspection, engineering, asset management, procurement, crewing, tendering and finance, through an integration across the UK and the Netherlands

OEG Topside

Dec 2025 to Oct 2026

18 managers

Marine, blades, generators, logistics, technical services, offshore technology, project management and the training centre

The second programme was commissioned while the first was still running, and was rebuilt rather than repeated.

06 / Start here

If you run an energy or offshore business and your managers came up as technical specialists, promoted because they were the best at the work and never given any management development, that is the work we do. We build it around your operating world, your values and the problems already on your managers' plates, not around a standard course.

Every partnership between 10X and a client is entirely bespoke and unique. Book a no-obligation call with one of our Development Experts to scope how we could support you and your situation.