Adastrum is a London executive search and leadership advisory firm. We appoint chief executives, chief operating officers and the technology and transformation leadership that energy, utilities and renewables businesses need to deliver the transition.
It is the largest programme of change most utilities will ever run, and it has to be delivered while the lights stay on, the regulator stays satisfied and the price control still holds.
Talk to us about a senior appointmentWe are retained by boards, chief executives, chief people officers and investors to appoint the executive leadership of an energy or utilities business. Retained means we are engaged to solve a defined problem rather than to fill a vacancy: we map the whole relevant market, approach leaders confidentially, assess them against the problem, and stay involved through the offer and the first hundred days.
Delivery horizons in this sector are measured in years and regulatory settlements, not quarters, which changes what a good appointment looks like. A leader who can move quickly is worth less here than one who can hold a direction steady through three price control periods and two changes of government policy. Before we open a search we agree which of those the role genuinely needs.
Energy briefs arrive in the language of assets, networks and regulation. Underneath, they reduce to a small number of leadership problems.
We are retained to appoint permanent and interim executive leadership, including
Our work is the executive leadership that runs and transforms an energy or utilities business. We do not place engineers, technicians, field operations or site-based roles, we do not work below director level, and we are not a contingent agency. If that is what you need, we will gladly point you to someone better placed to help.
Five stages, run the same way on every mandate, with the regulatory and delivery diligence this sector requires built into each one.
Stage 1
We establish what the appointment has to change, what the regulatory settlement permits, and what the organisation will let a new leader do. We will challenge a specification that asks for a regulatory expert, a capital delivery leader and a digital transformer in one person, because that brief is common here and it is how a search runs for a year.
Stage 2
We map inside energy and utilities and across the adjacent regulated and infrastructure industries where comparable delivery experience is built. We approach each candidate personally and confidentially. Where genuine regulatory standing is the constraint rather than a preference, we narrow the map and tell you we have.
Stage 3
Assessment is a subject-matter conversation between peers, not a scripted competency exercise. In a business with ten-year delivery horizons we weight one thing heavily: how a candidate behaves when a programme is late and the honest answer is unwelcome. Each shortlisted candidate receives a written assessment mapped against your problem.
Stage 4
We present three to five candidates with our recommendation, the trade-offs between them, and what we would do if it were our decision. We are explicit about the usual trade in this sector, which is between sector fluency and delivery pace, and about which one the business can least afford to be short of.
Stage 5
We manage the offer and stay close to the leader and the sponsor through the first hundred days. A leader arriving from a faster industry meets the regulatory clock in the first month, and how they respond to it predicts a great deal about the following three years.
A strong CV from a well-known utility is a safe-looking choice in a board pack. It tells you what someone has been part of. It does not tell you how they will lead when a capital programme slips, a regulator intervenes, or a board loses patience with a timeline that was always optimistic.
Working with the social psychologist Dr Ian Stewart, we assess how a leader operates when the room is calm and what they reach for when it is not. Those defaults are developable rather than fixed, which is the point: a leader who can see their own can regulate it. In a regulated business with long delivery horizons, that behavioural read matters more rather than less.
We place across sectors on purpose. The pattern recognition that changes an outcome usually travels better from outside an industry than from within it, because people inside a sector have often arrived at the same answers as one another.
A leader who has already delivered a multi-year capital programme, or already run technology at pace under real regulatory accountability, carries that judgement whatever industry earned it. We map inside and outside energy and let the problem decide. Where regulatory standing genuinely is the constraint, we will say so.
Adastrum brings twenty years of appointing senior leaders into complex organisations, a behavioural assessment method developed with the social psychologist Dr Ian Stewart, and our Meta Team programme, which has worked with leadership teams at organisations including Nasdaq, Novartis, HSBC, Unilever and EQT.
No. We appoint board and executive leadership: chief executives, chief operating officers, chief technology and information officers, and directors of capital programme, transformation and regulation. We do not place engineers, technicians, site-based or field operations roles.
Before your next senior appointment, one question is worth sitting with. Are you about to hire someone who knows what good looks like, or someone who has actually built it?
If that is a conversation worth having, it is exactly the one we welcome.
Talk to us about a senior appointmentObservations from twenty years of appointing leaders into complex organisations: what separates an appointment that compounds from one that quietly comes apart, why succession plans drift towards the most visible candidate, and what a board ought to ask before it signs off the brief.
The Collaborator is the schema you appoint to make a divided organisation move as one. It is also the one most likely to keep seeking agreement long after the moment for agreement has gone. The most dangerous phrase in a senior team is not “I disagree.” It is “let’s get everyone aligned first.” I watched a leader run a good business into a wasted quarter on that phrase, and almost nobody in the room could see it happ
The most expensive senior appointment I have watched fail had the best roadmap I have ever seen. I mean that sincerely. It was a genuinely impressive piece of thinking. Every workstream mapped, every dependency identified, governance and sequencing and risk all accounted for. The board saw it in month three and applauded. He was still refining it in month fourteen, when they let him go.
The Commander is the schema you appoint in a crisis. It is also the one you have to watch once the crisis has passed. There is a phrase you hear in big organisations when nothing is moving. "It's just how things get done here." Say it out loud and it sounds like culture. Listen properly and it is something sharper. It means someone at the top is commanding, and everyone below has quietly learned to wait.
The board thought they had found the perfect CEO. Two successful exits. A scaled multinational division. References that read like a character witness: decisive, commercially sharp, a natural leader. In the interview he was confident, fluent, convincing on growth and culture and transformation. The appointment was unanimous. Twelve months later the same board was negotiating his exit. Revenue targets had been missed.
There’s one question almost every HR-led interview process insists on. “Tell me about a time you failed.” At junior level, it sometimes earns its keep. At C-suite, it’s a junk question. And it’s almost always the wrong thing to ask in the room. I’ll explain why I won’t ask it. And then I’ll tell you what I ask instead.
Most succession planning assumes someone is ready to step up. But what happens when the obvious successor is the one who leaves? A look at why heir apparent plans fail, the real cost of an unplanned leadership transition, and how boards build genuine continuity.
