Interview with the Director of E&T at Rolls-Royce Submarines

In this episode of the Nuclear Leadership Network Podcast, host Matt Gavin speaks with Lee Warren, Director for Engineering and Technology at Rolls Royce Submarines. They discuss the current state of the nuclear industry, the importance of developing future leaders, and the value of networking and mentorship. Lee shares insights from his own career journey, emphasising the need for personal growth through diverse experiences and the importance of being adaptable in one's career path. He offers advice for aspiring leaders, highlighting the significance of boldness, planning, and the role of mentors in achieving success.

Takeaways

There is a massive opportunity for nuclear to make a difference.
The skills gap is a significant challenge for the industry.
Leadership is not about your role; it's a mindset.
Networking should start early in one's career.
Understanding the environment is crucial for leaders.
Mentorship is key to personal and professional growth.
Diverse experiences can shape leadership perspectives.
Plans for career development should be flexible.
Collaboration with competitors can lead to synergies.
Continuous learning is essential for leadership success.

Creators and Guests

Guest

Lee Warren

Director of Engineering and Technology - Rolls-Royce Submarines

What is Nuclear Leadership Network?

The Nuclear Leadership Network was established to fill a gap in leadership development. By the time leaders hit a certain level in their path, it becomes more and more difficult to know what development steps to take to ready yourself for a shot at the top executive leadership roles in the Nuclear Industry. As you climb the ladder the number of people available to help you on your path become fewer and fewer, and your journey becomes a much more personal one. There will always be a need to collaborate with others, seek advice and guidance from those around you and take feedback from others seriously, but when you get to a certain point, you realise the more you are on your own. It’s up to you to develop yourself, through conversations, self reflection, making mistakes and being brave enough to learn from them. Not having all the answers, but being bold enough to seek the answers, is where much of that later growth in leadership occurs.

Welcome to the Nuclear Leadership Network Podcast.

Speaker 1 (00:26.392)
Hello everybody and welcome to the Nuclear Leadership Network podcast. I'm your host, Matt Gavin, and today I'm delighted to be joined by Lee Warren, who's the Director for Engineering and Technology at Rolls Royce Submarines. So Lee, if you don't mind, I'll kick us straight off with a question. Having spent your career in the nuclear industry, I'm just really interested in your views as to where we're at right now in terms of an industry and what some of the biggest challenges are, but also what some of the biggest opportunities are.

So the easiest way to answer that question quickly Matt is I've been in and around our industry for 35 years and I wish I was 20 years younger because I think when I look around whether it's defending our country and our allies, whether it's keeping the lights on, whether it's looking after the climate and the world, that there is just so much opportunity for nuclear to make a massive difference.

to our people, our country and frankly the world. There are challenges of course with that because we need to find the people to be able to deliver on all those opportunities. But I can see some real sort positive actions around that, whether it's government support, whether it's big organisations really getting involved in bringing through new talent.

feeding the pipeline as I would call it, lots of positive activity particularly in the United Kingdom but elsewhere on really boosting apprenticeships, starting to get people in the sausage machine now so that they come through the education system and are ready for organisations to use. And I think a lot of positive conversations about being realistic about when you do need deep technical nuclear knowledge but also when you don't.

I think as an industry one thing we can do to help ourselves is be really clear on when something is nuclear and when something is supporting nuclear and not convincing ourselves that we need deep technical nuclear expertise for every single thing that we do whether it's on a nuclear power station, a nuclear submarine or on a microreactor that's going to space.

Speaker 1 (02:48.526)
Yeah, interesting that you talk about the skills gap there, Lee, because obviously that's a challenge for the industry that we're all facing. The sort of nuclear leaders, the senior leaders, the executive leadership teams of the future probably are still in their early career or not even in the industry yet. What is one piece of advice that you'd give those sort of aspiring executive leaders of the future to sort of level up really around from where they are now to where they need to be in terms of being that future executive team?

think I'd say two things. Being in the nuclear industry, guess I'm bound to say the first thing. It's really important to get a solid grounding in the complexities of the nuclear industry. Not so you can continue with those complexities, but so that when you get into an influencing leadership position, you can confidently and comfortably challenge people to do things, obviously always safely.

but in a different way and be prepared to think differently. So think having that solid grounding is really, really important. But also don't leave it too long to start to sort of pick up those more generic and softer skills about leading teams. Most people will go through a technical type role, whether it's in program management or engineering or finance or supply chain, it doesn't matter.

There'll be sort that doing role and then there'll be that first level supervisor and then there'll be the manager and then there's the step from manager to leader, which is actually quite a big step. So I guess simply I'd encourage people, it's never really too soon to start understanding what leadership is. I'm a big advocate of the statement that leadership is not about your role, it's not about your status or your hierarchy.

You can be a leader at any level of any organization. Leadership is as much a mindset as it is anything else.

Speaker 1 (04:51.598)
Yeah, I'm interested on that broad leadership skill set that's needed. When we talk nuclear leadership, when I say nuclear leadership to you, does that resonate in any different way? Does that have a different meaning, do think? Or are there unique elements of nuclear leadership over other industries?

I don't think I would say that nuclear leadership is in any way different, but linking to the very first question at the start of this, I just think in any industry when you're leading and you go into senior leadership positions and in influencing positions, it's really important that you have a broad understanding of what environment you're in. You as an individual, what environment your team is in.

what the mission is, whether it's the mission for the team or the mission for the organisation you represent or the mission for the sector that you're in. So I don't think it's necessarily peculiar or special, but I do think that back to that statement that our nuclear industry, not just in the UK but in the world, is at this massive pivotal point. It's a responsibility of senior leaders to really understand the whole environment.

and not just the little bit that they're in, which often involves a lot of networking, a lot of talking to people that you wouldn't necessarily think you might need to have conversations with. So quite often I'll have conversations with people in competitor organisations, you know, to understand what are their challenges, what are their opportunities, because sometimes you can actually find some synergy.

with competitors and you may actually end up doing some things together for the better of both organisations to achieve ultimately that bigger mission. And I think if you don't have a little bit of openness in your mind, you wouldn't necessarily make those connections and make those networks.

Speaker 1 (06:51.968)
Is that something you think should be pursued throughout someone's career or is it a point when you hit a certain level in your leadership, in your role in a company, in your position that that becomes an open door?

I think, I would say, again, like I answered the question a moment ago, I personally don't think it's ever too early to start making networks. And I also strongly feel that as a senior leader, it is your responsibility to open your networks to your teams as well, to all the colleagues, peers as well. You know, the little black book to use the traditional term shouldn't be a private thing that you stick in your

and you're inside pocket, you should be comfortable to share those contacts and sit down with Lee Warren and Matt. Here's all the people that I've been talking to in the last year. This person would be a great person for you to talk to. Here's their email address. Go and have a chat with them. So I think, I don't think it's ever too early to open up those sorts of networks. The specific of being bold and comfortable to have.

sensible conversations with competitors to use that example. Maybe that's something that you should probably reserve until you're in a bit more of a senior position because you could possibly get yourself into a bit of trouble doing that if you're in a sort of a more sort of first level manager position. But I think the fundamental takeaway is it's never too early to start building a network. And if I may, that network is as much about learning about yourself

as it is about the job and how your company is delivering on its mission. I think it's really important that you understand your strengths and your development areas and your blind spots. And sometimes you actually need some trusted mentors, not necessarily from within your own organisation, to get to know you and to get that level of trust where you can have the conversation and they'll say, did you realise you had this blind spot?

Speaker 2 (09:00.43)
because nine times out of ten you probably don't and until you start talking to different people you might not ever find out.

Yeah, it certainly resonates with me, the sort self-reflection piece of leadership and always willing to learn from mistakes. My leadership journey has never been about a destination. It's certainly an ongoing learning journey. So yeah, it certainly resonates with me. Just taking that one step further, in your career, there sort of trigger points when you realized you may be on a path or you could be on a path for sort of an executive position, a really senior?

role within the industry or has that evolved a bit more naturally?

My experience has been a lot of evolution and again I talk to a lot of people and I guess it's different routes for different people but to share my experience I didn't set out to want to be the director of Rolls Royce Submarines Limited engineering director. I didn't never set out or imagined I would be a formal board member with fiduciary responsibilities.

named on Companies House. I'd never had that in my plan at all. But again, my positive experience is that there were always people looking out for potential future leaders. There were succession plans that weren't just pieces of paper that were brought out every quarter to check that we'd got names on them. I'd got people who were actively looking out for me and other colleagues.

Speaker 2 (10:37.998)
and supporting me and us and putting opportunities in front of us to better ourselves and better our experience and better our CVs and better our learning, better our connections, sharing the black books as I mentioned a moment ago. So I think the first time I kind of realised that there was a chance I was going to be in an executive leader role was frankly when a former engineering director in my organisation and a former president

started talking to me about, well, we think you need to do this and this and this to get you in a position where you could be a candidate for it. And that was really quite a surprise to me, if I'm honest. Obviously a pleasant surprise. So I guess that there'll be others, and I talked to colleagues quite a lot, who had a very different experience and probably had a real idea from an early age that that's where they wanted to be. And that's okay, because that's their experience and that's how they did it.

But that was my lived experience.

Yeah, good. You get on kind of a trajectory that you then supported by your organization and by the networks around you. I guess, what do you think...

key things that you did through your career that got you into that position were what, I guess, individual contributor role and then as you developed into a team leader, into a manager, into a senior manager, you got any key things that you were doing, learning about yourself, learning about the industry that really enabled that, enabled you to be on that trajectory.

Speaker 2 (12:13.408)
I think there were two things for me partly linked to how I answered one of the earlier questions. One was I spent a decent amount of time getting a firm grounding in engineering. I'm an engineering guy so I spent probably a little bit too much time actually. When I'm talking to mentees now I would say one of my learning points is don't stay in a deep technical set of roles for quite as long as I did.

But that grounding is really, really important. And then I think one of the pivot points in my career, and again, whenever I'm talking to others, I did it too late. But I did two secondments out of Rolls-Royce. Still in the industry, so one was in Babcock's and one was in BA Systems. And I was really fortunate that I was given the opportunity to spend...

a little over a year in each organisation, but actually embedded in that organisation, not as a Rolls Royce person, but actually as a fully fledged seconde, I had a BA Systems badge or a Babcock's badge. And those, it was about two and a half, nearly three years in total. I learned so, so much in that period. You know, you can, if you stay in one place for too long, you can start to build a view that, well,

We're all awesome and the issues over there and you start getting your pointy fingers out. Immersing yourself inside another organisation. I think if anybody's ever got an opportunity also to get embedded or seconded into a customer organisation, I think that's really important as well. You know, it's the old adage of if you can understand and walk in somebody else's shoes for a period, you really start to learn a lot more about your environment.

And ultimately in a supplier organisation, it's really important to understand what your customer really needs and wants. And sometimes you don't just get that from a piece of paper or a contract or an invitation to tender or even a conversation. Sometimes you have to actually have that lived experience. So for me, that was a real pivot point for my career because I went outside of the bubble and understood what it's like for other people.

Speaker 1 (14:39.394)
Yeah, just seeing the world from a different viewpoint, guess, is the advantage there. So I guess, through those experiences, how do think you changed as a person? Did your values change? What are the things that you thought weren't as important, become more important to you? So I'm interested in how those experiences have shaped you as an individual.

Yeah, I don't think my values change. Again, I'm a firm believer that your core values are there from quite a young age. There's lots of research around that says that your fundamental core beliefs and values, they're instilled in you when you're single-figure years old. But learning and understanding other people's perspectives.

Dare I say it, knocking a bit of arrogance off as well. think one of the downsides of my experience is being broadly in the same organisation for most of my career has been a great benefit for me personally and I hope it's been beneficial for the company as well. Somebody else could answer that question. But I do think it's important, you know, again, to move around and get different experiences.

Because you can, particularly when you're in a big organisation, there's a risk of you becoming a little bit arrogant and thinking that your way or your organisation's way is the only way. So I learnt a lot about that. I spent quite a bit of time away from home as well, so I learnt a lot about myself and a lot more about how I valued my family as they were growing up. I'd got children, I wasn't seeing them in the week because I was working away quite a lot.

So I learnt an awful lot about myself. And then I learnt quite a bit more about, I mean, when I moved into those secondments, I was already in a reasonably senior leadership position in my company. So I learnt a lot about how to quickly embed yourself in another organisation and get some credibility and trust, because ultimately, if you haven't got that, you're not going to really have a very successful secondment.

Speaker 2 (16:57.868)
And a key part of that actually is having sponsorship. know, somebody in wherever that place is that you go in, if it's a secondment, a new job, it's really important to have that sponsor or that mentor who's actually there. You've got somebody to reach out to. So if you're a bit of a difficult time, you're not quite achieving what you wanted to achieve, there's somebody who you can go and knock on the door or pick up the phone. I think that's really important. I learned a lot about that.

So obviously getting to an executive role, director level, that kind of level, it starts to run out of opportunities to progress further. What does the future hold for someone in a director position? What is the future looking like over the next five, 10 years? What is the plan? How do you develop that plan? How do you develop that next step? And always keep yourself hungry.

Great question. We've already said, haven't we, that it's so important to keep learning. Whether you're 16 years old or you're still working at 60, I think it's really important and healthy to always be learning. So think finding a way to grow yourself. This podcast is fundamentally about leadership. So for me, leadership's a bit of a never-ending learning experience.

I always say to my team that as far as I'm concerned, one of my primary objectives is to put myself out of a job. So I have done an awesome job. If I've grown a team and I've got three really, really awesome successes and I can go and hang my boots up, that means I've achieved my primary aim in my role. So when you're on that journey, to use that phrase, again, it's linked to the networking thing, I think.

still be the leader and get to the point where you've built a strong team, you're really, really comfortable, trust them implicitly, you can delegate more, you can empower your team more, which actually gives you a bit more headspace. Of course, one of the roles of executives is to look forward and think about the future of the organisation, the business, the environment, the enterprise. So think that's one of the things that I've been working quite hard on.

Speaker 2 (19:20.078)
is making sure I've got the right balance of being comfortable that the day job's being done, it's been done well, but trying to leave that to the team so that then you can start looking at the five years, 10 years, 20 years. In our industry, I guess one thing that is peculiar to the nuclear industry and leadership is the timelines. There aren't many industries where you can genuinely...

start thinking and you need to start thinking about 80 years from now when you think about the full sort of concept to decommissioning and recycling. So it's really important that you find that headspace. And then finding the right balance of internal activities versus external activities. You know, we've talked a bit about the importance of networking and connections and mentors.

So I think a fundamental part of being an executive in any organisation is finding that balance because fundamentally if you don't look outside you don't know what the environment's doing, you don't know who your competitors may be, you don't know who your collaborators may be, so you've really got to lift your head up, at least 10 years hence, but also be looking for those connections, those mergers, acquisitions, collaborations, competitors.

new customers, new markets. And that's what excites me these days.

Yeah, interesting point around sort of giving yourself the headspace by letting go of some of the, and I think that's certainly a challenge for any new leader and any sort of aspiring leader is letting go of that sort of ground level, that level they were operating in before. So that's really interesting point. Last question before we finish, So for any aspiring sort of leader who's potentially on the...

Speaker 1 (21:12.278)
on the path to an executive role or even just starting their leadership journey, what is the kind of one piece of advice you'd give?

In our industry at the moment, I would say that the world is literally your oyster. So be bold. Don't be too cocky if I can use that term, but be bold. Find that balance of absolutely aspiring to where you need to be. Always, again, my lived experience...

you can probably always do more than you actually think you can. But the way to get there, in my opinion, my experience, without being too cocky, is actually to find those couple of mentors who can guide you. And if you find the right couple of mentors, maybe have one in your current organisation and one or two outside your organisation, if you've got good mentors, they will guide you, they will advise you when you're not...

promoting yourself enough, they will help to unlock opportunities and unlock doors and encourage you to think more broadly about your future opportunities. Have a plan, but remember that plans can always change. So it's okay to have a career plan, but don't make it a scientific thing and don't expect that you're going to go from phase one to phase two to phase three to phase five and you'll become a

a CEO in five years, that's clearly not going to happen. But also be very comfortable with if you execute phase one and two that all of a sudden you need a phase three, A, B, C and D and be comfortable for that plan to change because it will, stuff will happen.

Speaker 1 (23:03.938)
Yeah, one thing I've learned, maybe it's age, is there is plenty of time. You don't need to be in such a rush.

Agreed, I think that's a tricky balance when you're talking about your career and your development and it often depends on how you are as an individual. Some people will need a bit of gentle persuasion to move a little bit faster, some people might need to slow down a little bit but fundamentally have a plan, be prepared for the plan to change, be bold, be confident but make sure you get some mentors to guide you because they will be...

worth their weight in gold.

Great. Lee, thank you very much for joining us. It's been a pleasure. Thanks very much.

Matt. Great, have a good day.

Speaker 1 (23:53.07)
So it was great talking to Lee Warren about his journey through leadership in the nuclear industry. I mean, he spent such a long time in a single company, realizing the benefits of branching out. He shared with us about the importance of mentors, the importance of sharing those connections, sharing those networks and continuing to build networks in the industry to help the leadership journey and take advice off of the leaders and of the people on the same journey as yourself. And I think a real valuable set of lessons for

us to all learn and certainly I will take those forward into my career following the conversation with Lee today. Thanks for listening to the Nuclear Leadership Network. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast. We've got more content coming your way where we hear from a number of leaders in the industry globally, where they share their insights into how they've got to those executive leadership positions and how you can level up your career too. Join us next time for more great content.