Fiona co-founded Ashcroft Rowntree in 2010 with David Rowntree after a first career in oil and gas commercial roles and a second in energy search. The company places chief executives, project directors and engineering leadership across energy, utilities and infrastructure, on both sides of the transition.
Thirteen people across Aberdeen and London. Fiona holds the Energy & Infrastructure chair in the first volume of The Executive Search Ten.
I’d say it’s whether the job they were hired for still exists six months later. This sector moves. A brilliant appointment against a brief that has stopped being true is still a failure, and it isn’t the executive’s fault.
So we pressure-test the brief harder than the candidate now. If the strategy would not survive one election or one commodity cycle, the appointment is built on sand and we say so.
Energy runs on engineers, and engineering is where the tools genuinely deliver. What changes for my people is the shape of authority: a project director used to be the person with the answers; now they are the person who decides which answers to trust.
Sector experience, oddly. This industry demands thirty years of it, then complains it keeps hiring the same people. Some of the best appointments of the transition came from adjacent industries, and every one of them was fought over internally first.
On a site, safety culture is real culture and it is the one fit that is non-negotiable: someone whose instinct is to push past process will hurt somebody. Everything else called fit in this sector is often just “has worked in the North Sea”, which is a postcode, not a competence.
Somebody who can hold two truths: the hydrocarbons business pays for the transition, and the transition is the future of the company. Leaders who can only preach one of those sentences last about two years. The ones who can carry both rooms are the scarcest people I search for.
Infrastructure runs on projects that outlast careers, and boards still plan succession in three-year cycles. The person who starts the project will not finish it: plan for the handover from day one, because pretending otherwise is how a gigawatt gets delivered late.
It swings on policy, which makes it look irrational and actually makes it predictable. Every subsidy regime mints a hiring boom, every review kills one. The skill is not reading the market, it is reading the legislation eighteen months early.
When the timeline is honest and long. If a utility knows a role is opening in two years, their own people are the answer and development is cheaper than search. We tell them so, and it is why they call us for the roles that genuinely cannot wait.
Energy started from the furthest back and can see the change on every graduate intake: the control rooms are transforming. The senior engineering line is a generation behind the intake, which is arithmetic, not excuse: you cannot promote people you did not hire twenty years ago. The boards, meanwhile, moved fastest of all.
Sixty-forty the company, but in this sector I’d put it differently: it is sixty per cent the timing. The same chief executive is a hero in a rising commodity cycle and a cost-cutter in a falling one, and neither reputation is really about them.
A submarine engineer for an offshore wind operations role. No wind experience, no oil and gas, and a room full of doubt. Running complex kit in a hostile environment with no margin for error was precisely the job; the sea does not care which industry you learned it in.
“What will this industry be embarrassed about in twenty years?”
How long we spent arguing about whether the change was real instead of getting the right people in place to deliver it. The engineering was never the constraint. The leadership pipeline was.
Asked at every sitting, answered without thinking too hard.