Leading Talent Through Transformation with SLB: Preparing the Workforce of Tomorrow

Jean-François Leleu-Eponville on Preparing the Workforce of Tomorrow

Jean-François Leleu-Eponville — Human Resources Director, Total Talent Management, SLB. Photos © Jonnu Singleton/SLB

As the global energy landscape undergoes an unprecedented shift toward decarbonization, digital innovation, and operational reinvention, the companies driving this change must also transform from within starting with their people. Few organizations illustrate this evolution as powerfully as SLB (formerly Schlumberger). A global technology company with operations in over 100 countries and a workforce representing more than 170 nationalities, SLB has spent decades at the frontier of energy innovation. Yet in a world where the rules of the game are changing faster than ever, even the most established players must rethink how they attract, develop, and retain the talent that will carry them forward.

Jean-François Leleu-Eponville has been at the heart of that human transformation for nearly three decades. Now serving as HR Director, Total Talent Management at SLB, he leads the company's global strategy across Talent Acquisition, Talent Management, and Learning & Development. His mission: build an integrated approach that ensures SLB's workforce is future-ready and aligned with the company's evolving business priorities.

Q. You have spent nearly 30 years at SLB, building your career across four continents. What has this global journey taught you about leadership, and how has it shaped the HR leader you are today?

A. My path started in Houston in 1997, doing compensation and benefits work fresh out of school, and from there it wound through New York, Oklahoma City, Paris, Houston again, Kuala Lumpur, London, and Paris again, before bringing me back to Houston today. Almost thirty years, and by my count somewhere around a dozen moves.

If there's one thing that journey has taught me about leadership, it's that global exposure is contextual; there is no single way to lead everywhere; you can't lead the same way twice. What worked in Oklahoma City didn't translate to Kuala Lumpur, and what worked in Kuala Lumpur didn't translate to London.

Every market, every team, and every downturn we went through together demanded that I relearn how to listen before I tried to lead. That's probably the biggest shift between who I was at twenty-five and who I am now: I used to think good HR meant having the right answer. Now I think it means asking the right question, of the right person, in the right place, before you ever propose one.

Outside of work, I've built that same discipline into how I train. Long-distance triathlon has been part of my life for years, and there's a real parallel: neither a career nor an Ironman rewards a fast start. They reward consistency, showing up for the unglamorous middle miles, long after the excitement of the start line and long before the finish is in sight. That's the kind of HR leader almost thirty years and four continents has shaped: someone who trusts the long game.

SLB is a hundred-year-old company, and what has carried us this far is that we've kept the principles that matter while being willing to evolve the ones that needed to change.

Q. “Future-ready” is a term we hear often. What does it concretely mean at SLB, and which capabilities are you prioritizing to prepare your workforce for the next decade of energy transformation?

A. For me, future-ready at SLB is not a buzzword. It means having the capabilities, mindset, and adaptability to evolve as fast as the energy landscape is evolving. We often use skills, competencies, and capabilities as if they're interchangeable, and they're not. A skill is something you build, through an assignment, a course, hands-on practice. String skills together with real experience over time and you get a competency. Combine that with the right tools and the right behaviors, and multiply it across a team rather than one person, and you get a capability, which is really what a business runs on.

That distinction is shaping how we're evolving our approach to talent management, and we are deliberately moving toward more skills-based ways of developing and deploying people. I want to be honest about that shift, though: it isn't a switch you flip. Plenty of strong companies have started down this path, and what they, and we, have learned is that it takes real change management to make it stick, new ways of describing roles, new habits for managers, new trust in how people are evaluated. We're pursuing this deliberately, not declaring it solved.

One place we're not starting from scratch is our early-career technical programs for engineers and technicians. They're tied directly to our business lines and their technology, and one of our genuine strengths is how quickly we can adapt them as that technology evolves. That responsiveness, updating what and how we teach nearly as fast as the technology itself changes, is what future-ready actually looks like in practice, well before you get anywhere near an organization-wide skills framework.

Ultimately, future-ready isn't a milestone we reach and move past. It's a continuous conversation between the business leaders who know where our technology is heading and the teams who build our talent programs, so that what we teach and how we deploy people keeps pace with where this industry is actually going, not where it was five years ago.

Q. You led the digitalization and simplification of HR services at SLB for several years. How has that experience shaped your approach to upskilling in an era of AI and rapid technological change?

A. That experience taught me that technology only creates value when the underlying work is simplified and redesigned around the user first. Bolting new tools onto old, cluttered processes just makes the clutter faster.

In the AI era, that lesson matters even more — but the bigger shift is upstream, in how we design processes in the first place. We can no longer just automate the way a person has always done the work; we need to look at our processes through the lens of how AI would navigate them, and redesign from there.

That reframing changes what upskilling means. It has to start with baseline literacy on the tools we're now using. But literacy is the floor, not the ceiling, and it will always vary by role and population. Beyond that baseline, the real work is capability building: continuing to equip people with skills that don't expire such as judgment, adaptability, collaboration, and the ability to keep learning. Whatever the technology of the moment, those capabilities are transferable, and they're the ones that can't be automated away.

Q. In today's increasingly competitive talent market, what do employees expect from employers that they did not expect ten years ago?

A. Three things stand out to me. The first is transparency, not just what decisions are made, but why. That expectation now extends into HR itself, particularly around compensation. The EU's new pay transparency regulation is a good example: employees want to understand why and how they are compensated. It creates real process challenges, but I believe it also helps address bias in how we make decisions and builds trust in the fairness of the system.

The second is coaching, which matters more and more for managers. Coaching helps us develop leaders who understand their own strengths and can look honestly at their shortcomings and work on them. More fundamentally, it redefines what a manager is: not a top-down decision maker who is expected to hold every answer and all the authority, but a coach who elevates the people around them.

The third is collaborative career development. Employees want agency, which is the ability to choose their own path, while knowing they are supported in the areas they want to explore or need help with. Careers used to simply happen to people. Today, career development is genuinely a partnership.

Q. SLB has continuously evolved alongside major shifts in the energy industry. How do you maintain employee engagement and a strong culture while leading constant change?

A. None of this is new, and none of it happened by accident. People has always been our number one value, full stop. Being safe is part of that, and in an industry with as much inherent risk as ours, safety is a commitment we renew every single day, on every operation, everywhere we work. But People as a value is bigger than safety alone, it's the lens we put on every decision we make about our workforce. It's something our people feel, and something the industry recognizes about us.

We're also built on excellence. Our people are among the best in the industry, and we've built a culture that nurtures that talent and recognizes it, rewarding achievement and a pioneering spirit rather than simply tenure. That recognition is what creates a real sense of belonging, one that carries people through change because they know what they contribute is seen and valued.

And none of that would mean much without consistency. We've stayed true to our people principles, and we've walked the talk. SLB is a hundred-year-old company, and what has carried us this far is that we've kept the principles that matter while being willing to evolve the ones that needed to change. Our people know we don't reinvent our values every time the business does; we adapt where it counts and hold the line where it matters.

Our employee survey, from the enterprise level down to individual teams, is what keeps us honest about how well we're living up to all of this, and lets us act on what our people actually tell us.

Q. As organizations accelerate the adoption of AI, how do you strike the right balance between technology, human capabilities, and employee experience?

A. For us, it starts with being clear about what belongs where. AI takes on the repetitive tasks, the friction, and the administrative work, which frees people, and particularly managers and HR, to focus on what humans do best: judgment, creativity, and leadership, along with more time for coaching and developing the people around them.

But I don't think that's the full story. The bigger opportunity is that AI becomes an accelerator for innovation itself, giving our teams more capacity and better tools to test ideas and solve problems faster than we could before. That only works, though, if we design it around the employee experience from the start rather than as an afterthought, which in practice means training people at the right level for their role so they can adopt these tools quickly and with confidence, instead of being slowed down by them. Get that balance right, and technology and human capability reinforce each other rather than compete.

Q. As business priorities evolve faster than ever, how do you ensure that talent strategies remain agile and aligned with the organization's changing needs?

A. If I look at why SLB has been able to adapt as well as it has over the years, three things stand out. First, we've been through enough industry cycles, downturns and upcycles alike, that adapting quickly without losing our core capability has become organizational muscle memory rather than something we have to relearn each time. Second, we've long held to a talent philosophy of recruiting where we work and promoting from within: hiring locally keeps us close to the markets and skills we actually need, and a strong promotion-from-within culture means the people stepping into new priorities already understand the business, rather than needing to be onboarded into it. And third, that same philosophy has built us a genuinely global, cross-trained talent pool that we can redeploy as priorities shift, which gives us options that a more siloed workforce simply wouldn't have.

It's important to say that agility is not about matching the speed of business evolution one-for-one; and it shouldn't be. We uphold our standards and policies before making foundational changes, so that we can properly assess the impact on our people and our talent pipelines before we act. The goal is an agile talent management strategy, not an erratic one.

The talent we compete hardest for wants to work on something that matters

Q. Looking ahead, what opportunities do you believe organizations should embrace to build stronger, more resilient, and more innovative workforces?

A. A few shifts are already underway, and organizations that lean into them early will have a real advantage. The first is designing work with AI, not just adopting it, redesigning how teams and workflows are structured so AI and human judgment each do what they do best, rather than layering AI onto roles that were never built for it.

Talent mobility is also becoming far more fluid. The workforce that wins the next decade won't be organized around rigid jobs and functions; it will move toward wherever skills are needed most, which takes real trust and a willingness to let careers take shape around skills rather than titles.

We also need to get better at seeing change before it arrives, using data to anticipate shifts in skills and capabilities years out rather than scrambling once the gap appears.

And for an industry like ours, purpose is a genuine magnet: the talent we compete hardest for wants to work on something that matters, and being honest about the complexity of the energy transition draws exactly that kind of person.

None of it works, though, without the right foundation: an inclusive, safe culture where people don't feel they have to go it alone, can fail without it defining them, and feel empowered to learn and speak up. Without that, there's no resilient way to keep innovating, whether the opportunity is AI, mobility, foresight, or purpose.