01.09.2026
On October 15, Energy Club will hold the forum “Energy of Women’s Leadership: Women Holding the Energy Front of Ukraine” in Kyiv. The focus is on the experience of female leaders who, in the conditions of a full-scale war, make difficult decisions, ensure the stability of companies and teams, and shape the future of the Ukrainian energy industry.
During two panel discussions, participants will talk about anti-crisis management and operational resilience, experience working during blackouts, supporting teams under constant stress, attracting investments, transforming the energy market, decentralization and development of renewable energy and storage systems.
One of the speakers at the forum will be Tetiana Melnykova, Deputy Director of AK TRADE GROUP. In an interview with Energy Club journalist Olena Karpachova, she talked about business management in wartime, speed of decision-making, trust with partners and support for teams in constant stress, shared AK TRADE GROUP’s anti-crisis experience and vision of the development of distributed generation, storage systems and virtual power plants. They also talked about female leadership in the energy sector and career opportunities for young women in the industry.
– Ms. Tetiana, the energy market today operates in conditions of constant uncertainty. What qualities of a leader have become crucial for you in making decisions when there are simply no ready-made answers?
– A leader who expects to be able to predict everything will quickly break down in our market. Instead, you need to build a system that can withstand the blow when the forecast does not work – backup scenarios, flexible teams, clear protocols in case of force majeure. And, perhaps, the most important thing is calmness as a management tool. Not indifference, but the ability not to broadcast your own anxiety to the team, because the leader’s panic instantly scales to the entire organization, and in the energy sector this can be very expensive.
– AK TRADE GROUP works in the field of trading, balancing and aggregation – where the price of a mistake can be very high. How does the management style change when you have to work every day in conditions of war, risks and responsibility for partners?
– In trading, balancing and aggregation, we work not just with our own risks – we are supported by partners who have entrusted us with their volumes, their obligations to consumers, their operational stability. A mistake or delay on our part instantly becomes their problem. So the management style has changed in several specific things.
The speed of decision-making has become a critical competency, not a bonus. A missile attack, a generation outage, daily volatility of the DAM and IDR – it can take minutes to react. We have built processes so that decisions on the front line are made without waiting for approval from above, because there is simply no time for that.
Transparency with partners has become a strict requirement, not a matter of reputation. When the situation is unpredictable, the worst thing you can do is to remain silent or embellish the real state of affairs. We have consciously moved to the model: it is better to tell your partner the unpleasant truth right away than to let him find out about the problem from the news or from the balance.
– Balancing the energy system today is no longer just about technology, but also about trust between market participants. How do you think this trust is built in times of crisis?
– Trust is when market participants feel that you are looking not only at their own balance, but at the stability of the system as a whole. Balancing is, by definition, a game where the individual gain of one participant at the expense of another destroys the system itself for everyone. Therefore, we try to act in such a way that our partners see: we are not using the crisis for a one-time benefit, but are interested in ensuring that the market continues to function after a specific difficult situation passes.
As a result, trust in times of crisis is built not through large-scale statements, but through a series of small, consistent actions that confirm: we can be relied on precisely when it is most difficult.
– In the energy sector, people traditionally talk a lot about technology, but much less about people. What, in your opinion, is the most difficult part of a manager’s job today: managing processes or supporting a team that has been living in war conditions for more than four years?
– A tired, burned-out, anxious specialist makes mistakes more often – and in our field, where we are talking about balancing and trading, the price of such a mistake can be very high. So supporting the team is no longer a “soft” function of a manager next to the operating room, but part of operational reliability itself.
So the war years taught me a few things. First, to notice team fatigue before it turns into burnout or mistakes – which requires much more attention.to people than any KPI system. Secondly, not to demand from people “usual productivity” on days when it is physically impossible, and at the same time not to allow chronic anxiety to become an excuse for a systemic decline in quality – here is a very fine line. Thirdly, to remain a support yourself, even when it is also difficult personally – because the team reads the state of the leader faster than any of his words.
– Women are increasingly actively occupying leadership positions in the energy sector. Did you feel that you had to prove your professional capabilities more than your male colleagues did?
– This question is difficult to answer unequivocally, because the experience of each woman in the industry is individual, and energy has been changing very rapidly in recent years.
If we talk about your own path – yes, to some extent you had to make additional efforts so that competence was perceived without reservations. But I wouldn’t call this a unique challenge for women – rather, it’s a pattern for any manager coming into a historically conservative industry with a less typical profile or experience.
I look at this topic with optimism: the industry is changing, the number of women in leadership positions is growing, and each success story – no matter how difficult the path to it was – makes the next step a little easier for those who follow us.
– Over the past few years, the Ukrainian energy market has learned to work in a completely new reality. What anti-crisis experience of your company do you consider the most valuable and the one that can be useful for the entire industry?
– The most valuable anti-crisis experience for AK TRADE GROUP is understanding the importance of diversification, liquidity, systematic risk management, and speed of decision-making.
The energy market can change literally in a matter of hours, so it is important to have strong analytics, constantly monitor risks and be ready to make decisions very quickly and adapt the strategy to the new situation.
A separate lesson is that liquidity is no less important than profitability. It allows you to withstand sharp market fluctuations and fulfill your obligations. Even during periods of significant market decline and financial losses, AK TRADE GROUP always fulfills the concluded contracts and adheres to the agreed conditions. For us, this is a matter of trust and reputation.
The main conclusion is simple: it is impossible to predict every crisis, but you can be ready to react quickly to it, have a sufficient margin of safety and remain a reliable partner in any situation.
– Today, AK TRADE GROUP helps manufacturers minimize imbalances and work more efficiently. What new opportunities do you see for the market in the coming years, especially in light of the development of distributed generation and energy storage systems?
– Distributed generation and storage systems are probably the main driver of market changes in the coming years, and I see several key areas here.
Firstly, the growth of the number of small producers changes the very logic of balancing – instead of working with dozens of large and predictable stations, the market will have to manage thousands of distributed sources simultaneously. This requires fundamentally different forecasting and aggregation tools.
Secondly, storage systems open up a new level of flexibility for producers – the ability to manage the time of energy supply, not just its volume, and significantly reduce their own imbalance even before entering the market.
Thirdly, I see serious potential in the development of virtual power plants – when disparate assets, generation, storage, managed loads, are combined into one managed portfolio that behaves in the market as a large stable player.
For AK TRADE GROUP, this means moving from a purely operational aggregation of volumes to the role of a strategic partner that helps the manufacturer build an optimal model of behavior in the market, where flexibility becomes the same resource as energy itself.
– What does the concept of “female leadership” in energy mean to you? In your opinion, is there a special management style that women bring to this strategic industry?
– I am cautious about the idea of “female management style” as something monolithic – styles differ just as much among female managers as they do among men. Therefore, I would not like to reduce this concept to a fixed set of traits.
However, there are certain trends that are often recorded: female managers are often inclined to a more communicative decision-making style, pay more attention to the state of the team, and are less inclined to hide uncertainty behind a facade of confidence. But these are trends, not the rule – I know many men with exactly the same approach.
For me, female leadership is not about opposing the male style, but expanding the idea of what a strong leader in the energy sector can be. The industry has long been held by rather narrow standards – rigidity, detachment, focus exclusively on numbers. A greater diversity of management profiles shows that results can be achieved in different ways.
Therefore, the value is not in women leading with principle andrather, the industry becomes more flexible when it stops demanding the same behavior pattern from all managers. It is this diversity of approaches that is a real asset in times when ready-made solutions often simply do not exist.
– If a young girl were standing in front of you today who only dreams of building a career in energy, but doubts whether this is “her” field, what would you tell her from your own experience?
– I would tell her one simple thing: doubting whether this is “your” field does not mean that it is not yours. I myself started with similar doubts and, looking back, I understand: they were a natural reaction to an industry that seemed closed and alien, and not a signal that I did not belong there.
Energy has long seemed to be a territory for engineers in hard hats and men with technical education. But today everything is much broader: analytics, trading, risk management, communication with partners, crisis management – all kinds of thinking are needed here, and none of them has a gender. If you are interested in understanding how complex systems work, if you are not afraid to make decisions in conditions of uncertainty – you already have more of what this field needs than any diploma.
I would honestly warn you: it will not be easy. Sometimes you will have to prove your competence a little more persistently than you would like. There will be moments when you want to prove to yourself that you are not here by chance. But it is this school, passed at the beginning of your career, that later becomes an advantage: you learn to rely on facts, on results, on your own evidence, and not on status or authority by default.
And the main thing that I would like her to hear: you should not wait for the moment when all doubts disappear and you will have complete confidence that “this is mine.” Confidence does not come from action, but from a few bold steps. So if you have even a little curiosity, it is worth trying. The industry, which is being rebuilt literally before our eyes today, needs exactly such people – those who are ready to learn and act, despite doubts.
– What is the main message you would like to convey to the participants of the forum “Energy of Women’s Leadership” so that after your speech they will look at the role of women in Ukrainian energy in a new way?
– If I had to leave behind one thought, I would say this: stop talking about female leadership in energy as an exception that should be emphasized, and start talking about it as a norm that should be scaled up.
Therefore, my main message is to every woman in the room: do not wait for permission to take a seat at the table where decisions are made. The energy industry is being rebuilt so quickly today that it needs the best people, not people who fit the established image of a leader. And if you have the competence, endurance and willingness to act in conditions where there are no ready-made answers, that is all this industry needs from you.
Ukrainian energy today is changing not only technologically – its leadership culture is also changing. The war proved that in conditions of constant uncertainty, the industry does not need stereotypical images of managers, but professional, flexible and resilient people who are able to make decisions, be responsible for teams and see the future even in a crisis. Women are already an integral part of this process: they ensure the daily sustainability of the energy sector and at the same time shape its future. And the main thing now is to make their experience, competence and leadership become the norm for the industry that is building a new energy system of Ukraine.
