17.12.2025
On December 10, the Energy Club forum “THE ENERGY OF WOMEN’S LEADERSHIP: Women Holding Ukraine’s Energy Frontline” took place in Kyiv. The focus was on the unique experience of female leaders in the Ukrainian energy sector who, amidst a full-scale war, take responsibility for teams, business processes, and the industry’s resilience.
In the forum’s first panel discussion — “Facing the Challenge: Leadership on Fire. Crisis Management and Operational Resilience” — Kateryna Litvinko, Commercial Director of Phoenix Contact LLC, shared her experience. Her speech was not about management strategies in the classical sense, but about internal support, human endurance, and daily work with stress. “I will speak not so much about leadership strategies, but about something more personal,” she outlined immediately.
Kateryna admitted that she became the head of the company unexpectedly — as often happens in wartime realities. Until last December, she lived the relatively quiet life of a marketer, until the company’s director, Andrii Maksymets, joined the ranks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Then the management offered her the position of Director of Sales and Marketing — effectively, Commercial Director. The speaker noted: “It was unexpected for me and everyone around. But there was no time for reflection or despair — I needed to calm the team and the clients.”
Speaking about her own experience of living through stress, Kateryna formulated several rules for herself that she constantly relies on and that help her remain resilient.
She recalled the well-known principle from airplane instructions: take care of yourself first, and then others. Caring for one’s own emotional and physical state is not a manifestation of selfishness, but a rational necessity. This principle has a deep personal background for her. Her husband currently serves in a Civil-Military Cooperation unit of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, working with the wounded, the fallen, and the missing. The most difficult audience is the relatives of the missing, who live in a constant gap between hope and its loss. The first thing the military is taught in this work is to protect themselves, not to let all the pain pass through them, so as not to burn out and be able to help further. “I try to act the same way: listen, support, help, but not destroy my own emotional resource,” emphasized Kateryna Litvinko.
The second important principle is to stop constantly “living through” the news if it is impossible to influence it. Kateryna cited the example of a trip with the team to the Carpathians, when during another massive shelling, a colleague monitored messages all night long. “If you are safe now and can’t change anything, constant reading of the news only winds you up and exhausts you. We will return to reality anyway, but when there is an opportunity to save yourself — it is worth doing so,” advises Kateryna.
The third component is caring for the body. Sleep, rest, the opportunity to “reboot” when circumstances allow. Even simple daily rituals — morning exercises, breakfast, a familiar routine — become islands of stability in an unstable world: “This reminds me: I am alive, I am okay, and right now everything is as good as it can be.” Kateryna named photos of her grandson, sent by her daughter every morning, as her personal anti-stress. In difficult moments, a few seconds looking at these photos help restore internal balance and move on.
Summarizing, the speaker emphasized: there is nothing revolutionary or new in her words, but these simple things often need reminding: “If you don’t save yourself — you will let down the team, your family, and many people around. Therefore, please, take care of yourselves. Because a lot depends on us.”
