19.12.2025
“Only you are capable of doing everything you can with what you have, where you are. Everyone else is incapable of this. I wish you success in this,” Olga Babii, Advisor to the Head of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine and NEURC member (2019-2024), addressed the participants of the Energy Club forum “THE ENERGY OF WOMEN’S LEADERSHIP: Women Holding Ukraine’s Energy Frontline.”
On December 10 in Kyiv, the event dedicated to the role of women in ensuring the country’s energy resilience during the full-scale war gathered heads of energy companies, representatives of state institutions, experts, business leaders, and entrepreneurs working daily in an industry critical to the state.
The forum became a platform for an honest conversation about leadership under pressure, crisis management, balancing roles, internal resources, personal responsibility, and the power of female agency in the energy sector — a frontline no less important than the military one.
The first panel, “Facing the Challenge: Leadership on Fire. Crisis Management and Operational Resilience,” began with an emotional, candid, and incredibly honest conversation about what it means to be a female leader in energy during wartime. It covered how decisions are made when there are only minutes to spare, how to bear responsibility when the country is in darkness, and how not to lose oneself between work, war, and daily life.
Olga Babii’s speech was one of the frankest and strongest at the forum.
She started with a simple but very telling observation: despite power outages and blackouts, women remain organized, collected, and professional. And this ability to combine many roles simultaneously is their unique strength.
“Women are that part of society that can do many conscious and unconscious things, but they always remain women. They always worry about children, family, and themselves. And it seems to me that no man can beat a woman in any competition who, for example, got up at six, made soup for lunch, made sandwiches for her child for school, made tea, packed a backpack, wrote lists for everyone for the day, got herself in order, and left the house at 8:30. She has already lived a small life. On the way to work in traffic jams, she distributed tasks to everyone, checked the mail, arrived, and started working at 9:00. We should be proud that we can do this. Men often accuse us that we should only be beautiful, but not multifunctional, doing only one thing. Why can’t we do what we like and everything else? My first piece of advice: do what you like, and do everything you want, because therein lies your superpower,” she said.
Ms. Olga recalled the moment that defined the tone of the war in the energy sector: February 25, 2022, 11:00 AM — the first wartime resolutions of the NEURC, adopted effectively in a shelter. “We voted facts, not emotions,” she said. And this formula became the basis for the entire industry’s work.
Under the pressure of an emergency, according to the speaker, chaos in consciousness disappears — only cold analysis of risks and decisions remains: “When we make decisions, we always face a choice. Personally, since the beginning of the full-scale war, I realized that my brain starts working in emergency conditions not chaotically, but systematically. It forms risks, and certainty becomes real. You don’t have time for emotions, for some disputes; you work and don’t have time to pull yourself together. Of course, certain managerial elements, like speaking calmly and acting measuredly, must be used. But the key moment is that we don’t have time for decision-making, and we need to be able to gather only real facts, not everything that is brought to us. And this is the second difficult task.”
In her opinion, women in management have an innate ability to break down the big into small elements — and build a strategy from these small details.
The introduction of the first electricity outage schedules in 2022 became a personal challenge for Ms. Olga: simultaneously seeing both the heroic work of energy workers and the dishonesty of individual structural units of companies regarding the publication of schedules. “In the eyes of the consumer, the company is a single whole. And the responsibility is shared,” she emphasized.
Leadership is responsibility for the result, the speaker emphasized. But it is also the ability to punish and reward. She speaks openly about this because that is how the business environment works, and it is in this ability to balance between softness and firmness that the strength of a female executive lies.
“Leadership has its limit. Leadership can be with a plus sign or a minus sign. Because there is such a simple formula that power is the ability and capacity to reward and punish,” noted Olga Babii. “And the truth of female leadership lies in the fact that one must both punish and reward, otherwise you won’t be able to be a high-level manager and achieve something greater. No one will feel your strength. And for a woman to play on the men’s field only by rewarding is to lose. Because men live in other paradigms. They believe that power is a story where they punish a lot and reward little. And our female leadership, our energy, can manifest in the fact that we can balance on the edge, knowing exactly where to reward and where to punish. And this must be learned. This is exactly how we raise children. But how to practice on people? Go to a position, take responsibility, work with people. This is constantly raising the bar for yourself and taking responsibility because leadership is not taught at university; it is not in academic programs. It must be learned, felt, and desired.”
But women must understand that playing on the men’s field must be done only professionally, constantly proving the ability to match the profession. A woman who takes responsibility instantly becomes a competitor. Therefore, it is important:
to be noticeably professional,
to always have “+10 arguments in your pocket,”
to rely only on facts and analytics,
to develop continuously.
Therefore, an important component is to study the profession, be an expert, rely not on emotions but on data, facts, processes, and circumstances. “You need to read a lot of analytics, prepare. It’s a bit exhausting, but it’s interesting. It is self-development. I once decided for myself that studying EU directives is self-development. Of course, it’s a story where there will be no identical processes; they will be different. The main thing is to react calmly to this. Very calmly. It arrived – we solve it. It arrived again – we solve it,” shared Ms. Olga from her own experience.
“A female leader must keep the focus on herself and her goals, not allowing herself to be dragged into side games. Education, development, professional resilience — this is the foundation that protects in a crisis,” emphasized the Advisor to the Head of the NSDC. “Always keep the focus on your strategy. No matter what you are told, who you should be today — beautiful, smart, performing some other task. You can spend an hour on what you were assigned, but all your other time should be focused on your own strategy. Because the competitive field with men can often be such that they start to corner you. But don’t get cornered, smile, and implement your strategy. The basic strategy of female leadership is education and development. Yes, we can be beautiful, we can invest in beauty, but no one canceled intellect and soft power. And you can only win this way. You cannot win in any other way.”
Ms. Olga openly shared some female secrets: sometimes male managers react only to an emotional trigger. Therefore, a slight raising of the voice or a tactical conflict can become a tool of influence — ecologically, of course, and without “special effects.”
The speaker emphasized: the greatest strength of a woman is in her multifaceted nature. The more facets, the stronger the energy: “It is important for a leader to remain a woman who realizes herself in all her manifestations — mother, wife, daughter, friend, manager, a person who studies culture. That is, the profession is important, but we ourselves are the most important. There are moments when we have to perceive anything with a smile, with understanding, because only we are capable of this.”
Today, a huge field of opportunities is open for women in energy: engineering, design, management, commerce, markets, integration, regulatory policy. “There are no limits to perfection,” noted Ms. Olga.
The moderator of the first panel, Yaryna Skorokhod — Co-chair of the Energy Committee of the European Business Association — noted how important honest dialogue is. After all, many topics, especially those voiced at the end, are rarely discussed with men and in professional circles. Such a space allows women to exchange experiences that usually remain “behind the scenes.” “This is about prioritizing oneself, about what we do with our lives. The war taught us to distribute limited resources among very many spheres,” she said.
