Jennifer Medcalf, REACH Group: Fulfilling a lifelong instinct to serve – in life, in work

By Stephen Whitfield, Senior Editor

Ask Jennifer Medcalf what drivers her, and the answer isn’t a job title or a business deal. It’s a word she comes back to again and again: service.

“I feel that our communities are only as good as what you put back into them,” said Ms Medcalf, President and Partner at The REACH Group, a Houston-based professional coaching firm serving the upstream oil and gas industry. “Community is not just where you live, it’s also where you work.”

It’s a philosophy she traces back to her mother at 90 still volunteers at  Red Cross after 70 years. And it has carried through a career defined less by climbing ladders than by the desire to show up – whether it’s in the Junior League, the Daughters of the American Revolution, her church’s rock gospel band or, for more than a decade, IADC chapters and committees. In June, that pattern of showing up earned her an IADC Exemplary Service Award, presented at the IADC World Drilling Conference in Estoril, Portugal. You will see her at many of the IADC conferences globally.

However, even with the award in hand, Ms Medcalf’s first instinct was to point the credit elsewhere: “There are a thousand people who deserve this as much as I do,” she recalled thinking when she was informed about the award. “I see a lot of people really active in IADC. I think it’s an organization that people want to be active in, and I saw it as an extremely complimentary honor for me.”

Her instinct to serve goes back further than her time in oil and gas, to where she started her career in public service. She describes her early work for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania running their Ben Franklin Partnership, a state technology-funding initiative as knocking on doors and telling people, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help you.”

From there, a series of moves – to Viriginia, then Texas, then into cellular telecommunications and Enron’s deregulation-era power business – put her in the midst of industries that were under transformation. Still, wherever she landed, the same instinct followed her: to understand the people in the industry, not just the ones at the top.

That showed up most clearly during her years working offshore telecommunications in the US Gulf in the mid- to late 2000s, where she spent long stretches immersed in the bayou communities that support that industry’s supply chain. “I have my white boots that the shrimpers all have,” she said. “I got to understand the true supply chain, what the requirements were, how it’s so integrated,” she said. That included understanding, for example, how regulations like the Jones Act shape the movement of vessels and cargo through US waters.

In the late 2012, she moved to TETRA Technologies, running the company’s sales, marketing and contracts decommissioning business in communities that were still reeling from the dual impacts of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Those efforts included working alongside divers and crane crews on damaged offshore infrastructure.

In 2014, she joined the REACH Group, a company that places its coaches on rigs, FPSOs and platforms to help organizations enhance their drilling performance, new team cultures, safety culture, leadership development and human performance, typically through months-long engagements.

Companies sometimes come to REACH with a goal, Ms Medcalf said but often they arrive with a problem – incidents on a rig, a contract on the line, a new project that needs a culture built for success. The work, as she describes it, is ultimately about people: “You have to listen to understand what the problem is, or what they perceived the problem to be,” she said. “I want people to go home. I want them to improve their skills, be safer and feel really good because they have a great culture to work under.”

Ms Medcalf oversees business development globally for REACH, supporting the company’s regional leaders in South America, the Middle East, Europe and Southeast Asia. She’s always working to help people achieve their goals. It’s a role that’s earned her a reputation as something of a connector across the industry. “I have no fear of walking into a conference I’ve never been to before,” she said. “And  when I leave, I make sure I know a whole lot of people.”

A widening circle of involvement

Ms Medcalf’s active involvement with IADC stretches back roughly 13 years, although she’d been aware of the organization long before that. Today, her involvement with IADC spans the Houston Chapter, the Human Resources Subcommittee, the Latin America Chapter, the North Sea Chapter and the program committees for two conferences – the HSE and Sustainability Europe and World Drilling.

She said IADC’s specific focus on drilling often helps give her a sharper lens on issues like local content requirements, which can ripple through the entire supply chain. “The drillers’ role in the supply chain is much larger, oftentimes, than what we give them credit for.”

Beyond committee work, Ms Medcalf has become one of the more visible advocates for redM, the human trafficking awareness initiative founded by NOV CTO and CMO David Reid and supported by IADC. She helped bring redM’s “Action Speaks” activity to IADC’s Latin America Chapter and is known for posting weekly photos, from global locales, supporting the organization and its cause.

“Human trafficking is a very scary topic for a lot of individuals, but I think David and his wife put together an organization that brought together a lot of people who knew how to have a conversation about it. You make it factual, not scary. You make it so people want to join, and then you build a solution around awareness,” she said.

Ms Medcalf does not view her IADC Exemplary Service Award as a capstone of any kind. Looking ahead, she would like to expand her involvement in IADC’s legislative fly-in program, something she already does regularly with the NOIA (National Ocean Industries Association), where Ms Medcalf serves on the Board of Directors.

“The fly-ins are so important. When programs and policies go into place, drillers are often some of the first ones to get hit and the last to have a seat at the table,” she said. “These fly-ins are all about telling our story.”