"A passion for learning systems"

Position: Senior Competency Development Consultant

As the instigator, manager and guru behind Pilko’s new EHS competency development program, Mary Morahan is passionate about her case-driven approach to teaching. “I would never lecture to people,” she says. “I would much rather give them tools and help them solve problems for themselves in a way that’s non-threatening. My real joy is ‘Holy Cow, they got it!’”

Mary knows how to apply the theoretical side of learning to the practical side of business with extraordinary results. Mary’s keen insights into how people learn, how to apply that theory to the workplace, and how to increase productivity while respecting individuals’ skills and knowledge have helped to revamp and revitalize training and development activities for clients worldwide. The program she is developing at Pilko includes process mapping; auditor training for EHS management systems; root cause analysis training; and EHS leadership competency evaluation and development.

“Our programs have almost no lecture,” Mary says. “They are practicums built on case studies, where people learn by doing. When you walk out of an auditor training class, for example, you’ve actually done an audit of a fictitious company or business unit that relates to your own company. And when you go through the various modules of an EHS leadership development class, everything you do relates to your own work experience.”

Mary’s love of teaching goes back to her first job teaching math to 7th and 8th graders, a job she took on three days’ notice. It soon became evident that teaching would not put her three children through college, so Mary went back to school herself: She taught school in the morning, studied for her MBA in Finance in the afternoon, and went to classes at night – all while raising three children.

Before she even finished graduate school, Mary was solving economic problems at Getty Trading and Transportation. When Getty became Texaco, Mary created the pipeline company’s first geographical information system and then moved on to crude-oil trading, a job made more intense by the first Persian Gulf War going on at the time.

In 1991, Texaco created a training department and tapped Mary to head it. “I looked around and saw how much potential there was to improve safety training,” she says. “There were times that a subject-matter expert stood in front of a class and read, which bored participants out of their minds. I knew there had to be a better way.” And she found it.

For the next ten years, Mary led Texaco’s EHS training and employee development efforts, first as training and development manager, and then as manager of all of Texaco’s domestic and international EHS learning projects. For the last six years of her career, she worked internationally to bring her hands-on, scenario-based methods to the field. “The tough sell was the mid-level managers and supervisors who were averse to trying something new,” she says. “The first time we ran our training program on an offshore platform in Angola, the manager didn’t even bother to show up. By the last day, he was on the phone to the other platforms saying ‘You gotta see this!’ The thing is, are you just putting together a procedure to cover your butt for the government, or do you actually want to change the way people do their jobs?”

Mary is an ardent advocate of the Pilko approach to transforming its clients’ approach to EHS governance– and she’s also our “secret weapon” in making sure that the systems we help develop work effectively.

When not helping clients run their businesses more profitably, Mary enjoys camping and hiking in the Colorado Rockies with her husband (they’ve been tracking ghost railroads since their kids learned to walk) and watching momma and baby elk amble past her window. The Morahan offspring include an electrical engineer daughter with patents in electronic medicine, another daughter who works for the US Developmental Bicycling Team (“the Lance Armstrong wannabes”), and a son who carries on the Morahan training tradition with Frontier Airlines.