‘Hold course and adapt as you go’: An interview with Manon van Beek

Manon van Beek became CEO of TenneT, which operates high-voltage grids in the Netherlands and Germany and is a major developer of offshore grid infrastructure in the North Sea, in September 2018.

She stepped into the role just as electricity grids were moving from the background of Europe’s energy system toward center stage. The energy transition was gathering pace, putting new demands on infrastructure that had long operated largely out of public view. What followed was a period of accelerating electrification, geopolitical and energy-market shocks, and a growing recognition that the grid would be critical to Europe’s energy security and competitiveness.

During van Beek’s tenure, TenneT’s agenda expanded on an unprecedented scale, with investments in grid-related projects rising from roughly €2 billion a year to almost €15 billion today. The company embarked on a massive build-out of its onshore grids in the Netherlands and Germany while confronting increasingly acute grid congestion. At the same time, TenneT became a central player in efforts to turn the North Sea into a major source of European renewable power.

Van Beek’s second four-year term formally ended in August; she has remained CEO through the transition and will hand over to Frans Everts, the former president of Shell Netherlands, on November 1.

She recently spoke with Erik Mandersloot, a McKinsey partner in Amsterdam who advises CEOs and senior leadership teams on leading change during transformation, moving from a stable world into the unknown, and navigating uncertainty with resilience, adaptability, and clarity of purpose.

Erik Mandersloot: What made you decide to become the CEO of a government-owned organization?

Manon van Beek: I think at the time I wrote that “duty is calling.” That was my feeling, though I’m not sure I understood how central this role would become to Europe’s energy transition.

The grid plays a critical role. It is not simply technical infrastructure; it’s a platform for decarbonization, industrial renewal, and energy security. European interconnection depends on it, literally and figuratively. That connection has become more important, especially with the goal of turning the North Sea into the joint green powerhouse of Europe.

What I learned over the years is that greater energy independence ultimately strengthens resilience. It strengthens Europe’s competitiveness, but also our ability to keep energy affordable, even if it doesn’t always look that way day to day. In the end, I believe we are moving toward a more affordable energy system.

I was attracted by the scale of that responsibility and the opportunity to bring the expertise that I had on technology, transformation, and organizational change into a more public-purpose environment. So, it was quite a conscious choice to work on something that matters for the next generation.

Erik Mandersloot: How do you lead an enormously complex, interdependent system under such uncertainty?

Manon van Beek: When I started, I thought the biggest challenges would be technical: leading an asset-driven organization and scaling an investment agenda. Those things were certainly demanding. But the deeper challenge turned out to be managing all the interdependencies. Building the grid is not something you can do in isolation. Everything is interconnected, and progress depends on many different actors and decisions moving together.

If you look at the energy transition today—offshore wind, nuclear, grid congestion, energy security, the North Sea—it all goes together, and you are operating under continuous uncertainty. But if you turn all those strands into a ball of spaghetti, it becomes too complex and you get nowhere. You have to understand the interdependencies while still finding a way to move individual issues forward.

TenneT can’t deliver the energy transition alone. Our success depends on governments and regulators, suppliers and financial institutions, industry and local communities—and, of course, on the more than 10,000 people who work for TenneT. The challenge is getting all those actors sufficiently aligned to move forward.

TenneT had to play on several chessboards at once. At the European level, that meant cross-border interconnection and cooperation in the North Sea, where TenneT chairs the collaboration among offshore transmission system operators. That requires alignment on policy, regulation, and financing. At the same time, our role became increasingly local, as grid congestion began to affect households, small and medium-sized businesses, and communities directly.

Besides grid congestion, the issue that probably demanded the most of my personal energy was finding a sustainable funding solution for the growth of TenneT Germany. We initially pursued a full sale to the German state. When that didn’t happen, we had to find another route, ultimately bringing in private investors alongside the German state.

But it was never simply a question of financing or ownership. It was a strategic question about our public responsibility, the future of cross-border cooperation, the uncertainty for employees, and ultimately the future structure of the company.

The hardest part of being a leader is that you often don’t know what will happen, or even what should happen. You have to create the conditions for many different parties to act together, while their interests, their timelines, and the information they have are constantly changing.

It’s all about trade-offs

Erik Mandersloot: What were the toughest trade-offs you faced?

Manon van Beek: The trade-offs are part of the challenge I just described, because every dimension is legitimate. Society wants us to move faster, but not at the expense of safety or reliability. We need enormous investment, but we also need affordability and disciplined use of capital. And we need to build infrastructure faster, while communities rightly expect meaningful participation in decisions about what gets built and where.

That last point is important. Participation needs to happen earlier and more effectively and permitting needs to become faster. But you can’t simply skip those processes, because in the end that can make things take longer.

Grid congestion made these trade-offs very visible. For many years, TenneT operated largely behind the curtain. Now there are thousands of companies in the Netherlands waiting for a grid connection. That is not an operational detail. It affects whether companies can grow, whether homes and neighborhoods can be connected, and ultimately whether the Netherlands remains an attractive place to invest.

So, the answer is rarely to optimize one objective. You have to make the trade-offs explicit, decide which principles are nonnegotiable—reliability and safety, for example—and then find ways for speed, affordability, reliability, and social legitimacy to reinforce one another as much as possible.

Erik Mandersloot: What has been the impact of the war in Ukraine?

Manon van Beek: One thing I’m particularly proud of is that, within weeks of the start of the conflict, the European transmission system operators were able to connect Ukraine and Moldova to the continental European grid. It was an extraordinary example of what an interconnected European energy system can make possible.

More broadly, the war brought the question of energy security much closer to home. Europe experienced very directly the consequences of being dependent on external sources of energy. And we are seeing again today, with the disruptions in the Middle East, how events far beyond Europe can affect energy supply and prices here. It made resilience much more tangible, and reinforced the importance of building a more secure, interconnected, and increasingly homegrown energy system.

It also accelerated changes that were already underway. As gas prices rose sharply, households and businesses moved faster to reduce their dependence on gas by installing solar panels, heat pumps, batteries, and other technologies. In some places, that happened faster than TenneT and the regional grid operators could reinforce the grid. That was when grid congestion really started to become a visible societal issue. I sometimes called it a crisis in slow motion: Suddenly the constraints of the electricity system were being felt not just by industry, but also by households and local communities.

For me, the lesson was that we needed to respond to the immediate crisis without losing sight of the longer-term direction. Europe needs more cross-border grids, stronger interconnection, and greater cooperation around the North Sea. Resilience does not mean retreating into national systems; it requires countries to work together.

And I learned something about leadership in a crisis. People need honesty about what is uncertain, but they also need confidence about what will not change. Our purpose did not change. If anything, the need for a secure, interconnected, and more homegrown energy system became more urgent.

Embracing uncertainty

Erik Mandersloot: You’ve talked about leadership in ambiguity. What do you mean by that?

Manon van Beek: Leadership in ambiguity isn’t about pretending that uncertainty isn’t there. It’s about being very clear about your purpose, your principles, and the direction you want to take the company. The direction stays the same, while you adapt along the way.

That’s what I’ve said so often: Hold course and adapt as you go. That becomes even more important in an era of acceleration and AI. Expertise ages quickly, so curiosity and learning agility matter more. And as technology speeds up, I think trust, judgment, and meaning become more important, not less.

As a CEO, you’re really a chief resilience officer. You can model all the scenarios you want, but you can’t prepare for every one of them or put a mitigating measure in place in advance. But you can build resilience: in yourself, in your people, and in the company.

Erik Mandersloot: What does that look like in practice?

Manon van Beek: One advantage of being an infrastructure company is that you have to think decades ahead. That’s actually a gift.

Look at where we are today: the grids are full, there is congestion, and energy prices are high. The natural reaction can be, “See, it isn’t working, we need to pause or change course.” I would argue the opposite. The shocks we have experienced, from the war in Ukraine to what we are seeing in the Middle East, have reinforced how important it is for Europe to build a more resilient and less dependent energy system.

What helps is to set a point on the horizon, as a person and as a company, that sits well beyond the immediate crisis. For us, that is ultimately a climate-neutral energy system around 2045 to 2050—one that is also more secure and less dependent.

Then you hold course toward that point and adapt to what happens along the way. Choices that move you in that direction, you embrace. Those that don’t, you deprioritize. Sometimes you have to take a side path, but you cannot lose sight of where you are ultimately trying to go. For me, resilience is also a mindset. Sometimes you have to slow down in order to accelerate later, or bend for a while. But you don’t lose sight of where you ultimately want to go.

Erik Mandersloot: How did you translate that approach to your leadership team?

Manon van Beek: I came to realize that ambiguity wasn’t a temporary disruption; it had become part of our operating environment. I wanted our leaders to stop waiting for uncertainty to disappear before acting. Leadership means starting to move without pretending you have every answer.

That can be challenging in a company with a lot of engineers. We tend to think the switch is either on or off: something is certain or it isn’t. But both certainty and uncertainty can exist at the same time. You can be very clear about your purpose and your principles, while remaining uncertain about the path you will take to get there.

We tried to make that explicit. We focused on our purpose and leadership principles—courage, connection, and ownership. We distinguished between decisions that were reversible and those that were not and brought difficult trade-offs into the open. And rather than asking only “What decision do I need?” we encouraged leaders to ask, “What clarity can I create for others?”

That also means not closing everything down from the top. Leaders need to give people enough clarity to move, while giving them enough space to use their judgment, take responsibility, and make an impact. No leader should have to carry all that ambiguity alone.

Erik Mandersloot: What did that mean for how you communicated?

Manon van Beek: I learned that you have to take people along not only in the decisions, but also in the considerations and principles behind them. People usually see the outcome. If they don’t understand how you got there, decisions can appear inconsistent.

The financing of TenneT Germany was a good example. At one point we were pursuing a full sale but ultimately we arrived at a different solution, involving private investors and the German state. If you only saw those outcomes, you might ask: How is that consistent? But financing was always a means to an end. The objective was to find a sustainable way to deliver an enormous investment agenda and move the energy transition forward. There could be different routes to that destination.

Looking back, I could have communicated that more. There were many things I couldn’t discuss while negotiations were underway, but I could have said more about the considerations and the higher purpose. As a leader, you shouldn’t communicate only the decision. You can say: This was complicated; these were the factors we considered; this is what we ultimately gave the most weight.

That matters because your people are living with uncertainty too. You show that you have the courage to correct course tomorrow if the facts change.

And communication in uncertainty is not only internal. You have to keep listening, explaining, and building trust with governments, regulators, customers, communities, and other stakeholders. The instinct in uncertain times can be to close the doors. I think you have to do the opposite.

‘The balcony and the dance floor’

Erik Mandersloot: Looking back, was there a moment of truth in your journey as CEO?

Manon van Beek: A moment of truth is probably when there is no risk-free option left and your values become visible through the choices you make. At TenneT, grid congestion became one of those moments for me, because it forced us to confront the societal consequences of scarcity directly.

I remember having to explain in my own hometown, Den Bosch, what congestion actually meant. Companies were waiting for connections. Housing plans were being delayed. Communities were frustrated, and ambitions for economic growth were coming under pressure. You have to face that rather than hide from it.

But you also have to keep returning to the purpose. Congestion is a serious problem, but in another sense it reflects how quickly demand for electricity is growing. So, the question becomes: Have we done everything we can? Can we innovate more, use the grid differently, introduce new kinds of contracts? You have to keep challenging the organization and yourself, while also being honest about what you can’t solve immediately. And we also have to be honest: Congestion, I’m afraid, is going to be with us for the next decade.

You have to acknowledge the reality that congestion is a crisis in slow motion. And then you have to be very clear: What can we do? You have to keep challenging the organization, but also yourself.

I learned that resilience is not the same as staying strong or appearing strong. It also means acknowledging doubt. Will this work? Is it enough? Can we deliver what we promised? And it means asking for help. I have probably never been more vocal than in the past year in saying we can’t do this alone. For me, that willingness to acknowledge uncertainty while continuing to act is also part of leadership.

Erik Mandersloot: You have said that the CEO is responsible for both the big things and the small things. What does that mean in practice?

Manon van Beek: I try to ask myself: What is it that only the CEO can do? I don’t always succeed, but it’s a compass that keeps me focused.

The big things are setting the purpose and direction of the company. For example, what should the grid look like in 2045 or 2050? What are our principles around leadership, capital, culture, and our license to operate? How do we respond to grid scarcity and its consequences for the economy? Those are questions that ultimately have to sit with the CEO.

But then there are the small things, which in the end can be very big too. I make site visits and safety walks several times a month. If an employee writes to tell me that one of our policies isn’t working in practice, I might go and see for myself. If the mayor of a small city writes to me about an issue, I will often go and listen. Those interactions are not a soft extra. They tell you how the organization is really working and what matters to people.

I sometimes think of it as the balcony and the dance floor. You need to be on the balcony, seeing the bigger picture and making the connections that only you can make. But you also need to be on the dance floor, listening, engaging, and feeling what is happening. If you aren’t deliberate about both, you can spend all day doing work that other people could do and miss the things that only you can do.

So the small things and the big things are connected. Those individual conversations build trust and credibility, but they also give you insights that shape the larger decisions. Over time, what you learn on the dance floor helps you lead better from the balcony.

Erik Mandersloot: What comes next for you?

Manon van Beek: My first priority has been to support a strong transition at TenneT. After such an intense period, I don’t want to rush into defining the next thing; I want to give myself some space to reflect. But I know I want to keep working on big transformations that include a societal purpose. That has always given me energy. I don’t know exactly what form that will take yet—and I’m actually quite comfortable with that.