A reflection by Paul van Gelder, CEO of HES International
Halfway through the year is a good moment to pause. Not to slow down, but to look up from the daily operations for a moment and ask: Are we still moving in the right direction, together?
That question was very much on my mind at the end of June, when our leadership team from across all our terminals came together in Noordwijk (the Netherlands) for our Leadership Team Event. It felt like a natural follow-up to the conversation we had earlier this year, when we looked back on 2025 and ahead to 2026. Back then, I talked about direction. This time, I want to talk about the people who have to make that direction real: Our leaders.
Closing the distance
HES is not one building with one hallway where you bump into each other. We are seven terminals in four countries; where cross-terminal colleagues rarely share the same room. That makes physical distance one of our biggest leadership challenges and exactly why a moment like the Leadership Team Event matters so much.
When our terminal managers and executive committee members sit down together, something happens that a video call or a policy document can never quite replicate. People exchange the small, practical wisdom of running a terminal; the things that don't make it into a strategy deck but make all the difference on the ground. They see that the challenges they face in Rotterdam are not so different from the ones a colleague faces in Wilhelmshaven or Gdynia. That recognition builds trust, and trust is what allows us to move as ONE HES rather than as separate sites doing their own thing.
We deliberately built this event around more than status updates and spreadsheets. We invited Ben Tiggelaar to speak with us about behaviour and leadership. I have long admired how he manages to make leadership concrete; not abstract theory, but small, repeatable behaviours that shape how a team performs under pressure.
What struck me most was his reminder that culture is not something you announce; it is something you demonstrate, every day, in the smallest decisions. As a leadership team, we can write down our values as often as we like; what people remember is how we behaved in the moment that mattered. That is a mirror I needed, and I suspect many of us did.
Our strategy, Progress 2030, still stands firmly on three horizons: delivering on excellence, growing a diversified portfolio, and developing a sustainable operating model. Those horizons haven't changed. What can and should change is the pace and priority we give to specific initiatives when circumstances shift. Where I see we need to course-correct, I would rather say so now, in June, than discover it in a December review when the runway to act is gone.
What leadership requires
We have made real changes over the past years, and I am proud of how our organisation has professionalised. Every member of our executive committee and every terminal manager has now been in their role for at least a year. That matters, because it means we can stop asking people to "settle in" and start asking them to lead with full ownership.
From my executive committee, I expect strategic clarity: the ability to translate Progress 2030 into decisions that are consistent across our terminals, even when local circumstances differ. From our terminal managers, I expect operational courage: The confidence to make the calls that keep their sites safe, efficient, and future-ready, and the honesty to flag early when something isn't working.
The central theme for management remains: Invest in our people. Skills and capabilities that got us here will not automatically get us to 2030. If we want to grow a diversified portfolio and build a sustainable operating model, we need people who keep growing with it.
Success in 2026 is when we achieve our main strategic targets in all areas. But, when I need to be more specific, success is meeting our safety targets, ending above budget with our financial performance and delivering on the strategy with at least two FID's of the projects in the business development pipeline (CMH project @HBTA, TP60 @HBTT, Marcegaglia @HES Fos, etc.). For our people, success is improved cooperation as part of ONE HES resulting in a strong culture.
If I take one thing from our Leadership Team Event, it's this: leadership is not a title, it's a series of small, visible choices. I don't need to be the loudest voice in the room to lead well. I need to be consistent in the behaviour I show, especially when no one is explicitly watching for it. That's a standard I want to hold myself to for the rest of this year, and one I hope our leaders across HES will hold each other too as well.
We didn't gather in Noordwijk just to update each other. We gathered to remind ourselves that ONE HES is not just a slogan.