Going Places

The Right Stuff

That Shell has turned to Elsenhans for this pivotal job is hardly surprising. She has been with the company for a quarter century, since earning an MBA at Harvard Business School in 1980. From the start, the company expected big things. “Lynn was brought into Shell as part of a program that was focused on recruiting people with MBAs, high academic credentials, and high talent packages,” says Steve Miller, a Rice Board of Trustees member and one of Elsenhans’s first supervisors at Shell. “We targeted folks who we thought had the tool kits to be successful.”

They were right about Elsenhans. In her tenure at the company, she has attained positions with steadily increasing authority and responsibility. After starting her career at the U.S. headquarters in Houston and then moving to the Deer Park refinery near Houston, Elsenhans has had assignments in virtually every aspect of the company’s business—from manufacturing and marketing to strategic planning—and in locations from Singapore to London. Most recently, she served as country chair—the Anglo–Dutch company’s top representative in America—and as president and CEO of Shell Oil Products U.S.

It’s an enviable career trajectory made even more remarkable by the fact that it occurred in an environment that has not always been encouraging to women. “When I first started, there weren’t many women here, and women’s credibility was very much questioned,” says Elsenhans. “In the roles that I had, there always was this feeling that I was being watched very closely and couldn’t make a mistake.”

Much has changed since the early 1980s, thanks at least in part to the success of women like Elsenhans. As she has risen in the corporate hierarchy, she has made a concerted effort to pave the way for women who followed, mentoring them and helping establish women’s networking opportunities within Shell. “Lynn has been a tremendous supporter of women,” says Jo Pease, Shell USA’s corporate chief ethics and compliance officer, who worked closely with Elsenhans in implementing an ethics and compliance program and the women’s employee network within the company. “She helped give women a true chance to show their talents, and she made sure that their contributions don’t get lost by people at senior levels.”

Clearly, Elsenhans’s contributions have been hard to miss, and she sees her new, more global role within Shell as yet another opportunity to contribute. It’s a position, she says, that has required a career’s worth of preparation. “I feel the kinds of jobs I’ve had have prepared me to do this. I’ve had international assignments, I’ve been a plant manager, I’ve been the head of refining in the United States, and I have run large businesses for Shell in both oil products and chemicals,” she says. “I feel I have the background to do this job.”