A major power outage throws the island into darkness and just like his foot soldiers, Peter Williams springs into action.
As managing director of the Barbados Light & Power Company (BL&P), this seemingly quiet dynamo is on top of his game, effectively managing his operation to ensure that 120 000 customers get the service and attention they expect, and 500 employees get the working environment and conditions conducive to its delivery.
“I am an engineer first,” Williams told the Sunday Sun in a candid interview in his Bay Street, St Michael office. He also wears two hats – one as managing director of the utility company and the other as managing director of the holding company.
Advertisements have gone out for a replacement for the first position, and soon Williams will be solely in charge of the holding company, a responsibilty with which he says he is comfortable after managing the utility company for the past four years.
He recalls starting there “by chance rather than by design” and tells the story of being at the airport with his parents Cecil and Dorothy Williams, heading back to England to continue engineering studies, when there was a chance meeting with then manager of the Barbados Light & Company John Nelson.
Hearing that the young Williams was studying engineering, Nelson encouraged him to apply to the company when he had completed his studies. Williams did and apart from a brief period when he resigned to further studies in Canada, has been with BL&P ever since. That was some 30 years ago.
“It is nice to have a job you enjoy,” he said, flashing the trademark Williams smile which “shapes the way I am”.
“I have always been an optimist. When I got married, my brother was my best man and he said that my wife was marrying a smile. It is not just something that I put on, it is something that I genuinely feel and I find it hard not to smile unless it is obviously very tragic or difficult circumstances, and it helps me to remain positive and optimistic.”
The father of two daughters – Deborah, 27, and Linda, 24 – and husband of “one devoted wife”, Jennifer, to whom he has been married for 29 years, Williams remains very much a family man even after the “chickens have flown the coop”.
Now that the children have gone, he is enjoying spending time with his wife. “My wife reads and I do crossword puzzles.”
Intimate conversation across the dinner table or watching a favourite television show as the two savour a simple bowl of soup is their way of connecting and enjoying time together.
To many, Williams appears unflappable and he admits “very little annoys me” though lateness does. “I like to be punctual.”
He readily confesses his “stubbornness”, though, explaining: “I am very stubborn. Once I have a plan in mind or set my mind on something, it is very difficult to move me. My view is I am determined and committed.
“There are things in the society that can annoy you. There are people who are always saying ‘the youth of today’ . . . but I believe your society is really what you make it. You have to work with young people to show them the beauty of things and not let them get caught in bad habits.”
Williams points to his own team at BL&P and credits the training programmes with helping to develop better people.
“I work with a great team here but where we have had challenges and difficulties, you talk through them and even situations where customers may feel unfairly treated, we do a lot of training and I have certainly taken some of that into my own life.
“We have certainly over the years done a lot of customer training for our staff, and not just staff in the customer service area but throughout the company, so that they understand what it is to be customer-focused; what it is to deliver service.”
He confesses to personally being imbued with the lessons learnt, and is quick to counsel his staff: “People may treat you in a certain way or maybe you are genuinely irritated or upset, but certainly it is part of your responsibility to listen. Don’t start to argue and react.”
By his own admission, Williams’ outlook on life has been influenced by his parents “to a tremendous extent”.
“I think their values in what it meant to be a Barbadian – my family has come from a broad spectrum literally of society; my ancestry goes back from Indian heritage, African heritage, European heritage – [helped me] to understand that it’s not your complexion that makes you who you are and to understand that your respect for people is not because of their station in life . . . .
A lot of those things came from my parents.”
Williams comes from a line of distinguished Barbadians, with uncles former Chief Justice Sir Denys Williams, the late Justice of Appeal Colin Williams, former Harrison College headmaster Albert Williams, and former Queen Elizabeth Hospital director James Williams.
Perhaps his quiet demeanour and aura of always being at peace with himself derives from the musical influence in his life. Music and a round of golf elevated him to another plane of satisfaction.
The music goes back to his childhood, coming from his father’s influence. While studying in Canada, he joined his children in learning to play the violin. No wonder he later teamed up with a group of friends to start Suzuki Music in Barbados, teaching young children to play the instrument. Now he claims this and his marriage among the highlights of his life.
Also ranking highly on this list is his professional life. As he describes it: “Having reached the position of managing director and being trusted to take on that role for a company that I think serves all of Barbados and does so very well; and the team that we built, to me it is a real honour to serve in this position.”
Did he ever expect to be in this position?
“Not necessarily, because I expected to be here but I always said that that was my goal, and so when I left to study in 1998, I left as a senior member of the company but I did it because I felt if I did stay, I did not feel I would be well equipped to lead the company and if I wanted to be in the position I am in now, then I wanted to make sure that I was able to fulfill the demands of the position.”