A sassy slogan is embroidered on the cushion of Kathy Sendall’s chair in the Petro-Canada executive suite: “It’s Good to be Queen.”

OK, how about it? Can she become Queen? Or will she always be a lady in waiting?

Petro-Canada photo
From the Arctic to the Atlantic, Petro-Canada’s Kathy Sendall has risen to the top in the highly competitive Canadian oilpatch

What are Sendall’s chances of becoming the first female CEO to elbow her way into Viagra Village, the testosterone-drenched cabal of alpha males who run the Canadian energy majors, their way or the highway?

We’ll leave the oddsmaking to Vegas. But before Petro-Canada promoted her to senior vice-president, Western Canada, earlier this year, Sendall spent two decades demonstrating her upstream competence.

A former company VP for engineering and technology, she always felt more comfortable getting mud beneath her nails than staring into a computer screen.

Almost always the lone senior female in the field, “right where the money is made,” she has stared down recalcitrant rig bosses and neanderthal paper-pushers alike. She demonstrated her merit on assignments from the Arctic pilot project to Hibernia.

You’ve gotta believe she could handle any job,
including the Big One.Ambition? Sure, she’s got that, too.

It’s subtle, it’s understated . . . but it’s there.

“It would be fun to run a company, to take everything you’ve learned and put it all together,” she admitted,
hastening to insist that Petro-Can chief Ron Brenneman is doing a crackerjack job.

But no, Sendall confessed, she’s not marching along to some 10-year action plan, like those encouraged by time-management consultants.

She insists her corporate rise wasn’t pre-plotted on a flow chart. More like a series of happy accidents. But it seems clear she was flagged early on as a highly-promotable woman.

“Most of my decisions have been by default. Because I couldn’t think of a good enough reason NOT to do something,” she laughed.

An engineering grad from Queen’s, she was neither recruited out of school nor ever pictured herself climbing ladders in the energy biz.

But after joining Petro-Can in 1978, Sendall served as a process engineer on the ill-fated Arctic pilot project, a scheme to transport liquefied natural gas from the high Arctic via tankers.

When the project ran aground, Sendall jumped to NOVA, where she landed another plum. The week before she reported, the Princess compressor station blew up. Her first assignment: work on the rebuild.

She was subsequently lured back to Petro-Canada by an offer to oversee offshore reservoir engineering for the company’s 20-per-cent interest in the Hibernia project, off Newfoundland.

Ultimately returning to the West, she later became
operations superintendent for Alberta, a post she regards as perhaps the most rewarding of all.

Nevertheless, Sendall had to metaphorically duke it out with every self-proclaimed Big Dawg who felt threatened by her competence and gender. To her credit – and maybe theirs, too – most were eating out of her hand by the time an assignment wound down.

“They’d never had a female superintendent before. I had never run a gas plant before. In time, we developed mutual respect. I think when you have a real passion to learn, people respect that,” she said.

Nor did it take her long to clue in to a universal secret we males have desperately tried to keep under our caps:

“Lots of times, some men pretend they know what’s going on when they don’t necessarily know,” Sendall said.

“I never did that. When I didn’t know, I asked. I worked with a superbly competent field staff and they seemed thrilled to explain all the bits and pieces,” she said.

Her assignments were never predictable. But one of the toughest happened along when she followed a two-year detour to the downstream side, and found herself in charge of wholesale operations in Alberta, as well as rural retail.

It was a time of sagging bottom lines. Sendall never got comfortable with “re-allocating resources,” as the euphemism goes, but she did make grim personnel decisions and learned to live with the consequences.

Subsequently, she led a year-long strategic overhaul of ICG (now Superior) Propane, then a Petro-Can subsidiary.

A rounded resumé, to say the least.

And Sendall doesn’t play down the resistance and male resentment encountered on the learning curve she ascended to the 28th floor in Petro-Canada’s skyscraper.

But she also credits dozens of men, including company president Norm McIntyre, for years of unqualified support.
Now that Sendall has joined the Big Dawgs, she’s still a lady in waiting.

But she might not have to wait much longer.