Engineering Leadership

Engaged people sit right at the heart of your organisation; and centrally on our Maintenance Efficiency Map™. Any lasting performance improvement will only come from your teams being more engaged in the business drivers and the future business success.  Good leadership training can provide the catalyst to effective change, through stimulating their engagement.

How is our approach different?

Engineers are a bit ‘unique’ and engineering itself requires a certain style of leadership.  If you asked me that 20 years ago, I would have said not true, but experience has taught me that we Engineers are a different breed.

Engineering is still populated by a mainly male demographic (sadly), men are more often emotionally wired to ‘fix’ things; also, people who are attracted to engineering are, by nature, logical analytical thinkers who also like fixing things.  In short, the vast majority of the engineering population are high on technical skills and lower on emotional intelligence.  That is compounded by the fact that today’s engineering manager was yesterday’s top engineer…. promoted on technical merit into a post requiring good emotional intelligence, often with only limited management training.

Our leadership workshops recognise this and work at a level that gives sound basic management tools for your teams to use. Also the workshops consider the business operating model and the interrelated elements of efficient engineering management.  Normally in leadership training this doesn’t have as much weight, but we have found with Engineers it carries disproportionate weight.  Engineers (generally) like tried and tested routine and approaches; they trust what they know and are in many ways cautious people.  A Plan-led business is proactive and progressive; a significant departure from the previous reactive model; behaviours required are very different; what was ‘good’ yesterday, is ‘bad’ today. Bringing all this together, we have the Professional Engineering Leader, it is this that differentiates our approach.

“I have been exceptionally impressed with both the approach and the outputs from the management development we undertook recently. Howard brought to us leadership in the subject and helped us explore it with him.  I particularly liked the fact he listened to us and blended a course specifically for us, that we trialled before it went live. His experience in both engineering and subject meant he completely understood our needs. It is sometimes hard to measure ROI on this sort of training, but the before and after ‘feel’ is so very different, I am certain that my management team are equipped and confident to take us forward. Great work Howard, many thanks”

Colin Dobson, Engineering Director, Greater Anglia

Read our case study: Greater Anglia - Engineering Leadership Development

Insights to how to build the right approach: 4 easy secrets to build the right culture for plan-led efficiency

Programme development

We work with you, our client (typically the Learning and Development Team) to build a leadership development programme that fits your needs.  This programme is delivered jointly by us and internal client training teams; thus using our expertise area whilst controlling costs and keeping ownership with your organisation.  We ‘pick and mix’ from our Management Excellence Pathway™, building a collaborative and shared programme that covers the most important elements of development needed such as:

Core skills | Investigation | Disciplinary management | Coaching and mentoring | Plan-led approach | Asset management data accuracy