Leadership Acceleration
The Engine Room supports organizations by designing and delivering tailored leadership training, coaching and experiential learning to embed leadership best practices as consistent daily habits in the workplace. We equip leaders at all levels – from the boardroom to the frontline – with the core leadership capabilities, tools and behaviours necessary to drive your priorities, culture and business results forward.
To create rapid and sustainable human performance, leadership and workforce development improvements, it’s essential to truly understand an individual or team’s critical improvement opportunities before prioritizing resources and efforts to generate the highest returns. The Engine Room works closely to focus on identified leadership and skill development gaps and the specific tools that support creating the desired culture and operational results. Thus, reducing training redundancy, duplication of effort and program costs while increasing focus, sustainability and results.
Program Design
The Engine Room’s approach to human performance and leadership development stands apart from typical “off-the-shelf” programs that lack customization and often yield minimal operational and fiscal impact. We emphasize evaluating needs, tailoring resources to align with those needs, and providing functional training to fill knowledge gaps, along with targeted coaching and experiential learning to address skill application gaps.
Based on the results of our needs evaluation, we selectively choose resources to target identified gaps using the most effective tools—training, coaching, or experiential learning. This process ensures accuracy, reliability, and sustainability in achieving the desired skill sets.
While many organizations strive to implement the 70-20-10 learning model, it is a core value for The Engine Room. We firmly believe this model is the most effective for adult development and for sustaining leadership behaviors.
The critical process steps for training and development initiatives includes:
- Evaluating the Current State – Operational Leadership and Human Performance Diagnostic.
The Engine Room’s leadership evaluation process provides a customized and targeted evaluation of how an organization, region, business unit, or individual functions with respect to all facets of operational leadership performance, including leadership strategy, culture, process and systems capability, communication and operational execution. The diagnostic pinpoints the current practices, skills and culture of the individuals and/or organization to design the most appropriate leadership development program for the situation. This ensures training is neither beyond the group’s capability to adopt nor too basic to be helpful. This phase also allows The Engine Room to align development programs with previous training initiatives within the organization.
- Verify Receptivity for Training, Coaching and Development
In order for anyone to absorb and benefit from training and development programs, they must be of a suitable frame of mind to take the materials on board. While training and development represent a significant investment for companies, failing to address issues that reduce receptivity is often a key reason for failure in development programs. Receptivity is verified through one-on-one dialogues and discussions with participants, managers, and leadership. This process ensures alignment, accountability, and clear communication of expectations before training and development begin.
- Identifying Timing and Organizational Focus to Apply the Training and Coaching
There is little value in providing training and coaching without an opportunity to apply the knowledge gained within a reasonable time frame. Knowledge retention levels from training and coaching programs drastically decrease if the theory is not applied within three weeks. It is critical that the organization identify the context in which it expects these skills to be applied, set expectations, and then hold people accountable for performance. The Engine Room believes that training and coaching are most effective when an organization clearly understands what it is trying to accomplish. An application and training strategy will reduce the risk of “training for the sake of training” to ensure efforts do not result in wasted time, effort and money.
- Delivering Tailored Training enhanced by Follow-up Coaching
The Engine Room’s leadership training courses are focused on the most impactful core leadership skill sets that support achieving operational objectives. Training is tailored to the targeted managerial levels and conducted in digestible modules that do not overwhelm participants and minimize disruption to ongoing operational activities. Each training session includes instruction, participation, case studies, application, and plans for each participant to put the theory into practice. Case studies are based on actual examples from relevant client organizations. Using a proven blended learning approach, leadership coaching is central to ensuring skills and tools are applied effectively on the front line. This emphasis on real-world application embeds behaviors, anchors competencies, and delivers measurable business outcomes.
- Cascading Alignment, Re-enforcement and Sustainment
All Engine Room projects leave the client’s organization with sustainable processes that deliver value long after the engagement has concluded. During the sustainment phase of an implementation, The Engine Room decreases participation with individuals or teams to provide client leaders and employees the opportunity to practice learned skills. Sustainment tools include individual human performance sustainment plans, cascading leadership alignment matrices, leadership activity quality audits, due diligence reports, and tying skills to organizational metrics and cascading key performance indicators.
Tools
We believe that by tailoring Implementation Tools to the specific needs of the organization and the root cause findings of the Operational Leadership and Human Performance Diagnostic, we provide razor focus to the specific areas of workforce development that require improvement and the specific skill development gaps that may be affecting them.
- Operational Leadership and Human Performance Diagnostic (Evaluation)
- Leadership Training
- Leadership Coaching
- Leadership Coaching Matrix
- Leadership Sustainment Plans
- Cascading Leadership Alignment Matrix
- Leadership Business Review
- Field Observation FOE (Focus of Effort)
- Leadership Activity Quality Audits
Working with you
At The Engine Room we value the culture, experience and resources our clients have developed and bring to the table. We understand that cost-effective human performance programs that create sustained results requires a close partnership with our clients to achieve those desired outcomes. The Engine Rooms human performance philosophy is grounded in the following client partner principles:
- We align to and fully leverage existing client development programs in every project.
- We don’t bring a one-size-fits-all human performance and development solution.
- We identify, assess and mitigate root causes of developmental opportunities.
- We take a surgical approach to program implementation and deliver tailored resources.
- We take a 70-20-10 blended learning approach to anchor desired behaviours.
