Our blogs normally cover events within our industry, or specific projects we’ve been involved with. This one is a bit different, our topic is about a big investment we’ve made in our most important asset, which is of course our people.
Our business has almost doubled in size over the past three years, and as we’ve grown, our management team has needed to grow in size and in effectiveness. This article explains how we’ve been doing this.
As a technically focused business in the heavy industrial sector, often working in hazardous area environments, we invest heavily in technical skills training to ensure we deliver the right quality and optimum safety. Like most organisations, the common promotion path is from technical roles into management roles.
Also like most organisations, we’ve been guilty in the past of throwing people into new management roles with an assumption that “they’re a really good tradesperson or supervisor, so they’ll make a really good manager”.
It's worked, but it could have worked better. Entec has invested in putting nine of its managers through the Active Management Programme (AMP) over the past twelve months with two distinct goals;
- Provide our managers with new skills and insights, and
- Form closer bonds between the managers to build a more effective management team.
AMP is different from other management training courses we’ve used in the past. The learning delivery style is designed to be concise, focused and – most importantly – able to be put into practice immediately, “while the paint is still wet”. In our view the greatest strength of AMP is the monthly co-lab session with all of the trainees, independently facilitated and held under a code of confidentiality. The participants can compare their own experiences and support each other as they implement their newly learned practices.
Of course, those co-lab sessions are also a forced opportunity each month for the management team to “down tools” and do some work on the business.
We’re so convinced that AMP is an excellent management training programme that we happily helped The Breakthrough Co put together a testimonial video, check it out on our videos page here. Any readers interested in finding out more should visit www.thebreakthrough.co.
To summarise, it’s a practical training programme delivered in bite-sized chunks over the course of a year, it can be immediately implemented within the business, and it strengthens the individual skills of the managers and forges a better management team, all at the same time! What’s not to like?