Inspiring Leaders programme

The brief

Downer is one of the New Zealand’s leading providers of civil infrastructure – and to reinforce its position, it needs to build capability within its workforce. As part of its ongoing involvement with Downer’s learning programme, The Learning Wave was tasked with preparing operational leaders amongst the workforce to take on wider responsibilities.

This meant working with a diverse group that included everyone from leading hands and supervisors to contract managers and divisional leaders at sites throughout the country.

The solution

The Learning Wave developed a three-pronged approach to develop employees’ leadership capability.  The first step was to prepare a suite of leadership tools that could be used practically on the job to support direct reports. These would become a benchmark across the business as a new leadership paradigm was established.

Secondly, The Learning Wave designed a programme that delivered a National Certificate in First Line Management. This focussed the learning into a workplace application while giving participants a recognised qualification.  

Finally, the team undertook to deliver the programme in an interactive learning environment where participants would be able to explore and develop capability around the leadership tools before applying their new skills in the workplace.

The result

The success of the programme has been measured against key Downer business performance measures. Its ongoing success is evaluated on the significant shifts gained in the managers’ ability to:

• Build business capacity

• Enable others to act
• Promote and support efficiency and effectiveness at all levels of contact
• Walk the talk
• Run the business as if it was their own
• Model the way
• Inspire a shared vision
• Challenge processes

Downer now has a critical mass of internal leaders who have developed a suite of vital people skills. Building an organisation that enhances the ‘soft’ skills of management has strengthened Downer’s ability to operate profitably in the hard world of engineering and infrastructure.

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