Jaluch Limited

Management Development with Colourwise

The Challenge

Mark Northey, Managing Director of Norco, a specialist in GRP/Composite mouldings, was becoming increasingly aware of the need to build the overall skill set of his Leadership team to ensure effective risk management with the ever increasing complexity of employment law. Although the team was well established there had been limited previous management development so there was a need to put foundations down for the team as a whole.

Additionally, Norco’s entire management were heavily involved in key business projects with tight deadlines so it was key to ensure any learning would keep time out of the business to a minimum but generate maximum learning.

The Solution

Jaluch overcame Norco’s availability concerns by providing a modular management development course, split into key technical and soft skills areas and delivered in intensive chunks of 3 hours every 2 weeks for a period of 3 months to ensure maximum exposure with minimum disruption and time for reflection between modules.

To ensure maximum learning all delegates were personality profiled in advance of the first contact day to ensure the trainer could adapt exercises to accommodate the learning and communication preferences of the group. Further to this, the first module ‘Colourwise’ which included feedback on the profiles, focused on self awareness and how personal style can impact on all other management activity. This generated a language of ‘personal style’ in the form of colour which the trainer carried through the entire programme.

Modules included not only fundamentals of management such as effective communication and key employment law impacting on managers but also practical issues such as handling discipline and other key employment relations subjects. All modules were tailored to ensure they focused on the most common issues encountered by the team in their day to day work and were heavily case study based to ensure practical understanding of key concepts.

Training materials were developed for diversified levels of training needs. Each individual module was support by its own materials and to ensure suitability, there was flexibility to amend courses during the course of the programme to ensure that any key issues arising out of the first modules could be referred to in later packs.

Jaluch provided a multi-skilled trainer, qualified to administer the personality profiling as well as with the relevant employment law background and practical experience to ensure consistency for the delegates throughout the programme.

The Results

Because the training was conducted in this way, the team benefitted from carrying questions from one session to the next and linking all of the different areas together to get a fuller picture of key employment areas they may encounter. Equally, the profiling aspect allowed the group to consider their personal approach relative to that of others in the team when tackling work related issues and the benefits of these different approaches.

Although Norco’s team were impressed with the training in itself they were also pleased with the return on investment they could see for the longer term.

Managers agree that they are now more in touch with their personality traits and recognise the need to adapt to others. This has certainly improved working relationships where some underlying tensions previously existed. Furthermore, knowing the strengths and preferences of individuals also means that it is possible to allocate the right jobs to the right staff keeping everyone motivated, which will certainly drive up productivity in the future.

The MD is now progressively and successfully handing over a larger proportion of key management responsibilities to the other people managers in the business.

Mark Northey, Managing Director at Norco said:

“It was a big thing for such a male company to go down this route but we’ve never had a situation where everyone involved was so actively and positively responding to staff training days later, I can honestly say that I have never known a training course create such a post event positive vibe. Everyone is talking in colours and is genuinely interested in self improvement and finding out about each other! A job very well executed. Thank you."