Overview
Although many businesses have excellent technical skills they have sometimes not adapted their behavioral skills to meet a changing world. This becomes particularly important if you want to move to new sectors such as nuclear supply chain because these sectors have very specific cultural expectations.
Change Management
For well established manufacturing businesses ‘change’ can be a real challenge. The employees have well established routines and it is human nature to be reluctant to make changes. Skills are required to lead the required change and the employees need to know their role in adapting positively to change.
We provide training and coaching on a range of skills for leaders that can be built up into a one or two day workshop and shorter workshops for the employees to help them review their own attitude to change.
- Understanding behaviours in transition
- Understanding the leader’s role in guiding transition behaviours
- Why do people respond in specific ways: Transactional Analysis, Meta Programs, Chimp Model.
- Kotter’s 8 step change process
Continuous Improvement Culture
Too frequently there have been attempts to introduce continuous improvement through the use of tools (either Lean Manufacturing or Six-Sigma) without an attempt to understand the existing culture and it’s drivers. Successful implementation of continuous improvement is something that needs to be internally driven, not something ‘done to the business’ by external consultants. The starting point is to identify what a good continuous improvement culture looks like and then understand the gap between existing behaviours and required behaviours. There are two separate workshops for this:
- Leader and manager roles in establishing continuous improvement: a one day workshop to explain what a Continuous Improvement culture looks like and what behaviours the leaders need to exhibit to support effective implementation
- Key Influencer’s Continuous Improvement Workshop: This is a joint workshop with key leaders, managers, supervisors and selected influential employees to agree what is trying to be achieves with Continuous Improvement, what the benefits will be and what will happen when manufacturing processes become more efficient.
Nuclear Supply Chain Culture 
This is a one day training session that explains what the key features and expectations are of the nuclear industry for those companies that will be selected to supply it. I covers aspects such as:
- Material control including Counterfeit, Fraudulent and Suspect Items (CFSI)
- Document control including final certification
- Manufacturing area cleanliness
- Material and consumable segregation
- Third party inspection and oversight
- Systematic processes
- Continuous improvement
- Behavioural Safety (Human Performance)
- Policy Deployment
Human Performance
This is the approach to safety and quality adopted by the nuclear industry (and by air traffic control) and is now becoming more widespread in other industries. There are three different training sessions associated for this, each with a specific target audience:
- Human Performance for Leaders
- Human Performance for Knowledge Workers such as designers, engineers and other professionals who work primarily with data
- Human Performance Fundamentals which is relevant to every employee, no matter what role they have.
Coaching 
Coaching is a skill that rapidly gives benefit to a business by engaging the workforce and increasing their capabilities. Many companies use mentoring, but few are really skilled at coaching which is a different skill. The training would need to be adapted to the specific trainees that were being targeted, depending on their current role and current natural coaching ability. An introduction to coaching can be done in one day, but to become a skilled practicing coach requires several days of training with periods of practice between each training day. The model we prefer to use is the GROW model and the method we prefer to utilise is ‘coaching trios’ as this makes it self driven by the trainees and quickly maximises the benefits.
Practical Problem Solving 
In many manufacturing organisations there is a culture of passing problems upwards and this leads to supervisors, managers and leaders all being overloaded. A systematic and simply-structured approach to problem solving overcomes this problem. Two types of training are available:
- Problem Solving for Leaders which explains why leaders, managers and supervisors tend to try and solve problems and identifies how people in these positions can change the culture. It also explains what the basic problem solving process is.
- Practical Problem Solving which is a hands on training day that helps people understand why their current approach to problems is not always the best and how they can learn to provide solutions for approval rather than problems for someone else to resolve.