Tailored leadership training with Holyoake by Price (NZ)
“These skills are ones that young and emerging leaders don’t naturally have in their armouries.” – Kurt Monkley
“The EMA came in and customised the training to exactly what we were looking for and where we found the biggest holes in what we were doing in our business.”
EMA Learning has partnered with Auckland-based multinational air management company Holyoake by Price (NZ) Ltd to tailor a course that produces effective leaders while teaming leaners with a skilled facilitator who can communicate effectively to produce results.
Overview
Auckland-based multinational heating, ventilation, and air conditioning specialist Holyoake by Price (NZ) Ltd is committed to developing the capability of its managers and shift team leaders.
When it came to finding a training partner, past experience led it to the EMA’s Learning team and its popular facilitator Ash Dixon.
Holyoake by Price (NZ) Factory Manager Kurt Monkley arrived at the company in 2022 and was tasked with bolstering the company’s leadership teams.
“We have a predominantly older crew, so we needed to bring the younger guys along,” says Monkley.
“Those experienced guys are not going to be around forever, so we identified some younger team members with leadership potential.”
Monkley had done the EMA’s Ultimate Team Leader course in 2022, which was facilitated by Dixon, and he felt that it would be a good idea for the company’s emerging leaders to do it.
However, Monkley says there were some topics that he really wanted to hone in on, so he connected with EMA Learning Experience Manager Kate Suhonen to see if he could tailor the training.
The course needed to equip managers and shift team leaders who had already undertaken Holyoake by Price’s foundational leadership programmes with advanced skills and tools required for their roles.
“The EMA came in and customised the training to exactly what we were looking for and where we found the biggest holes in what we were doing in our business.”
The Holyoake by Price (NZ) Leadership Development Programme
The resulting Holyoake by Price Leadership (NZ) Ltd Development Programme contained three main focusses, which were each covered off with two day-long sessions over six months.
The key features of the course were:
- Assertiveness and Effective Communication.
- Motivating Teams for High Performance and Art of Delegation.
- Feedback and Courageous Conversations.
“These skills are ones that young and emerging leaders don’t naturally have in their armouries,” says Monkley.
“We were having a few issues where we needed those particular skillsets.
“After the first round of training, I started to see great results. After our second round, I could see how far they’d come in a short space of time.”
And it was the EMA’s facilitator Ash Dixon who Monkley tagged to lead this training.
Dixon’s background includes senior management, national sales management and finance roles in Australia and New Zealand over 20 years.
He is also an experienced board director with governance experience across a wide range of sectors. His desire to impart his knowledge saw him move into training and facilitating to empower people to grow their businesses.
“I have delivered leadership programmes for medium and large multinationals around NZ for the EMA,” says Dixon.
“Seeing people I have trained apply learning and grow, then are promoted in management roles, is very rewarding.”
Monkley says he particularly likes Dixon as a facilitator because of his ability to adapt and explain concepts in a way that is specific to the audience.
“At a previous employer I had done some similar courses, but Ash is by far the best facilitator I’ve ever been taught by.
“He’s brilliant and I’ll continue to use him so long as he is around.
“He focusses on the topics that are real for us. We catch up before each session, and he listens to what has been coming up and caters to what is needed by the business.
Making a Difference
The measure of success, says Monkley, is that it’s obvious how much easier the course attendees now find having those hard conversations or delegating work to other members of their teams.
“It’s just a big difference between where we were before and where we are now.”
The course also had the sideline benefit of finding team members who weren’t quite suited to management positions.
Monkley says some of the learners really grabbed hold of the training, but in a few cases the company could see that leadership wasn’t right for them.
“Without doing this course we probably would have stayed the same path and thought that it was. So, it has helped us realise this as well.”
One of the added advantages of having a cohort of learners from the same company is that the EMA took the training to Holyoake by Price’s office in Auckland’s East Tāmaki.
“We do our training inhouse, which is a another really cool thing,” says Monkley.
“We don’t have to battle Auckland traffic to get everyone into another location!”
