Training

Extensor's training programmes are focused on behavioural skills and are therefore suitable for people at all levels in an organisation, from junior staff up to Managing Directors and Chief Executives.

We exclusively work on single-organisation programmes where the goals an objectives of the programme will be relevant to each and every delegate. This is significantly different to open courses where the content inevitably has to be more generic to cater for the different objectives and backgrounds of the delegates.

The following programme descriptions provide an indication of the types of work we typically undertake:

  Organisational Enablement for Jaguar Land Rover - When owned by Ford, Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) was operated as a subsidiary business with the majority of strategic decisions made by the parent company in America. The transfer of ownership to Tata led to a significant change in this approach with Tata expecting the UK board of JLR to set its own strategy and direction. To enable the company's senior leaders to take on this responsibility, people at all levels in the organisation needed to take greater ownership for decisions within their own areas of responsibility while, at the same time, also involving themselves in strategy to a greater extent than ever before.

Extensor's role was to help facilitate this transition by working with leaders from across the business to help them understand the need, see what they could do to assist the business in achieving its vision and make a stronger personal contribution to the achievement of JLR's extremely aggressive growth ambitions.

The programme we designed and implemented consisted of a 3-day module, a 2-day follow-on module 4-6 weeks later followed by two one-to-one 90-minute coaching meetings, one 3 months after the second residential module and one 3 months after that. Each programme set the objective that JLR was expecting delegates to take a greater ownership for driving advances in their area of the business.

In total over 550 delegates attended the programme with the commercial results vastly exceeding the Extensor goal of a 10-fold return on investment within 12 months. One delegate claimed to have achieved a £9m pa saving for the business as a direct result of changes he made following the programme. Another developed a product offering he attributed to the programme that generates annual profits of over £4m. An other submitted a proposal to the Board to reorganise aspects of the business that both reduced cost and increased effectiveness - we was then promoted to run the new department, while another person ran a project looking at warranty claims that led to significant cost savings and an improvement in commercial processes.

  Leading Change for Santander - Prior to the introduction of a major new IT system and the consequential restructuring of the business, the MD of the Commercial Bank in Bootle asked Extensor to run a strategy workshop for the leadership team. One of the outputs of that 3-day session was a realisation that the success of the project would require a far greater involvement of managers throughout the organisation than had previously been thought. As a result, Extensor was commissioned to run a series of programmes entitled 'Leading Change' with the objective being to help managers understand what the changes would involve, what its impact was likely to be, what their personal involvement was likely to be and to then develop personal plans for the way in which they could help ensure that the project was successful.

Extensor designed a programm that was specifilly achieved to achieve these objectives. It consisted of two 2-day modules that we designened to help people understand the impact that the change programe was likely to have on the business, highlight its implications and provide an experiential insight into the need the oranisation would have for their personal involvement in making the programme a success. At the end of each programme the delegates prepared and delivered a presentation to the leadership team of their conclusions and highlighted the issues that were likely to encounter in achieving the organisation's goals and objectives. The leadership team were then required to respond to each of the managers with details of what actions they would take to support them and their teams through the change process.

After the implementation of the new IT systems, the Board of the company commented that it was the most successful project of its kind that the company had ever undertaken.

  Strategy Workshop for ElectraLink - ElectraLink is a company that provides a specialised data-transfer service that enables the whole UK competitive electricity market to work. The CEO wanted to to develop the company commercially by selling their services to organisations outside of their core market. Extensor were asked to facilitate a strategy workshop to assist the leadership team in thinking through the implications their objectives would have for the structure of the organisation and the skill requirements of the Board.

As the company's background was in electrical engineering the leadership team consisted of individuals who were rather similar. We therefore began the workshop by looking at personal profiles using the neuroscientific profiling instrument MiND. The results were then used to facilitate a discussion around the core strentghts of the team and the liklely 'gaps' that would need to be filled to achieve their objectives.

It was only a one-day workshop but in our experience people often do not need to invest vast amounts of time and commit to huge expenditure with organmisations like Extensor tio achieve the desired results. The reason is that in most cases they already have the expertise in-house. Where a third party involvement is useful is in prompting new directions of thinking that they can then persue.

The outcome was that in the months following the workshop the CEO altered some of the roles and responsibilities of the existing Board members and recruited a new Director to complement the skill set of the rest of the Board.

  Other Programmes - Extensor is always interested to discuss any behavioural skills requiremenst and in the past have worked in all of the following areas:

             
    Communication & Presentation Skills   Team Leadership    
    Introduction to Managing People   Exercising Influence    
    Achieving Excellenece in Customer Service   Creating Agile Teams & Organisations    
             

 

To learn more about Extensor's services and the way in which they could be tailored to suit your particular requirements, please contact Extensor on:

Tel: +44 (0)7831 246885        E-mail: