Customised Capability Development

Customised Capability Development & Advisory Services

Icehouse customised training is an opportunity to create a high-impact learning experience tailored to the specific needs and delivered right in your business where the biggest impact can be made.

Whether you are facing shifting market dynamics, new competitors, more demanding customers, new strategic challenges and opportunities or a desire for team capability elevation, we partner with you to assess your needs and customise a relevant development process to strengthen the leadership and management capability of your business and build a strong and effective top team.

We take what we have learned from years of working with successful Kiwi business owners and entrepreneurs and leverage this into a tailored programme that is the right fit for your business and employees.

Giltrap Holdings - Customised Leadership Development

‘You know I have been to Harvard, 3 of our team have been to Ashridge, and a couple have done MBAs/Exec Programmes at Mt Eliza and what you guys did on that first block is above all of those programmes. We are really really impressed’!

Richard Giltrap, Joint Managing Director, Giltrap Group Holdings

| Is Customised Training Right For Your Business?

We have developed and review our current suite of programmes, workshops and advisory services to be constantly relevant to the needs of Kiwi businesses, at any stage in their journey. However we also understand that many business owners and leaders have isolated unique and focused areas they wish to improve upon and that the ability to deliver this development within the businesses environment, will provide the best impact.

When assessing your needs for customised training, the following provides a good starting checklist; 

| How Does Icehouse Customised Training Work? 

In almost every case our customers are looking to build management competency into business operations and to develop leaders who can make a difference within the organisation. While each company faces its own unique set of issues, all typically partner with The Icehouse to help achieve one or more of four commonly shared objectives;

1. Prepare leaders to implement a strategic change - for example, a merger or an acquisition
2. Enable individuals to enhance specific management skills
3. Build new or greater organisational competency in specific area - such as marketing, operations, or governance
4. Build the capability of the business’s top team

Specifically, this can mean:

• Moving from silo to integrated management methods
• Leveraging quality and time with technology
• Alignment of the management with the owner
• Building customer driven value engineering into everything the company does
• Using decision making methods based more on fact-based logic and science than intuitive reasoning
• Becoming a self-managing, proactive and dynamic organisation that is focused on opportunity and innovation

| What Are The Outcomes?

Most development outcomes differ from one customised training development to the next, as they relate directly to the defined goals of each tailored experience.

However, feedback reveals that Icehouse customised training puts a group of committed individuals, with the desire to learn and change, on a new and more productive path that will lead their organisation to a different and better place.

Through ongoing interaction with the faculty and their peers, participants acquire enlightened perspectives, enhanced capabilities, improved decision-making skills, and the desire to drive the takeaway learning throughout all levels of the organisation. Whether focusing on change management, capability enhancement, or organisational development, executives and managers return to their companies with the ability to contribute more broadly as leaders.

Icehouse customised training adds value in five distinct categories:

1. Reinforcing positive intangibles—confidence, trust, organisational commitment, openness to change, and inspiration—to energise executives' efforts, transform managers into leaders, and spread leadership throughout the organisation, from top to bottom
2. Fostering collective recognition of our customer’s mission and values, core businesses, key challenges, and promising opportunities, as well as a common level of understanding, to further improve the communication of ideas within the business group and across the organisation
3. Providing the necessary time and space for participants to step back from their daily responsibilities and reflect, think, learn, and converse about the issues, thereby fostering a learning culture
4. Creating professional and personal networks to enhance intra-company relationships, develop a different mindset, break through barriers, and "make it happen"
5. Focusing on best practices, case stories, models, frameworks, and tools to apply new knowledge, programme concepts, and innovative approaches within the workplace

Key outcomes include:

• Lifting and enhancing general business management capability
• Encouraging and fostering a “Whole Business” view
• Developing strong leadership and people management and motivation skills
• Exploring ‘Best Practice’ business systems and process disciplines
• Enabling the company to build a culture of high performing teams and integrated performance measurement

| Why The Icehouse

Peer Learning

Customised training is structured specifically to promote constant, dynamic interaction among company peers. Through working and learning with others within the same organisation, participants develop a shared language and an understanding of the company's mission, values, businesses, challenges, and opportunities. This sense of camaraderie helps build effective professional and personal peer networks that are based on trust, communication, and cooperation. Strong intra-company relationships foster a level of organisational commitment that, in time, spreads across business groups and helps to extend the learning for the benefit of the entire company.

Programme Design

Icehouse customised training is designed to be a learning journey that creates lasting change in the management competencies, behaviours and performance of our customers. This requires an iterative delivery process that is experienced in integrated modules, spread over time.

To link all the modules and outcomes together, a system of management projects are designed and run through the training, then remain in place afterwards – continuing to add value to your business.

Customised training is developed and implemented using the following four-step process: