Nuclear industry gets a leadership boost from Total Excellence Centre

Manchester based, Total Excellence Centre, beat off three other training organisations to win a contract worth £250k. The two-year contract is to design and deliver a tailor-made leadership development programme for Urenco UK Limited, the uranium enrichment company near Chester.

Total Excellence Centre was provided with a brief for the Urenco contract which involved creating a leadership programme which was aligned to a national qualification standard. The successful bid offered a pragmatic approach providing leaders with a good blend of theoretical understanding and practical skills, just what the client wanted.

Michelle Mercer, Director of Total Excellence Centre, said; “We were pleased to be awarded the Urenco contract and have really enjoyed working with them over the past few months to establish the programme. It was great to get the whole thing started by being given an opportunity of a day’s induction into the company, where we learned about the business, the culture and the people. We have now successfully started to deliver the training to the leadership team which will continue well into 2009.”

“We feel we have produced a programme which will deliver great results. At Urenco they already have a good leadership team and a committed workforce whom we are helping to take to new heights and this will involve changing the long-standing culture within the business. We are focussing on making sure that the training we deliver actually does impact on the day to day business and we are confident that it will.”

Following the creation of an organisational development strategy to support the company business plan, the Human Resources team at Urenco set a specific objective to ensure the company has a high performing workforce with strong, effective leaders. A number of focus groups, involving 20% of the workforce, were conducted and a set of leadership standards was developed. Each leader then participated in a 360° feedback exercise to identify their development needs against those standards, with the information gathered from this exercise being used by Urenco to determine the content of the leadership development programme.

Steve Ball, Head of HR and Organisational Development at Urenco UK Limited, said; “The nuclear industry, as a whole, is preparing for a period of significant growth and if Urenco is to continue to be highly successful it is important that we have a high performing workforce and a strong leadership team. We wanted an organisation that would help us to achieve our key objectives. The team at Total Excellence Centre spoke our language and have proved to be a really strong partner, bringing high-quality training and some real tangible experience of the issues that leaders face. They have worked with us to develop the material and are now delivering the training to almost a hundred of our leaders. In short, they are helping us deliver our vision.”

The team at Total Excellence Centre spoke our language and have proved to be a really strong partner""

Steve Ball - Head of HR and Organisational Development, Urenco Limited.