Sarnia Lambton Industrial Educational Co-operative

Why Leadership and Workforce Development Programs? Beginning in the spring of 2002, with partial funding provided by the Government of Canada’s Labour Market Partnerships Program, the IEC conducted a community-wide soft skills training needs analysis. The long-term goal of this project was to raise the level of people skills within Sarnia-Lambton. In the short-term, the project would identify “soft” or "people skills” training required by the local workforce, common training needs of the community, priority topics, and preferred delivery methods.

We invited 450 organizations to tell us what kind of non-technical and non-safety training & development their employees needed to maximize their individual performance and contribute to overall business performance.

In addition to a “Top Ten List” of soft skills training needs for the general workforce, we discovered a need for basic supervisory or front-line leadership training. So similar to our co-operative efforts to provide safety and health training, we are collaborating to provide high-calibre leadership and workforce development programs for our community.

This Leadership Development Guide is intended as a resource for all organizations & individuals in our community seeking to develop their leadership skills.

DDI + IEC: Partners in Excellence

Development Dimensions International (DDI) enjoys a world-wide reputation for being the premier leader in leadership development. For the past 33 years, DDI has been conducting research and creating programs that focus oneffective leadership. DDI not only helps organizations build exceptional leaders, but also extends their expertise to giving people at all levels the skills they need to enhance their performance.

We selected DDI’s Interaction Management® Exceptional Leaders…Extraordinary Results System (IM: EX System) and courses from Techniques for a High Performance Workforce® for the IEC’s Maximum Leadership and High Performance Workforce Development Programs because:

Many IEC members are using or have used DDI’s Interaction Management System to develop their leaders
The new IM: EX System focuses on 7 key leadership imperatives (or “must-do’s”) that are critical to leaders delivering the business results needed to sustain a competitive advantage
DDI has a long history of helping companies realize a return on leadership and workforce development initiatives – e.g. 3 million leaders have been trained in every industry in 30 countries over the past 30 years
IM: EX focuses on the “SEE-Level” leader – leaders who are right where the action is seeing problems, opportunities, and challenges daily – they have the mission-critical job of engaging workers, keeping up morale, and retaining key players
All the courses are competency-based meaning they are designed to equip people with the behaviours needed to be successful on the job

Nadine Brown

Andrea Chennette

Nadine is a People Skills Specialist at the Industrial Educational Co-operative overseeing the implementation of leadership and workforce development courses.

Nadine worked in the petroleum and petrochemical industry for 17 years and automotive for 6 years where she designed, developed, delivered workshops in Communication Skills and Team Building/Critiques, Assertiveness, Conflict Management, Personality Dimensions, and Priority Manager. She supervised the Organization Effectiveness and Training Department at Nova Chemicals Corunna for 7 years and managed the Organization and Training Development Department at Bayer Sarnia Site for 1.5 years. As an independent consultant she worked with Human Resources Development Canada delivering workshops in career/job transitioning.

Nadine is a DDI Certified Instructor for Interaction Management, a Certified Personality Dimensions Instructor, and has a certification in Neuro-Linguistics Programming.

Andrea is the new Business and Program Development Team Leader at the Industrial Educational Co-operative overseeing the implementation of leadership and workforce development courses.

Andrea’s experience in Training and Development was honed in the automotive industry, working as a training manager for the Magna Corporation and later for Ford, with a focus on Health & Safety training and Leadership Development programs. While her primary function was to manage the day-to-day operations of Training and Development and the strategic planning for the department, Andrea continued to maintain her skills as an instructional designer and training facilitator, delivering programs such as DiSC, Performance Management, Coaching, Business Communication, and Supervisor Competency. Most recently she led a team at RIM focused on process improvement through the development, delivery and evaluation of job-specific training programs and simulations. Andrea is an experienced people leader and Training and Development professional.