Client Case Study
Stowe Australia
Stowe celebrated 100 years of continual service excellence in September 2010. The company’s origins date back to the advent of the electricity industry in Australia when Francis Bell and George T. Stowe incorporated the company in 1910.
Stowe Australia is a leading electrical and communications installation and service contractor with a pre-eminent industry reputation for performance, quality and reliability.
Today Stowe Australia is Australia’s leading privately owned electrical and communications contracting organisation with forecast annual revenues over $500mil and currently employing over 1,700 people.
Like many organisations that engage LMA to assist with people development, Stowe Australia started with a clear learning and development need for some staff in key technical roles. The company’s Training Manager, Craig Pendleton was keen to find the right partner that could understand Stowe’s business objectives and deliver training outcomes that would enhance the leadership skills of its technical workforce.
It’s a challenge we at LMA hear about time and time again – the ever-present need to equip emerging leaders with the skills and confidence they need to lead the team they were previously part of.
“We wanted a partner to work with to create and deliver the most appropriate learning and development experiences for our people at all levels. LMA has become that trusted partner and has helped us by providing two levels of development program – one for new and emerging leaders, the other for experienced leaders looking to elevate their skills as leaders”, Craig said.
For emerging leaders, LMA’s Workplace Leadership Essentials (WLE) course provided a relatively cost-effective method to introduce prospective leaders to key leadership concepts. Perhaps more importantly, this short course enabled Stowe to identify candidates interested in, and suitable for, the longer and more wide-ranging Success Strategies for Team Leaders and Supervisors (SSTLS) which has now become something of a “rite of passage” for aspiring leaders.
For its existing mid-level and senior leaders, Stowe has also invested heavily in LMA’s Challenge of Leadership (COL) and High Performance Management (HPM) programs which cover higher level concepts, tools, techniques and support to enhance leadership skills.
Stowe’s commitment to the development of leaders and leadership at all levels shows up in the day-to-day operation of the business. As Craig puts it, “we’re now seeing more professionalism and business acumen from our people, better critical thinking as they seek to address the challenges they face and enhanced dealings with customers and each other. Some of most experienced technical experts are now far more able to communicate effectively, share ideas, engage and empower others and create and sustain the teams and environments we need to thrive.”
The company’s values – Safety, People, Customer, Innovation – are the foundations on which the Stowe/LMA relationship has been built and they continue to guide ongoing people development discussions. “LMA’s commitment to understanding our business and aligning our people development initiatives with our values is the main reason we love working with the LMA team. Not only do the key LMA contacts we deal with make our lives easy, but we also know we can trust their advice and their systems, processes and the wider LMA team to deliver on our needs – every time!”.
Craig values the outside perspective that LMA brings to the Stowe Australia team – whether it be via the interactions with the other companies that enrol participants in Open programs (programs typically have 5-10 different organisations represented) or the new technologies that participants are encouraged and trained to use (like Feedback Online (FBOL) and the LMA apps). “The approach LMA takes keeps us on the cutting edge and helps our people to become the best they can be – both professionally and personally.”