Leadership Development for Engineering Firms

Your strongest technical people are stepping into lead roles. The technical work was never the issue. Now the job is people, clients and decisions that used to belong to someone else, and the managers who lead them need support too.

Why this is built differently

I spent almost three decades in engineering consulting. I opened and ran a branch office, recruited and trained the team, took the night shift on commissioning, and made the coffee run. The sessions are built for consulting and industrial teams, not adapted from generic management training, and every one is fitted to your team in a call beforehand.

There are three ways firms use this.

Sponsored Coaching for Firms

Three months of coaching for someone you're counting on, and support for the manager who leads them.

You have someone you want to keep: a strong technical person who has stepped into a lead role, or is about to. The goal is to help them be as successful in this role as they were in their last one. The technical work was never the issue. Now the job is people, clients and decisions that used to belong to someone else.

  1. Manager kickoff (45 minutes). Where they’re headed, what better looks like in three months, and how you’ll support it.
  2. Kickoff and plan. Goals and a written development plan with your person. CliftonStrengths is optional.
  3. Working sessions every two weeks. Six sessions on real situations, with email or WhatsApp access between them.
  4. Manager sessions (two, 30 to 45 minutes). How to back up the work in your own 1:1s, and what to keep doing once coaching ends.
  5. Midpoint and close-out. Progress against the goals at the midpoint, and the option to extend another three months. At the end, a debrief with you both in the room if your person agrees, plus a written summary.

What stays private. What your person says in sessions stays there. You hear progress against the goals we agree at the start, never the content of a conversation. Your sessions are about how you lead them, not what they said. That’s what makes people willing to be honest, and why it sticks.

What the firm keeps: a strong engineer who stays and grows into the role, and a manager who can do this again with the next one.

If after the first month either of you feels it isn’t working, we stop.

Workshops for Engineering Teams

Leadership and communication sessions for consulting and industrial teams.

Two formats: a lunch-and-learn of 60 to 90 minutes, virtual or on site, or a hands-on half-day workshop built around real situations.

Topics

  • How to Lead When You’re Still One of the Team (delivered). Moving from doing the work to enabling it: leading former peers, trust, feedback and delegation.
  • Practical Resilience: Lessons from the Field (delivered). A five-step loop for handling pressure on site and in the office before it turns into damage control.
  • Communication for Engineers. Getting from information to influence: know your audience, and explain value instead of detail.
  • The Conversation-Commitment Framework. Turning conversations into clear expectations, real commitments and follow-through.
  • CliftonStrengths for Technical Teams. A shared language for how people work, and where friction on the team comes from.

Every session includes a planning call with the sponsor to fit the content to your team, a handout participants keep, and a post-session survey with follow-up notes to the sponsor.

Many sessions lead to follow-on coaching for one or two people. Travel outside southern Alberta is quoted separately.

What Others Say

“I really enjoyed the use of storytelling and real-world examples throughout Chris’s Resilience seminar. It made the material feel relevant and relatable. The session provided practical tools and strategies that could realistically be used when dealing with pressure at work. The Resilience Blueprint handout was a great takeaway from the session, providing a useful resource to revisit and apply beyond the seminar.”

 – HSE Coordinator, engineering and construction firm

CliftonStrengths for Teams

A strength doesn't remove a cost. It moves it, and someone on the team absorbs the difference.

For teams that keep hitting the same friction and can’t name why. Two people who plan on completely different timelines. A lead whose speed leaves everyone else scrambling. A handoff that breaks the same way every time. Nobody is doing their job badly. The friction is in how people are wired.

 

CliftonStrengths is Gallup’s assessment of 34 talent themes: the natural patterns in how a person thinks, makes decisions and gets work done. It isn’t a personality type. It ranks all 34 for each person, from what comes most naturally to what costs them the most effort.

  1. Assessment. Each person completes the All 34 assessment online, on their own time.
  2. Individual debriefs (90 minutes each). What the profile means for their work, where it helps, and where it costs someone else. Each person gets a written summary.
  3. Team session. How strengths play out on a team, then a working session on one real friction point. Virtual by default, in person in southern Alberta.

The team walks away with a shared vocabulary for how each person works, one real friction point understood and addressed, a one-page team summary, and a clearer sense of who to put on what.

What Others Say

“I contracted Chris to support personal development needs within our team. The results exceeded my initial expectations. Chris has a long-term technical and engineering background, which allows him to put himself into the shoes of the candidates to be coached. Chris also established the necessary alignment and information flow back to us. This helped me stay in charge of the overall process.”

 – Markus Wissing
Practice Leader, Enterprise Architecture, TecAlliance

Frequently Asked Questions

Do we see what our person says in coaching?

No. You hear progress against the goals we agree at the start. Your own sessions with me are about how you lead them, not what they said.

Two sessions of 30 to 45 minutes on how to back up the coaching in your own 1:1s, and what to keep doing once it ends. The aim is a manager who can do this again with the next person.

Yes. Every session starts with a planning call so the examples and exercises come from your work.

In southern Alberta, yes. Elsewhere, sessions are virtual, or travel is quoted separately.

Talk to me about your team

Thirty minutes. Tell me what's going on and I'll tell you which of these fits, or whether none of them do.