Durham Region Employers

How Do I Know If My Company Needs Leadership Development? A Durham Region Employer's Checklist

A 10-question checklist you can work through in five minutes, an honest section on when the problem is not leadership at all, and what to do with whatever score you get.

35+ Years Senior Operations LMI Canada Licensed Based in Ajax, Ontario

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Does My Company Need Leadership Development? Durham Region Signs to Look For

Not every business problem is a leadership problem, but more of them are than most owners expect. The reason is that leadership problems rarely arrive with a label. They show up as turnover, as missed deadlines, as an owner who cannot take a week off, and it is easy to treat each one as a separate issue.

Gallup's research puts a number on how much the manager matters: managers account for at least 70 per cent of the variance in employee engagement across business units. That is why the same pay, the same policies and the same building can produce one crew that stays and one that does not.

There is a local edge to this as well. Durham Region sits within commuting distance of Toronto along Highway 401 and GO Transit's Lakeshore East line, so an employee who is tired of their supervisor does not need to move house to leave you. Invest Durham reports more than 10,000 highly skilled energy workers in the region and more than 30,000 post-secondary students enrolled each year, which means technical staff have options nearby and early-career hires form a view of your workplace quickly. A leadership gap that might be survivable in a remote town gets punished faster here.

The Durham Region Employer's Checklist: 10 Questions

Answer each one yes or no about the last 12 months, not about how you would like things to be. Count one point for every yes. Be honest, because the score is only useful if the answers are.

1. In the last year, has more than one good employee left a specific supervisor or crew rather than the company as a whole?
2. Do decisions regularly reach you that a supervisor could and should have made?
3. Were most of your supervisors promoted for technical ability, with no training in how to lead people?
4. Would your managers avoid a difficult conversation with a long-serving employee rather than have it?
5. Has overtime been running for more than three months without a matching increase in output?
6. Do two departments in your business routinely blame each other for the same recurring problem?
7. If you were away for two weeks, would something important stall until you returned?
8. Do your people know what the next role above them looks like and what it takes to get there? (Score a point for no.)
9. Does the same operational problem keep coming back after you personally fix it?
10. Would you struggle to name who is ready to step up if a key manager resigned tomorrow?

What Your Score Means

An illustrative example of a score of 6

Take a 40-person fabricator with two production crews, the kind of employer this region is full of. The owner answered yes to questions 1, 2, 3, 5, 7 and 9. Crew B had lost four people in a year while Crew A lost one. Both supervisors were excellent fabricators who had never been taught to run a team. Overtime had been standing for five months, the owner was signing off on scheduling decisions daily, and the same quality problem kept returning after he personally sorted it out.

Nothing in that list is a pay problem, a market problem or a systems problem. Every item points at the same two people, which is what makes a score like that useful: it tells you not only that you have a leadership gap but exactly where it sits, so you can spend on two supervisors instead of a company-wide program. Your own answers will differ, and the point is to run the count rather than to match this example.

One caution on scoring. Question 1 and question 9 carry more weight than the rest. If you answered yes to both of those, treat the result as at least a mid-range score even if your total is low, because those two questions describe money already leaving the business.

When the Problem Is Not Leadership

This is the section most training providers leave out, and it is the one that saves you money. A low score usually points somewhere else, and leadership development will not fix any of these:

• Pay genuinely below market. If a role pays well under what comparable Durham Region and GTA employers offer, no amount of good management closes that gap. Benchmark it first.
• Not enough people. A team that is short two staff is not a leadership problem, it is a hiring problem wearing a leadership costume.
• Broken systems and tools. If the quoting system loses information or the scheduling is done on paper, better supervisors will still be fighting the same process.
• A product or market problem. If customers are not buying, developing your managers will not change the demand.
• One difficult individual. That is a performance management issue for that person, not a program for the whole team.

If your score landed at 0 to 2 and one of those descriptions fits, you have your answer, and it did not cost you anything.

Why Owners Wait Too Long

Almost every owner who eventually invests in leadership development says some version of the same thing: they knew about the problem a year before they acted. There are three reasons for the delay, and they are worth naming because they are expensive.

The first is that leadership problems present as something else, so the money gets spent on recruiting, retention bonuses or a new system instead of on leadership development. The second is that nobody sends an invoice for a leadership gap, so it never shows up on a statement as its own line. The third is that the owner absorbs the gap personally, working longer and making the decisions their supervisors should be making, which hides the problem until they burn out or a key person resigns.

The cost is real even when it is invisible. When we worked through what a 10:1 return actually looks like for an Ajax employer, avoided resignations were the single largest line in the table, and our guide to reducing employee turnover in Durham Region works through what one departure costs in real dollars.

What to Do Once You Know

Whatever the checklist told you about leadership development, the next steps are the same in order. Skipping the first one is the most common mistake.

1. Write down four numbers before you spend anything. Turnover on each supervisor's crew, weekly overtime hours, your rework or error rate, and how many decisions reach you in a normal two weeks. Without a baseline you will never prove whether the money worked.
2. Pick the two or three people who carry the most of it. Company-wide programs spread the budget thin. Start with the supervisors whose crews show the highest turnover or the most escalations.
3. Ask whether they actually want to lead people. Developing someone who never wanted the role costs you a good technician and gives you a reluctant manager.
4. Choose a format that changes behaviour. Leadership development works through spaced sessions and application between them, not a single day in a hotel room. Ask any provider how many weeks the program runs and what happens between sessions.
5. Check whether funding applies. Some employer training qualifies for the Ontario Job Grant, which changes the cost side of the decision considerably.
6. Re-measure at months three, six and twelve. Compare against the four numbers you wrote down in step one.

How a Local Provider Compares With the Big Training Brands

Durham Region employers usually end up choosing between a large national training brand and a local licensed leadership development provider. Both can work. They are built differently, and the difference matters most for small and mid-sized employers.

Ask any provider two questions before you sign: who exactly will be in the room, and what happens in the weeks between sessions. The answers tell you more than a brochure. Our guide on how to choose an executive leadership trainer in Durham Region covers the rest, and if you are weighing outside help against building the skill in house, see bringing in a consultant versus developing internally.

Who Runs the Programs

Malcolm Gurley, President of Gurley Leadership Solutions Inc., is based in Ajax and spent 35+ years in senior operations leadership, including Fortune 100 environments, before licensing with LMI Canada. He is Lean Certified and a Six Sigma Black Belt, and works in person with supervisors and managers at client facilities.

Durham Region is eight municipalities, Ajax, Brock, Clarington, Oshawa, Pickering, Scugog, Uxbridge and Whitby, and programs are delivered on site across all of them. For the local picture, see leadership development in Durham Region or the service page for Ajax.

Frequently Asked Questions

Straight answers to what owners ask when they are deciding whether to spend on this at all.

Does my company need leadership development, or is it too small?

Size is rarely the deciding factor. In a twelve-person operation, one supervisor who loses people and escalates every decision affects a quarter of your workforce and most of your week, so the effect of fixing it is concentrated rather than diluted. What matters is the checklist score, not the headcount. Smaller employers also sit in the most generous Ontario Job Grant tier where a program qualifies.

How do I tell a leadership problem from a staffing problem?

Ask whether the work would get done if you added one person. If the honest answer is yes, you have a staffing problem. If the work would still stall because nobody is making decisions, setting priorities or holding people to them, it is a leadership problem. Many businesses have both, in which case hire first and develop second, because a new hire dropped into a badly led crew usually leaves.

What does leadership development cost?

It depends on how many people take part and how long the program runs, so any provider quoting a price before asking those questions is guessing. Ask for a custom quote, and ask what it covers between sessions. Where a program qualifies for the Ontario Job Grant, employers with fewer than 100 employees can have up to 83.3 per cent of eligible costs covered, to a maximum of $10,000 CAD per trainee.

How long before anything changes?

Expect visible behaviour change at four to six months and a measurable operational difference between months six and twelve. Anything faster is usually enthusiasm rather than habit. That is why the four baseline numbers matter: they let you see movement at months three, six and twelve instead of relying on how the room feels.

What if my supervisors do not think they need it?

That is common, and it is not a reason to skip it. Most supervisors were never told what good leadership looks like in practice, so they measure themselves against the technical work they already do well. Bring them into the decision early, show them the numbers for their own crew, and ask what would make their week easier. Resistance usually drops once the program is about their actual problems.

Can I just promote better instead?

Better promotion decisions help, and asking whether someone actually wants to lead people is the single most useful screen you can add. But promotion alone still leaves a new supervisor to work out delegation, difficult conversations and priority setting by trial and error, usually on your most experienced staff. Promotion decides who; development decides whether they succeed.