Maintenance Leadership School

This course equips maintenance and asset leaders with the strategic, cultural and people-leadership capability required to elevate organisational performance. Leaders must shape the environment in which great maintenance happens - setting strategy, building capability, and creating the culture that drives sustained reliability.

Course Outline

2 Days

8 Core Modules

Module 1: Self-Awareness and Leadership Identity (2 hours)

Understanding your behavioural style (DISC/Colours/Insights assessment)
How your style impacts your leadership and organisational culture
Your leadership identity: from technician → manager → strategic leader
Understanding your strengths, blind spots, and triggers
Your leadership shadow: everything you do sends a message
Building credibility and trust at the manager level
Leading with authenticity and consistency
Personal leadership values and purpose

Module 2: Emotional Intelligence for Senior Leaders (2 hours)

Emotional intelligence at scale: managing yourself and reading your organisation
The four EQ domains: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship management
Managing your emotional triggers and responses under pressure
Reading organisational dynamics, morale, and culture
Responding to emotions in your team (stress, resistance, conflict)
Building emotionally intelligent organisational culture
EQ in decision-making: balancing logic and emotion
Developing EQ in your leadership team

Module 3: Strategic Leadership in Maintenance (2 hours)

From manager to strategic leader: your role as strategist, culture-builder, capability developer
Strategic thinking: balancing short-term operations with long-term strategy
Asset, reliability, and maintenance strategy alignment
Leading through others: developing leadership capability throughout your organisation
Moving from reactive firefighting to proactive management
Creating clarity of roles and accountabilities across your organisation
Making strategic trade-offs (safety, cost, performance, risk)
Your role in organisational performance and outcomes

Module 4: Building and Sustaining Organisational Culture (2 hours)

Understanding culture: "how we do things when management isn't watching"
Assessing current culture and defining desired culture
The manager's role: culture is created through what you measure, reward, tolerate, and discuss
Creating high-performance maintenance culture (proactive, collaborative, learning-oriented)
Building a Just Culture: moving beyond blame to learning
Embedding continuous improvement mindset across your organisation
Managing culture change: resistance, communication, reinforcement, patience
Systems and processes that shape culture (not just words)

Module 5: Communication, Influence & Navigating the Organisation (2 hours)

Strategic communication at scale: cascading vision, strategy, and priorities
Adapting your communication style to different audiences and situations
Managing up: influencing senior leadership, making business cases, managing expectations
Managing across: building peer relationships and cross-functional influence
Stakeholder management: mapping complex landscape and engagement strategies
Navigating organisational politics with integrity
Building coalitions and alliances for organisational change
Developing communication capability in your leadership team

Module 6: Safety Leadership at the Organisational Level (2 hours)

Your role in safety culture: it starts with you, not the safety team
From compliance to culture: building a culture where people care about safety
Visible safety leadership behaviours: presence, questions, participation, recognition
Developing safety leadership throughout your organisation (at all levels)
Managing the production-safety tension: protecting against pressure
Leading incident response and learning: Just Culture in practice
Creating speaking-up culture and psychological safety
Fatigue management at organisational level: systemic solutions

Module 7: Performance Management, Accountability & Developing Leaders (2 hours)

Driving organisational performance: leading and lagging indicators
Creating a performance culture: clarity, capability, accountability
Setting meaningful targets, KPIs, and balanced scorecards
Performance conversations with your direct reports (all levels)
Managing poor performance: coaching, support, progressive discipline
Developing leadership capability throughout your organisation
Building high-performing teams and breaking down silos
Leading organisational change and improvement initiatives
Succession planning and talent pipeline development

Module 8: Managing Complexity, Priorities & Personal Sustainability (2 hours)

The manager's complexity challenge: multiple teams, assets, priorities, stakeholders
Strategic prioritisation frameworks and making trade-offs consciously
Managing resource constraints and making business cases
Balancing strategic and operational demands
Decision-making under uncertainty with imperfect information
Managing your time and energy: strategic time vs. firefighting
Building personal resilience: physical, mental, emotional, social wellbeing
Managing stress and preventing burnout
Work-life integration and leading sustainably
Your leadership legacy and 90-day development plan

What You Will Take Away

Snapshot

Self-Awareness and Leadership Identity

Emotional Intelligence for Senior Leaders

Strategic Leadership in Maintenance

Building and Sustaining Organisational Culture

Communication, Influence & Navigating the Organisation

Safety Leadership at the Organisational Level

Performance Management, Accountability & Developing Leaders

Managing Complexity, Priorities & Personal Sustainability

Your Instructors

Justina Stromnes

Organisational Psychologist & Leadership Coach

Justina Stromnes is an organisational psychologist and leadership development specialist with 25 years’ experience across rail, energy, and infrastructure.

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Booking

Maintenance Leadership School

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Private Courses

Whether you have 15 or 1500 people to train, our schools can be offered at a time and location most convenient for your company.

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Your Learning

Pathway

Asset Schools training courses can be completed individually at any time, but have you considered planning a Learning Pathway? For example:

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Our Clients

Asset Schools give peace of mind that the investment in our Maintenance and Reliability professionals will provide a great return to both them and the business.

Gwyn Garland

VP Asset Management & Process Plant

Anglo American

The training provided by Asset Schools was exceptional, offering a highly educational experience that enabled us to learn a wealth of new knowledge and skills.

Ali Sahin

Senior Engineer, Reliability

Rio Tinto