Read what Fiona Walsh, Women in Business Columnist has to say about The Refinery.

“Vancouver is full of inspired entrepreneurs. This month’s conversation is with Barbara Ross-Denroche, co-founder of Refinery Leadership Partners. Refinery is a different kind of consulting firm, whose clients include Goldcorp, Finning and Coast Capital Savings, to name a few.”

You can read the full article at http://www.makeitbusiness.com/columnistarticle/Fiona-Walsh/Refinery-Leadership

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Our very own Dr. Mark Frein was featured in the most recent issue of Texas CEO Magazine. In it he discusses the keys to building and maintaining an engaged workforce. Definitely a fun read!

Check out the full article in Texas CEO Magazine here

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In this blog series, I’ve touched on the core distinction in our firm between teaching and training (re: method #1) and the opening phase of our project work — discovery (re: method #2). I think of the design process in our firm as that fulcrum point where we have the opportunity to take good to great. I am confident enough in the quality of people we have in our company to know that we can walk into almost any client situation and do good leadership development work. However, an elegantly designed experience is what allows us to truly perform at our best as practitioners.

How do we design?

Our design work is all about matching a set of experiences to the needs of a client. If we have done good discovery work, we have a deep appreciation of the client’s culture and a clear sense of the opportunities for individual, team, and organizational growth. The design process is the creation of a bridge, a journey, a ladder, a challenge (take your pick of metaphor) that helps spur development from the present reality to the possible.

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Have you ever felt a burning desire to do something just for the love of it? If so, and I am sure you have, you’ve been inspired! At some point in our lives – hopefully more frequently than not- we live out of this state of passion!

In this piece I will share my understanding of what inspiration is, how it sits at the core of who we are at The Refinery and how it influences the work we do with our clients. I´ll do so by dancing on the frontier between the pragmatic from the philosophical (a bit more tilted to the latter!).

I am convinced that inspiration is the common denominator of The Refinery’s team. We, first and foremost, are a collective of human beings passionate about offering our clients the best of us. We create learning spaces that enable people to grow –time and time again– into a truer, happier and more authentic version of themselves and consequently becoming more effective team players, increasingly adding value to their organizations.

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It’s not always obvious to clients or new Refinery staff why we take the process of “discovery” so seriously. Not every instance of teaching requires extensive discovery or diagnostic effort. I usually don’t need to know much about someone, to explain where Bora Bora is on a world map or tell someone facts about the Galapagos Tortoise. If the “someone” in question is literate, and speaks my language, and has seen maps and tortoises or turtles, we do not need much “discovery” to understand how we would teach.

Our work is rarely like this. Our work is more typically aimed at changes in behavior, not simply acquisition of facts. Our clients expect us not only to influence individual change, but organizational change. Changing an individual’s behavior is tricky…as any smoker or ex-smoker can attest. Changing an organization’s behavior is at least as challenging, if not more so.

At least half of the value of a good medical practitioner’s skill is knowing what needs to be changed.

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The use of technology for learning and development in organizations does not appear to  be keeping up with the pace of growth and change in technology itself. In the ASTD State of the Industry Report for 2010, they found that the proportion of technology-based delivery of learning has decreased by 7.2% from 2009 to 2010. Since 2006, the percentage of learning delivery that has been technology-based has only increased by 3%.

When I read this report, I was surprised at the relatively low growth in this industry, especially given the pace of change and growth in technology and the ongoing conversations about utilizing technology for learning at the ASTD Tech Knowledge Conference last month in Las Vegas. Technology allows us to cater to different schedules, locations, and learning preferences, so it got me thinking about the barriers of using technology for training and development.

What does it take for online learning to be really successful? I’ve been a part of a few different types of formal online learning – guided courses, self-directed learning, and between class discussion forums and assignments.

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I thought I’d do a series of blogs about our “method” or process. I probably get asked about how we do our work more often than any other question. It is a key question not only for clients but for our new employees.

I plan to touch on a few different aspects of our leadership development methodology, including our discovery process, assessment process, and design process. All of these are in some sense “proprietary” but none of them are easily imitated. I’m happy to open the kimono so-to-speak.

In this first post, I’ll focus on teaching vs training. We regularly use the word “teaching” to talk about our work. It is the most common word used internally to describe what we do when we are flying off on plane to go and do it, and probably equally common when talking with clients or prospective clients. We rarely use the word “training”, although most of our industry refers to itself this way.

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We are proud to announce our very own Barbara Ross-Denroche as a winner of the 2012 Enterprising Women of the Year Awards! The annual award recognizes the finest women entrepreneurs around the globe, and we at The Refinery could not be more excited to see Barb’s recognition from such a prestigious program for women business owners. Barb’s commitment to growth at The Refinery, her leadership in the community, and her dedication to giving back to support other women in business has distinguished her amongst hundreds of other nominees around the world. Her founding principles have and continue to be a commitment to building a values based firm which can be attributed to her success. The Refinery was recognized as one of two Canadian organizations to receive the award falling into the category for over $1 million and up to $5 million in annual sales revenues. Congratulations Barb!

For more information about the awards visit Enterprising Women:  http://www.enterprisingwomen.com/EWofYearAwards_2012.htm

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Recently, after finishing a successful week on a new pilot program with one of our fantastic partner clients in South Dakota, David, Lisa, and I drove 45 minutes out of our way to check out Mount Rushmore.  The sun was setting as we headed off into the Black Hills region.  By the time we arrived, we were surrounded by total darkness, the kind of darkness only found well beyond any municipal area.  Even the light of the full moon wasn’t enough to provide anything more than a view of a dark rocky mountain.  So the answer is no, Mt. Rushmore is not lit up at night.  We had a good laugh and travelled on, thinking at least we had a good story to tell.

Why is it that sometimes, we can encounter adversity and just laugh?  Other times, it can be much more of a struggle.   How do we build that resilience so that more often we laugh and learn instead of see things as failures?  How do we make sure that the “dark Mount Rushmores” in our life are not the end of the world?

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