Leadership development services for manufacturing

Wipfli’s Leadership Essentials emphasizes the core of strong leadership in manufacturing environments: the ability to foster trust and guide team development. Our program equips leaders with practical tools they can apply on the shop floor and back office, helping them integrate new leadership techniques into their routines while tracking their growth over time.

Leadership Essentials is built for the realities of your business and:

• Offers support at every level: Our sessions are designed to connect with leaders across your business, promoting trust-based, authentic leadership.
• Fits into your workflow: Delivered in focused, four-hour sessions every other week over 16 weeks, our program minimizes operational disruption while delivering meaningful change.
• Drives hands-on application: Leaders are encouraged to immediately apply what they learn on the job, reinforcing skills through real-time practice in their daily operations.

Our essential topics           

We take up to 24 leaders on a journey that covers:

• Defining leadership and being an authentic leader.
• Communicating effectively.
• Partnering for performance.
• Delivering feedback.
• Coaching for growth.
• Delegating with purpose.
• Building a high-performing team.

Your results           

Participants walk away with tools that make an immediate impact, including:

• Clear strategies for performance and retention: They learn how to set measurable expectations, reduce employee turnover, manage operational change and align leadership actions with business goals.
• Trust-building skills: From navigating tough conversations to communicating effectively, leaders gain practical techniques to foster stronger relationships.
• A personalized growth roadmap: Each participant develops a customized action plan tailored to their role and challenges, helping them continue growing long after the program ends.

Wipfli’s team development solutions are built to strengthen collaboration and accountability across your manufacturing teams, leading to faster decisions and better results.

We follow a structured, three-phase approach that targets key drivers of team effectiveness:

• Recognizing workstyle differences: Team members gain insight into their operating styles and obstacles to achieving their personal and team goals.  
• Building high-performance habits: We guide teams in developing mutual trust, encouraging open dialogue, aligning around shared objectives and taking ownership of outcomes.
• Driving alignment and execution: Teams learn to focus on top business priorities and use their collective strengths and resources to execute precisely and consistently.
• Creating organizational clarity: We help teams align on your business’s most critical goals and harness team tools and resources to empower effective execution.

Wipfli offers industry-tailored coaching services and peer groups that can help your leadership transform.

Peer groups

Wipfli’s manufacturing peer groups are designed to foster professional growth, problem-solving and strategic collaboration. These sessions connect manufacturing leaders with like-minded peers to exchange insights, navigate challenges and accelerate leadership development in a high-value setting.

We host two groups to meet the needs of leadership across your business:

• The senior executive roundtable for presidents, manufacturing executives and C-suite level leaders.
• Leadership forums for young and upcoming leaders.

Leadership coaching

We help leaders excel with support that addresses their specific skill deficits and helps them grow in the aspects critical to leading others. Whether you need to develop high performers, new leaders or leaders who haven’t reached their full potential, we offer a three-step process that can help them transcend:

1. Discover: Your leaders will gain a deeper understanding of how they operate and their core values, beliefs and strengths. We also help them identify the behaviors that are obstacles to their success.
2. Conquer resistance: We help leaders challenge beliefs and assumptions about their leadership and recruit a team to support their development.
3. Transcend: We help leaders find their edge and leverage it so that they can transcend their limitations. We also enable them to foster an ongoing, relentless curiosity through a growth mindset.

We offer two coaching options to match your business’s needs:

• Rise: This accessible, 90-day program helps leaders rapidly realize their capacity to own and drive change for businesses facing transformation or innovation.
• Transform: Over six to 12 months, we provide personalized, one-on-one coaching that helps leaders strengthen essential capabilities — such as executive presence and emotional intelligence — so they can lead with confidence and clarity.

Wipfli helps you make data-driven workforce decisions with talent assessment tools that empower you to hire the right staff and place them where they can perform at their best. We help you leverage people data using assessments, including:

Predictive Index

As a certified partner of Predictive Index (PI), Wipfli helps you use this powerful talent optimization platform to make informed hiring decisions, reduce turnover and structure teams for peak performance. With PI’s behavioral and cognitive assessments, you gain actionable insights to align talent with the demands of your operations.

EQ-i 2.0

Wipfli supports manufacturing organizations in using the Emotional Quotient Inventory (EQ-i 2.0) to identify and develop high-potential leaders. We help you interpret and leverage EQ-i 2.0 results to:

• Design targeted development plans for staff across your business.
• Identify individuals with the emotional intelligence needed to lead effectively in any environment.

360-degree assessments 

Wipfli helps you implement 360-degree assessments that gather input from peers, direct reports and supervisors, so leaders better understand how they’re perceived. This insight helps identify strengths and growth areas, enabling the creation of tailored development plans and support that can ultimately help you:

• Improve leadership effectiveness.
• Boost team engagement.
• Enhance overall operational performance.