SAINT JOHN -- The managers at Irving Oil Ltd., a family-owned company known for its tankers, truck stops and refinery towers, are telling stories and painting with watercolours as they learn to lead.

The Saint John-based company has teamed up with the workplace learning provider Forum Corp. of Boston to teach leadership skills to its managers.

For many years, managers at Irving Oil have had the public image of grim-faced, tight-lipped people in white hard hats led by members of the Irving family driving for profits. But company executives say that has been a widespread misconception.

Instead, they insist Irving Oil has traditionally focused on corporate values that include a business strategy based on a rewarding working environment that shuns the use of job titles and stresses the importance of relationships with its staff, suppliers and customers.

Irving Oil has been known for its secrecy about its personnel policies. But top executive Kenneth Irving was one of the first to go through the leadership course and has been emphasizing the need for more such training as the company strives to compete with major international petroleum companies.

"We're competing in an industry with giants," says Daniel Goodwin, who works in communications with Irving. "We're never going to outspend ExxonMobil but our advantage has to be the people that we have. For a number of years, we weren't out there [in public] telling our story but the last few years, we've become a little better at that."

No one questions the success of 80-year-old Irving Oil, which began as a single service station in 1924 and is now an icon of Atlantic highways and operates Canada's largest refinery.

But there were plenty of queries from managers at the oil company in the past two years as about 150 of them were told to take off their hard hats and spend three days sharing ideas on how to improve their leadership skills.

Irving won't say how much it spent but company executives say the leadership training has helped them deal with issues ranging from discussing refinery operations to reducing e-mail volleys.

Greg Bambury, head of human resources, says the first challenge was to convince managers they should spend three days in small groups at a local resort on the Leadership for Results course.

"That was the risk taken by this organization because we had managers who asked if this was a wise investment of their time or the time of the company," Mr. Bambury says. "It could have been a terrible situation where people came back and said 'I knew it would be a waste of time.' But most people said it was the best program they had ever been on."

Mr. Irving and a group of senior executives formed the first group to go through the course and decided the training would be an investment in the company's people.

"Irving Oil has been successful for a long time because of a deliberate strategy of knowing who is going to do what," Mr. Bambury says. "We wanted to be explicit about our people strategy and talk about it the same way that we often talk about our marketing strategy and our financial strategy."

For the managers training to be leaders, the talking began on the first night after each small group of about a dozen of them arrived at the Algonquin Hotel in St. Andrew's, N.B.

Each manager was invited to talk about a personal experience with leadership. In another session, they talked about acts of courage they had witnessed or participated in. They also used the workshop sessions to talk about the elements of leadership and how their skills could contribute to Irving's business strategy.

Kevin Scott, who is responsible for the supply planning and trading group at the refinery, says the sessions allowed people to drop their work faces and communicate about things outside the world of gasoline and oil.

"It helped remind us that the people we work with have experiences and skills that they bring to work every day," he says. "You can work with somebody for 25 years and never have the opportunity to talk on those terms."

Tanya Chapman, who works in human resources for Irving, was overwhelmed by the stories of how people confronted illness and tragedy as well as their experiences with moral, physical and psychological courage.

"I was in awe of the level of courage of the people I worked with that I didn't even know about," she says.

The managers also learned about the "ladder of inference" -- steps taken to deal with a problem by putting together and assessing data to come to a conclusion. As well, the course stressed the five dimensions of leadership: aligning a vision with a corporate direction; engaging employees in the company's mission; enabling them to achieve Irving's mission; developing a commitment to team goals; and collaborating to reach the corporate goal.

Now it is common for Irving managers to talk about being at "the top of my ladder" -- meaning that they have decided how they will deal with a problem. They also talk of the need to collaborate on projects and reports, instead of arguing about who has the information and how it should be used.

"There is a whole language that we learned and now we're comfortable with it," Mr. Scott says. "Before, we might have been awkward talking about problems but now there is a self-awareness and a confidence level. You can talk about where you are on the ladder and cut to the heart of the discussion you want to have."

He recalls a recent incident where another manager prepared a report without asking him for input. "I reminded him of the need for collaboration and that was one of the goals we discussed. He had been on the course and knew what I was talking about and said he was sorry and I should have seen it. This way, we avoid confrontations and settle issues," Mr. Scott says.

For Ms. Chapman, the big surprise of the training session was the watercolours painting course. It came after discussion sessions about the nature of leadership and challenged many people with no artistic experience to try something new and display the result.

"It was a surprise for everyone there," she recalls. "It wasn't on the [written] agenda and we were asked to take off our shoes and go into a room where tables were set up with the water colours and an instructor who told you about brush strokes and technique.

"It was all about problem-solving and, in the end, the results looked pretty good. You had something you could take home and hang up in your house," she says, adding that the exercise also showed managers they could tackle a task they knew little about and achieve results.

Two months after taking the course, Irving managers returned to the small group sessions to talk about the practical applications of the course. Some acknowledge that it is hard to measure the success of the leadership courses.

Still, Irving was recently named North American refiner of the year by Hart Publications, a major energy sector publisher based in the United States. Irving is the first Canadian company to receive the annual award, which examines a refiner's environmental performance, ability to produce clean fuel and investment in facilities and employees.

And at the refinery, Saint John employees have been giving the company a higher rating for leadership in recent surveys.

Mr. Scott says he, for one, uses the lessons of the leadership training frequently.

"I've stopped using e-mail volleys where you just keep going back and forth and back and forth and nothing is going in the right direction. Now, I don't reply. I just go to see the person and I close the door and say that I want to talk about the issue and ask for the other person's perspective. I find I'm coming up with much better outcomes and a much better understanding of an issue," he says.

"This is really about shifting from being a manager to being a leader."

Five lessons learned in Irving course

1. Decisions are made by climbing the "ladder of inference."

At the base of the ladder, the manager and team of employees assembles and assesses data, then processes it, eliminates surplus information and, on the top rung, comes to a conclusion.

Colleagues are free to question how fast the ladder was climbed and whether rungs were skipped along the way.

2. Leadership is about achieving results with people and never at the expense of people.

3. Leadership is based on understanding what experiences and issues employees and customers bring to a situation and finding a solution that fits.

4. Through personal encounter sessions, managers learn to deal with problems directly rather than through endless e-mail volleys.

5. Irving aims to create an environment of approachability so managers can work with customers or employees as a team to solve environmental or business problems, rather than simply act on one person's marching orders.