Management Consulting | Improving Supervisory Leadership Capability

Management consulting

Affecting skillsets, toolsets and mindsets

Workplace Culture Change

At OIM we believe your workplace culture is a competitive advantage and it’s unique. Companies can copy systems, processes and services, but organisational culture cannot be duplicated. We partner with clients to ensure your workplace culture does in fact have a competitive edge and that you are geared for optimal performance at all levels.

Our Culture Alignment Programme (CAP) has been designed to do just this. Drawing on more than 30 years of insights and learning across multiple sectors, CAP serves as a blueprint to integrate all key people management practices and operational processes, guide leaders to become culture creators, and steer the entire change lifecycle from start to finish.

In short: It’s a roadmap to a high-performing organisational culture

No matter how well designed your strategic plan, it will miss the target unless your leaders and teams share the appropriate culture. Ultimately, it’s about how your people show up and conduct business – every day – that will determine strategy implementation.

Organisational Transformation Blueprint

Senior Leadership Development

An organisation is only as strong as its leaders – they are the custodians of strategy implementation, culture change and daily performance. Senior managers play a particularly vital role in this area, and must deliver much more than their standard management functions. They lead by example and set the tone for the rest of the organisation. – they provide direction, supply resources, motivate, build trust, influence the mindsets and behaviour of first-line leaders and their teams, and constantly coach on the importance of teamwork to achieve the excellence required for continuous bottom-line performance.

Our Senior Management Development Programme (SMDP) takes these managers-of-other-leaders on a six-month blended-learning journey to master this challenging task: What type of leader am I? Why will people follow me? Where am I taking them? How am I going to get there?

Customised to each client’s operational needs, this programme includes comprehensive competency assessments to determine developmental needs, and a series of practical master classes delivered in block-release fashion, supported by practical assignments and coaching to ensure entrench the new learnings. Benefits include increased employee engagement and productivity, finding new and innovative ways of working, developing leaders of the future and retaining your top talent.

The SMDP forms part of OIM’s Supervisory Development Programme (SDP) and integrates with our Culture Alignment Programme (CAP). The latter prepares the proverbial soil, while the SMDP “plants the seeds” for senior leaders to be the culture creators required for sustainable business performance.

Productivity Improvment

Our team of seasoned consultants partners with clients to improve efficiencies and throughout, reduce operating costs and resolve operational constraints.

Services include:

The War Room: A cross-functional framework that provides all senior leaders with a routine, highly visual perspective of target execution as it unfolds in real-time at an operational level. It’s a quick review of the entire value chain for the previous period and an expected performance outlook for the next period, focused on “achieving monthly targets”, which provides a level of comfort to the upcoming period and allows for the implementation of decisive interventions when required.

A visible improvement in quality and service, reduced unit costs, faster turnaround times, and increased operational compliance and control.

Safety Mindset

OIM’s Safety Mindset Programme develops the behaviours of supervisors and first-line leaders required to ensure zero harm.

Through a combination of diagnostics, training and operational coaching we guide supervisors and their teams to proactively regulate their safety behaviours. The programme combines:

Diagnostics: Measure the overall safety profile of individuals and their psychological fitness level; an indicator that screens the psychological fitness of employees to promote safe behaviour and work performance.
Training: Interactive learning around the importance of safety, self-mastery, fostering the appropriate safety mindset, recognising unsafe risks, and empowering supervisors to guide their teams towards becoming safety leaders and embedding a safety culture.
Coaching: We coach leaders and supervisors on a co-designed safety leadership action plan, to apply the right behaviours and processes to positively impact performance and create a safe work environment.

Research shows that 80% of safety incidents and violations are born out of a poor safety mindset, which leads to unsafe leadership practices and behaviour. Our safety mindset intervention addresses all of these factors in a practical, interactive way, to work towards “zero harm”.

90-Day Target Attainment Programme (TAP)

This offering is geared towards achieving significant safe productivity gains within the shortest time frame reasonable. It focuses on ensuring that underperforming areas are turned around through a mixture of daily instructive coaching, problem-solving techniques and implementation.

By revamping basic operating functions like daily meetings, visual management, shift management books and cross-functional meetings, the focus is placed on how to achieve daily success through a structured approach and an engaged workforce. Added to this mix is an emphasis on an enabling culture which creates focus and willingness of staff.

The 90-Day TAP is rapid and vigorous and is geared towards achieving the daily / weekly / monthly targets set out according to the plan. This translates into improved measurable operational KPIs, leading to increased profitability. In a recent client engagement, we saw an improvement of 31% of trammed tons, 79% improvement of meters drilled.

TAP is a great lead into OIM’s Supervisory Development Programme as it stabilises the operations, while the SDP focuses on the relevant behaviour changes needed to sustain and improve on the benefits previously achieved. The benefits gained from TAP should pay for the supervisory programme.

Latest insights

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The mine’s management approached OIM in 2022 to assist in a rapid safe production turnaround.

Case Study: Supervisory Development

OIM was first approached by Kumba in 2015 to implement our Supervisory Development Programme (SDP). At the time the commodity price created a challenging environment, but the pilot delivered such positive...

Case Study: Operational & People Transformation

In 2015, PPC Zimbabwe was building a new factory in the Southern Region (Harare), which would need to be staffed.