One of the main objectives of my presence here in Iron Ore WA is to build on my leadership capabilities. I will tell you later in this post, how I managed to do so later in this post.
In 2009, few months after having been appointed as training superintendent, I enjoyed the opportunity of being the first national to be embedded in the group’s Front Line Leadership Program.
Actually, it was the pilot session of the Europe Middle East and Africa’s region. Facilitated by Karine Savigny, to whom I pay tribute for having extraordinarily taken me through the discovery of the mainstream frontline management world of our company.
What made this experience enjoyable the most was the fact that we had to gather 3 times in Richards Bay in South Africa, in one of our important operations there (RBM.) We were all young leaders from Rio Tinto’s African operations. We were all grateful to our leaders and more broadly, to our company, for having been selected and provided with resources to attend to such a program.
From Simandou, in addition to me, Tim Crokett and Andreas Stierand were part of the adventure. There is no doubt that this experience changed my way of working. It actually occurred at a time where I needed it the most as the organisation was having its training team structured. I enjoyed the opportunity of being an actor of this team structuration (recruited up to 6 team members, designed development plans for them, and coached as much as possible most of them to deliver on business goals) and also, as part of a broader corporate project, participated actively to the organization of large scale Health and Safety compliance trainings, as part of the HSEC standards implementation project, chaired by Andrew Taplin, at that time, General Manager Operations.
I must admit that participating to such a project, under Andrew’s leadership, is the starting point of what I call my informal leadership learning journey. Andrew is actually one of these leaders across the group that really embodies what the company values the most. I have been able to learn from him rigor, simplicity, openness, integrity, team spirit, respect, and also accountability.
Obviously, reporting to Catherine Taplin (I was reporting to her before Rob) and Rob Davies (my current manager in Simandou) has counted a lot to me in understanding the Rio Tinto leadership spirit.
If there is an advice to give to anyone like me whose objective is to continually improve, please pay attention to those leaders surrounding you in your workplace. There is a lot to learn from their style. Just be open-minded and pay attention to the way they do….
I believe that leadership learning by observation (and obviously analyzing what you observe and retrieve the most important features that will enable you to improve) is one of the most cost effective and efficient ways of improving leadership/management capabilities in organizations. This should be an area of focus from a talent management perspective…
When I arrived, in Perth by the end of January, early this year, I told to myself that will have to get as much as you can from the opportunity given the limited time you have been entitled to (4 months. )
So what I did on the leadership front was to meet as much leaders as possible to find out from them, their understanding of leadership and obviously, the way they practice it on their day to day professional journey. I can tell you that I have been able to see different way of doing things and it brought me to the conclusion that leadership more than ever, is a matter of style.
I have observed leaders in action here and, while all of them use mainstream management tools provided by the organisation, what I found the most important is the human factor. The more a leader is a people person, the most effective he/she will be in its role of enabling team members deliver as much of their abilities.
So the lesson I retained is that while you have to make sure that your team members deliver on their duties timely and effectively, it cannot be done at the expense of the duty of care from a leadership perspective. This is the only way to ensure that your workplace remain a good place to be for your team members.
