Leadership Skills Development for Mining Supervisors and Managers
The Professional Supervisor Program Model
3 Day
Professional
Supervisor
Workshop
One on One
Field
Coaching
(Session 1)
Day 4
Prosup
Follow Up
Workshop
One on One
Field
Coaching
(Session 2)
Continuing
Distance
Coaching
(6 months)
“The Professional Supervisor” class is a three-day event that we limit to 20 people for any one course.
During this time we cover many topics of direct relevance to ‘any person who achieves results through the efforts of others’. At the end of three days, each person is asked to make Three Commitments for personal improvement based on the learnings from the class, and these are logged for future reference. Of note, each person receives a certificate from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, for which participants are given 18 Continuing Education Credits.
Field Coaching Sessions 1 & 2:
During these Phases of the Program we spend 1-2 full working shifts with each individual Supervisor and/or Manager. We observe each Supervisors’ performance in his/her normal work environment following which we have a formal close-out meeting to provide feedback. Each participant is evaluated for progress against their earlier commitments. We reinforce positive behaviors and habits and we offer opportunities for each supervisor to improve. Critically we ask each supervisor what they believe they need to do to be a better supervisor at this point, and this forms a continuing part of a new individual improvement plan for that person. This form part of the formal report to each person and to his immediate supervisor. This is used as a base throughout the next phase of the program.
Following the delivery of The Professional Supervisor Class and one round of field coaching we deliver a One-Day event to review the material, review where each person is in their improvement path, and celebrate identified successes. Each person relates to the group how he or she feels they have performed in the intervening period, and often each person receives feedback from the group as well. This session becomes a very positive experience for participants.
Upon completion of the Field Coaching Session 2 Phase of the Program, we start a once-monthly per person set of distance follow-up coaching, conducted via telephone or video call. This helps keep each person on target with their personal commitments and adds an important element of personal accountability and sustainability to the program.
Each program Element is important to the others; while we can and do customize our program in a variety of ways, we are quite reluctant to perform any one element without the benefit of the others. Any training event, no matter how well delivered (and we believe ours to be industry best), suffers from sustainability issues without the required amount of personal one-on-one work in the field with each person. We believe strongly that training supervisors is the single biggest lever any management team has to change performance levels in an organization. The Professional Supervisor Program consistently delivers excellent value to mining organizations.
All three Senior Partners are Mining Professionals who have held front-line supervision positions, all of the positions above this on the organizational chart, as well as GM and executive positions. We understand the critical importance of continuing development plans for Supervisors. Nearly all other positions have more defined training to make people ready for their positions; front line Supervisors are typically either promoted from operating or technical positions with essentially no leadership training in their previous lives or they are Degreed Professionals , again often without much previous leadership training. All of our Professional Supervisor Associates have a depth of industry-specific experience and we all relate really well to mining Supervisors. Our material is practical, backed up with experiential examples, and is applicable to all departments and multiple levels of Supervision and Management.
Our group of Associates is quite small, 6 people in total, and this is by design. Each Associate has been mining Professional and Executives for their entire careers, and we make sure we always deliver an excellent product for each implementation of the program. High quality Industry Professionals who are intimately familiar with the Program and the material will always be able to relate to mining people anywhere in the world, and this has been a key differentiator for our program. To continue with certainty regarding the level of quality we deliver, we limit Facilitators and Associates to a very small group.
The Professional Supervisor Program places a strong emphasis on workplace safety. We engage people repeatedly on the topic of PPE and SOP compliance, making them fully aware that the Front Line Supervisor is more responsible for these compliance levels than any other level in the organization. We give real practical examples for how supervisors can make the biggest possible impact in this area. This is a great opportunity to include and reinforce your organization’s safety program and materials, contributing to a high performance safety culture in your workplace. The Professional Supervisor Program routinely delivers excellent results in this area; typically we see a significant improvement in base compliance (driven by an improving culture) and therefore output safety statistics. Significant dollar value savings are delivered with just this piece of the Program.
We do a ‘familiarization trip’ prior to the delivery of the first ProSup class. Here we meet key individuals for short interviews to gain critical knowledge specific to each operation and to help personalize the class material. At this time we solicit and later integrate hot topics from the management team into the course material. Personalizing the material with pictures, key costs, safety systems, core-values information, personal development systems, etc. makes a large difference for participants. Again, it provides a real opportunity to reinforce these critical systems with your people as a group and later individually; as we all know, this opportunity can be difficult to find.
For the course events, we recommend people get mixed up as much as possible in terms of both departments and organizational levels. this aids in the development of team dynamics and fosters a sense of understanding of the different challenges that different people are facing. This can help inter-departmental alignment, which is one of the topics in the course material. People will come away from the course with a better appreciation of their role in the organization and how it relates to others, including their many peers.
We also offer other program elements, depending on a given individual situation:
- The Professional Leader, a class with supporting coaching elements to assist the development of middle management and senior management at sites
- The Professional Employee, a multi-piece class to encourage positive culture change in a group of employees
- Performance Management and Coaching, a 2-day class to help leaders learn and use performance management techniques
