Creating The New Face of Mining through Breakthrough Leadership
Dr Eric Seedorff, Mr Robert Mueller, Dr Steve Zaffron, Dr Mary Poulton
The global mining industry is in a challenging position where the nature of mining and the business constraints of a commodity industry have traditionally required long-term structured planning and top-down organizations. Yet the requirements of corporate social responsibility from stakeholder engagement to workforce diversity require a more collaborative and agile approach to culture change. Mining must present a “new face” to attract talent, be accepted by communities, and be valuable to investors. A different approach to change management in the mining industry is to examine how to create a shared ownership and commitment to meeting the business concerns of the enterprise by increasing the focus and accountability of the workforce. When new insights into how people work effectively together are revealed, the organization moves beyond compliance to authentic accountability for realizing the organization’s vision and goals. This approach, pioneered by the Vanto Group and recently applied with the Lowell Institute for Mineral Resources, has been field tested globally for 25 years with proven results in achieving sustained improvements in meeting operational and corporate social responsibility goals for mining companies around the world. We present the process and results for achieving step changes from project teams to large corporations.
