John Murray, Group Managing Director outlines the key to success. 

Observations

- Senior roles are becoming increasingly intricate and that some projects and leadership tasks are escalating in complexity faster than human beings are increasing in skill and experience.
- In the case of the former often the skills required to manage a large project are greater than required to run it. Using the Elliott Jacques stratum theory, if your aim is to be more competitive you need staff who can operate, and deliver outcomes, at a higher level than your competitors. Let us focus for a moment on projects, if you require a high level 5 to run a very large complex operation you may require a high level 6 to build the project. Most of your competitors will use level 5’s to build and operate. Statistically there is a 20-25% differential on annual salaries and output between level 5 and level 6 or the A team and the rest.
- Assume the spend on a Mega project is $20 billion, the 25% differential $5 billion. This then posses a simple question “do you have management team to do the task or simply warm bodies”. Even if you pay an additional $100 million for salaries for the A team the rate of return is more than reasonable.

Leadership

Setting the boundaries and in doing so focus on:

- Ensuring that there is clarity in one’s message and purpose.
- Being able to deal with ambiguity and simultaneously ensuring that your team are not confused by it.
- Manage complexity with clarity and have the skill to make timely and explainable decisions

Expectation of future leaders

- My expectation of a leader is someone who has the capacity to develop and maintain a team that is capable of delivering the required outcomes. To accomplish this the team needs to have: clarity of expectations; feedback; and an understanding of growth, personal and professional.

- Therefore selecting people placing them in the right job and providing feedback is critical and feedback (coaching) is the breakfast of champions and every champion has one.
- The individuality of the situation needs to be assessed, what do we do with families at Olympic Dam?
- We want the work team to focus 100% on the job, do we need to provide family support to ensure that. If we accept that there is not enough talent to go around, whether the times be good or bad, and also that the changing economic times will require different skills and experience the following questions come to mind.
- Are we setting people up for success? The public relations spiel versus reality.
- Are we using people effectively, is 40% of their time spent on mundane activities when the employment of a business analyst to support you might make the difference.

Inductions

Industry and commerce, including mining, employ a significant number of global citizens, both onshore and offshore, and I question as to whether we have given enough thought to the induction of employees (and families) into the country, into the community, into the organisation and into the role.

One interesting example of an induction is a very large Chemical company in US, new inductees are given a week to tour around the organisation, they are also given a booklet with 500 questions to answer. At the end of the week they have to present their observations to the executive team and any recommendations they have for improvement.

Industry Demand for Talent is unlikely to diminish in the short term

– Major mining companies will need leadership and staff to see them through these troubled times.
– The State Owned companies in Russia, China, India, Brazil and other countries will return to the market seeking globally experienced people to lead there companies and technical teams.
– The impact of the ‘lost engineering generation’ is still with us and may be exacerbated by the current economic woes.
– ‘Talent Risk’ will increasingly be considered a critical issue by Boards and and senior executives.

And the demand will be exacerbated by:

– The fact that English speaking, talented, mobile individuals  have already largely been scooped up.
– Many younger employees are less mobile and more inclined to opt for the safe haven of home and the benefits of education, life style and security.
– For the younger “work” is viewed as a commodity and a means to an end rather than a career.
– The impact of the “boomers” leaving the workforce.
– The old world rigidity of employment terms and condition doesn’t meet the needs of generation x and y.