SMART BUSINESS
MANAGEMENT INTELLIGENCE:
A KEY TO SUCCESSFUL LEADERSHIP
For quarries to succeed in today’s competitive world, a unilateral way of doing business is invalid. To get the best out of an operation and a workforce requires effective two-way communication. Mike Cameron explains the importance of management intelligence in the modern environment.
M
anagement Intelligence (MI) is the ability to lead “change” through effective communication and interpersonal awareness. It includes evaluating challenges, implementing strategies, empowering and developing team members, monitoring performance and constantly evaluating the situational relevance to future customer needs and business planning. MI is guided by numerous tenets of wisdom: • Dwight D Eisenhower (1944), who stated that leadership “is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because that person wants to do it”. • Gareth R Jones, whose Organizational Theory (1995) defines management in terms of its functions and objectives, ie: “Management is the planning, organising, leading, and controlling of resources to achieve goals effectively and efficiently.” According to Jones, efficient organisations manage resources to maximise their utility in the process of producing goods or services. Effective organisations achieve qualitative goals and targets that are customer-centric, such as satisfaction. • Peter Drucker (1994) summed up efficiency and effectiveness as doing things right. In other words, it is not a question of how much but rather how well the organisation achieves its goals. • The Value Cycle model, which identifies six key management commitments, six key management responsibilities and the organisation’s need to interrelate with their customers’ ever-changing requirements. The key components of MI are: • Competency in effective communication and interpersonal awareness. • Proficiency in the four behavioural competencies of the Plan, Organise, Lead and Control (POLC) model: Conceptual and Strategic (Thinking and Evaluating), and Tactical and Operational (Doing and Adapting). • An understanding of how to apply the 46
Quarry June 2019
Figure 1. The Plan, Organise, Lead and Control (POLC) model.
Value Cycle and utilise the process to transform and empower workplace teams, their interaction with the organisation’s management and others across the business, customers, suppliers, regulators and other important stakeholders.
POLC MODEL For the purposes of this article, the original POLC model (Figure 1) has been modified to suit the extractive industry’s prevailing management structure. Planning This is all about questions - “Where are we now? Where do we need to be? How do we get there?” - that will obviously differ in complexity, depending upon the person’s level of management within the organisation. The higher your status, the more the focus will be conceptual and strategic in nature, and at an operational level the more strategic and tactical it will be. At the operational level, questions may be as basic as: “What’s to be done? Who’s going to do it? How will they complete the task?” It is a manager’s key responsibility to articulate the daily, weekly and even monthly
plans associated with sales requirements, production output, blasted rock on ground or available raw material, the immediate steps in the quarry’s development, and any issues of importance to the safety, security and long-term wellbeing of employees and others associated with the operation’s success. Great planning is the foundation for both efficiency and effectiveness. At a higher level, management needs to regularly review its medium- to longer-term planning, while monitoring progress against expectations, as well as the business, social and governmental environments, to identify new opportunities for their organisation.
Organising An important management function is to organise the workplace in a way that enables groups of people to work together and achieve predetermined goals (established during the planning stage). To succeed, when measured in terms of effectiveness and efficiency, the organisation must deploy its resources (human, equipment and materials) in a way that maximises its ability to produce the best possible outcome.
