Marius Pretorius, Farm Manager at the Rooipoort pig farm of GHB (Pty) Ltd, recently completed the ODI Skills Programme for Management and Leadership Development.
The ODI Skills Programme for Management and Leadership Development, focuses on strengthening emotional intelligence and coaching skills and aims at middle management level. It is a practical programme covering two unit standards with a total of 12 credits. Learning is immediately applied in the workplace, both in terms of emotional intelligence skills as well as the coaching of line managers, with active coaching from the skills programme facilitator.
Marius says: “The programme really helped me to better understand important management skills and apply it in the workplace. It supported our farm team to get closer as a team and improve the operations performance of the farm. Going forward I will focus on improving further on the skills learned, and specifically:
- Listening more intently to my team’s opinions, inputs and ideas
- Providing regular positive feedback and giving recognition
- Coaching my supervisors based on the process and emotional intelligence skills I learned
I facilitated and coached Marius. It was highly satisfying to see him absorb the learning and making a real effort to apply the skills learned in the workplace. At the beginning we discussed the management approach of “being hard on standards but soft on people”. With a very small team on the farm, caring for a large amount of pigs, best practice standard operating procedures, with people fully and always adhering to it, are important. But the focus of management should be equally strong on caring for people; in a small team it is even more important that there are:
- teamwork,
- ownership of work,
- participation with ideas for improvement, and
- every person always giving his/her best, also when no one is around.
Marius has developed significantly over the last few months and is effectively applying the learning in terms of emotional intelligence skills and coaching, with the results of that effort also visible in the operations performance of the farm.
Rooipoort farm was recently again awarded the prestigious annual Topigs/Norsvin trophy for best Sow Unit.
Looking at the current team spirit and operations performance of the farm, it looks like Marius and his team will not let go easily of the trophy in 2021!
Author: Johan Benadie – Director at ODI
To read more about ODI’s Management and Leadership Development Coaching Programme, click here.