A mentor is simply put – someone who helps us get unstuck, a non-judgmental person who listens with an open mind to help us steer clear of the mistakes they themselves made (and wish they’d had a mentor to help avoid). A mentor helps us accelerate our growth by showing us a clearer path with fewer distractions and obstacles.

People with mentors perform better, advance in their careers faster, and even experience more work-life satisfaction. The problem is often that people don’t know how to find a mentor or establish a relationship.

It is important to first write down your career goals and to list some of the biggest obstacles to achieving them. This will help you decide what type of mentor you should be looking for. Maybe you need to develop new skills, expand your network in a specific sector, or build confidence to have some tough conversations. By first understanding where you want to be, as well as the biggest opportunities and gaps to getting there, you’ll identify how a mentor can truly be helpful to you.

Equipped with your goals and what you need to help achieve them, think through how a mentor can help. Write out the type of mentor that can help you seize your biggest opportunities and/or navigate your challenges. Be specific here. Perhaps you need someone that can help you accomplish a project, make introductions to people at a certain level within a specific industry, or coach you through a tough negotiation. Make sure to also include the “why” – just like companies want potential hires to understand the bigger purpose of their firm, explain why mentoring you will tap into something bigger.

Mentors can be from anywhere. They can be from your LinkedIn network, professional connections, or people you’ve met at conferences. It’s important to remember that while people are certainly busy, being asked to be a mentor is a massive compliment. People might say no, but it will be a positive exchange and you shouldn’t be shy about thinking big and asking, even if you think there is no way the person can find time for you. Let them be the judge of that.

ODI coaches can help you to develop, lead, and inspire productive workplace teams, ensure that all team members are involved, obtain operational targets and to implement improvements and corrective actions.

To contact us, click here.

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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.

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The CTP Group of companies, is recognised as one of the largest publishers and printers of books, magazines, newspapers and commercial print in South Africa. They are involved in various fields of publishing and printing i.e. newspapers, magazines, commercial print, book printing, stationery, packaging and labels, as well as manufacturing ink for web presses.

CTP enrolled members of staff to complete the NQF Level 3: Supervision/Management for energised workteams, learnership.

ODI’s National Certificate in Management – Supervision for energised workteams (NQF Level 3, Learnership Code: 23Q230027371203), aims at equipping every first-line manager with the essential knowledge and skills necessary, to develop, lead and inspire productive workplace teams and to ensure that all team members are developed to their full potential.

The manager of the first-line manager needs to coach his/her first-line managers, and is, as such, involved in the programme. A simple-to-use benchmarking system forms the basis for ongoing coaching and development.

Comprising of 8 modules, ODI’s MD, Huibie Jones will be facilitating this learnership.

The focus of our operations management and improvement coaching system, will always be to ensure performance improvement.  It introduces or reinforces knowledge and skills in three areas, namely:

• Operational.
• Mini-business management.
• People management.

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The 20 Keys is an intuitive evaluation and rating system that measures operational performance and guides ongoing improvement activities.

Recently, at ODI’s strategy meeting held at The African Pride Irene Country Lodge in Gauteng, Keys 2 & 15 of the 20 Keys system for continuous improvement, featured very strongly.  Goal alignment and setting objectives were the focus of the meeting.

To read the article about Key 2 at the recent strategy meeting, click here.

Key 15 of the 20 Keys system for continuous improvement, is all about Skill Versatility and Cross Training. It is about ongoing implementation of learning and development as part of the business strategy, to develop individuals to have more skills, and higher levels of competencies. Apart from individual development, the aim is also to have flexible teams, with a high level of skill versatility within, and between all teams; in production and supporting functions.

They key concepts are:

• Flexibility for teams and the organisation, and skill development opportunities for individuals
• Skill versatility through cross training
• Making work easier, to facilitate on-the-job cross training
• Start within teams with skill development, then address opportunities between teams
• Tracking progress of skill development with skills matrices

The ODI team rolled up their sleeves and everyone worked or coached on a module of the NQF5 Productivity Certificate to ensure Continual Professional Development. ODI’s National Certificate in Productivity consists of one Management System Module, to create a common vision, and eight practical Modules, to make operations more competitive. To read more about this qualification, click here.

The benefits of coaching can improve the workforce of a company, improve employee morale, and help achieve organisational goals. Effective coaching involves building a relationship with trust, motivation, and accountability.

At ODI, our Operations Management and Improvement Coaching process is an ongoing process, and aims to give guidance, opportunities, and support. The focus of our coaching process will always be to ensure performance improvement.

ODI’s strategy meeting was a great success and reinforced the goals we set out for ourselves and to encourage the work it takes to accomplish them.        

To read more about ODI’s Continuous Operations Improvement System, click here.

Author: Huibie Jones: MD at ODI

ODI is a globally represented management and productivity consulting company. Our mission is to provide holistic solutions that promote people development and operations excellence. We do this through training, coaching and consulting, supported by a range of excellent products.

The post ODI and Key 2 & 15, of the 20 Keys system for continuous improvement (Part 2) appeared first on ODI.

• Quality
• Cost effectiveness
• Delivery
• Safety and
• Morale and Motivation (QCDSM).

ODI’s mini-business concept is about such first-line teams. One objective is to establish effective team-working in teams in order to achieve organisation objectives, and to continuously strive to do better in terms of QCDSM.

One of my first questions when visiting a mini-business is usually:

1. “What is your business about?” followed by

2. “How are you doing in your business?”

The usual answers entail a description of the function and objectives of the team (business) with, also the usual answer, that is it going well with the business. The next question will then be:

3. “Why are you saying that it is going well, please explain to me, and show me?”

At this point I would like team members to explain and show the mini-business Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for their QCDSM scorecard. As it is a best practice for mini-business performance management to have a Visual Performance Management (VPM) system in place, this is done in the mini-business area where various graphs and other types of visual displays are kept on a board, or other medium. With this discussion, I often find that “it is going well” is not exactly the case, as KPIs do not show an on-target performance, or the trends with KPIs are not favourable.

This got me thinking about what kind of understanding we want, and the levels of understanding we can use when coaching is done for first-line team leaders and team members. Below is a first effort to describe the four levels of competency.

• Level 1. The person can read and interpret graphs or other forms of visual displays, and can indicate whether it is on target, or not (whether it is “good or not”).
• Level 2. The person can explain what the KPIs measure, and what it means
• Level 3. The person knows the root cause(s) of why a KPI is not on target, and the description of the root cause is aligned with that of the other team members and the team leader.
• Level 4. The person is aware of what is being done to address the root cause(s), can explain the actions, and indicate it on an action plan.

Levels 3 and 4 measure the real understanding, and are also about how problem-solving is done in the team, and whether there is alignment on issues to focus on. That is, has a root cause analysis been done with involvement of team members, and are they and management aligned on what should be done to address it?

I often do a fun test by asking some team members, the team leader and his/her manager to, individually, write down the root cause(s) and actions for improvement. I then gather this and compare it, thereby doing a simple test of goal alignment, which can be quite insightful.

I recently did a fun test where a Managing Director and some of his senior managers visited some mini-businesses with me. Before the visit, I asked him, his senior managers and the team leaders what the key issues are to focus on for improvement? The MD was quite surprised to learn that what he thought were not fully aligned with his senior managers’ thinking, and that there was quite a misalignment between them and the team leaders. Also, when we then did the walk-about, we did not see the identified focus prominently in the mini-businesses.

Mini-businesses are real businesses – we need to see the real KPIs, aligned to organisational objectives, based on real data and facts, and understood by all.

Author: Johan Benadie: Director at ODI

To read more about ODI’s Continuous Operations Improvement System, click here.

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The third myth in our series of Myths vs Reality is: “Suggestion boxes are effective for obtaining ideas for improvement”

The reality is, suggestion boxes might be useful if you use it for comments about a new product name, or proposals for a new menu in the canteen, but practical experience indicates that it is not effective at all for generating ideas for operations improvement.

I usually make a point of looking in boxes wherever they are used, and find almost 100% of the time that they are empty and dusty. Where there are the odd one or two pieces of paper, it is often about a complaint, or a suggestion about something somebody else must do. My experience, which includes speaking to people about their perceptions, indicates that there are a few reasons for such boxes not working effectively, namely:
1. After implementation of suggestion boxes, feedback is slow, or non-existent, and people simply   give up, as they see the box as a black hole into which things disappear.
2. Ideas are sometimes taken by the person opening the box, and are used as his/her idea.
3. It can create suspicion; imagine if you are a supervisor, and you see a person scribbling on a  piece of paper, and putting it into a box – you may think that he/she is complaining about you.
4. The most important reason is that no learning takes place; an idea is put into a box, and team members do not see it, so they cannot build upon it, or get stimulated to also think about something.

I believe that the most effective approach is to start with a simple, visual, system. In the case of a first-line team, the first-line manager should be the “walking suggestion box”; people should tell him/her about their suggestions, for example, during team meetings, and he/she should then record it on a visual register, for all to see. It is then the first-line manager’s (and his/her manager’s) responsibility to give feedback on it, and to support its implementation. With such an approach, it is important that first-line managers be coached on how to stimulate thinking about improvements in the team. The worst way in which to get a suggestion is probably to ask the question “Do you have any suggestions?”!

To read more about ODI’s Operations Management and Improvement Coaching, click here.

Author: Johan Benadie, Director at ODI, and a 20 Keys practitioner for 22 years

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• saving time and money,
• improving quality and safety

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