Recently, Safety MastersTM was invited to present our program to a management team in the mining and minerals sector. At one point, one of the managers asked, “what exactly do you mean by social processes?”.
“Systems Leadership[1] is a theoretical model developed by Ian MacDonald and associates[2]. It enables the leaders in an organization to create the conditions where people at all levels can work productively to their potential. It uses sound principles about human behaviour to create models of good leadership, organizational strategy, systems design and social process.”
All organizations encompass 3 aspects of work: commercial, technical, and social. However, it has been our collective experience that most organizations fail to pay strategic importance to developing their social processes. Yet it is through people, that change, innovation, and performance happens! And the social aspect is as important as the other two when it comes to achieving true organizational effectiveness.
Developing social processes goes beyond establishing day-to-day Human Resources Management practices. It is a form of “strategic engineering” in which all aspects of work including the required relationship elements are well defined. It is about taking the guesswork out of work so that workers and leaders alike can focus on the important tasks.
And to be clear…. developing organizational social processes is the work of LEADERSHIP and not just that of HR!
Our top-down approach to assessing the social elements in our Maturity Model is integrated across both the commercial (e.g. financial) and technical (e.g. production) elements with Safety Leadership and Culture being central in everything.
Safety MastersTM is not a Leadership Development program. It is a consultant-led process that helps Leaders to assess current organization capabilities and to develop and take ownership of a custom action plan to work towards Mastery (organizational effectiveness). While the emphasis is on Safety, our unique Maturity Model also addresses underlying themes on Culture, Leadership, and Social Process that enable effective, safe, and productive operations.
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