PUMALO AFRICA was invited to participate in the RISKWELL 2008 conference & exhibition. As a facilitator, speaker and business leader Robin E Pullen has engaged hundreds of people in organizations ranging from mining, manufacturing, engineering/construction, healthcare services and departments of the public service.
Robin Pullen presented a paper for the RISKWELL 2008 International Risk and Wellness conference that addressed the roles of Leadership and Culture in developing an organizational culture that cultivates a sustainable climate of safety.
Observations were drawn from their implementation of transformation and productivity interventions, where similar content and goals were presented across different industries, yet they noted different degrees of success in achieving sustainable culture of safety in the workplace.
The paper presented a number of questions about the Leadership and Culture dynamic that can successfully create a sustainable climate of safety. A research project that carefully examined 200 well-established management practices as they were employed over a ten year period in 160 companies proposes that what matters most with regard to the issues of leadership and culture is a strong grasp of the business basics. Without exception companies that outperformed their industry peers excelled at what they call the four primary management practices - strategy, execution, culture and structure, and learned to support those with the mastery of any two of the four secondary management practices - talent, innovation, leadership and mergers & partnerships.
Research suggests that nurturing trust relationships with key stakeholders creates emotional value so that organisations are able to engage with their communities. The ‘Levels of Work’ theories of Dr Jacques Elliot, proposes that we can match human capacity with the role complexity of a task required through the time-span measurement. This translates in practice to "the use of discretion and judgement in the making of decisions, in carrying out a task, backed by knowledge, skills, temperament, and wisdom, driven by values." Research into the domain of mental processing indicates that it is mental processing which holds the key to achieving more frequent success in transformation.
The paper then examined if Transformational Leadership can stretch across levels of work to charter the challenge of safety and change in an organisation which is to systematically and deliberately influence the human and organizational variables associated with complex change to achieve the desired sustainable safety results.
Robin Pullen is the founder of PUMALO AFRICA, a learning and education enterprise that partners locally with SMME and international organizations. The company’s clients have included Anglo America, Goldfields Limited and small and middle market enterprises in the South African market. Robin leads the PUMALO AFRICA team as they support clients through motivational speaking, industrial theatre performances across all levels of work, full sensory experiential learning facilitation and peak performance advising and consulting services. Today the PUMALO AFRICA team deliver an average of 20 interventions a month and have touched the lives of over 50 000 people in southern Africa through their multi-year contracts over the last three and some years.
Read more on the involvement of Pumalo Africa in Workplace Safety and Safety Leadership