FROM A LEADERSHIP PERSPECTIVE ,

WE WANT LEADERS TO BE APPROACHABLE

AND BE COMFORTABLE

WITH ADMITTING

MISTAKES OR NOT HAVING THE ANSWERS TO ALL

QUESTIONS . comfortable with admitting mistakes or not having the answers to all questions .

It ’ s those kinds of things that make people see that you ’ re real – what you say is what you mean , you make mistakes and when you say something , you keep your promise .

In our company , you must respect every single person for who they are , what they are and what they stand for . It ’ s just common sense . People are people . We love people for who they are , so we try and bring that across .

Tell us more about your organisation ’ s commitment to socio-economic development and why this is so important ?

We ’ ve created a trust where a portion of the company is owned by our black employees – in the context of South Africa that includes people of Indian origin , black and mixed race – so a total of 30 % of the profits will go through to the trust , to previously disadvantaged communities .

We also try , where we can , to help with schools in South African townships . We supported a small primary school , which takes kids and tries to give them a decent education . One of the biggest problems in South Africa is the education system is not effective as we would like it to be , specifically in poorer , impoverished areas .

From an employment equity policy , we ’ re striving to become more diverse in our consultants . Right now , we are at about 60 % diverse with our consultants . But in total , including leadership and support staff , we are on just over 40 % diversity so we are continuing to move towards that .

We ’ re not hiring to try and fill quotas . We ’ re hiring people because they ’ re good at the job and that ’ s what we love .

It ’ s exceptionally exciting to be able to walk into a room and it doesn ’ t matter who sits in front of you , you can pick skills from a whole range of diverse groups in South Africa .

How important is technology to your overall business development strategy ?

Technology is a major player towards our strategy . OIM Consulting is moving towards digitising nearly all its processes and key offerings . We have two exciting projects on the go ; one is the gamification of our competency assessments , including Augmented Reality ( AR ), and the building of our supervisory development platform which is cloud based and will house all our supervisory methodology and IP . We call the system ‘ Raeda ’, which means ‘ coach ’ in Latin .

This year we created an IT department within OIM Consulting whose specific focus is to develop the relevant technologies for our business .

What do the next 12 months have in store for OIM and how do you prepare your forward strategy ?

We are very excited about the next year . We ’ re looking at partnerships with two global mining companies . We want to take our offerings and methodologies outside of Africa , looking at North America and Australasia .

We were also approached by a company on the Australian Stock Exchange and the South African Stock Exchange that would like to partner with us on our methodologies for them .

We are on quite a strong growth trajectory , on the back of mining . We are building a supervisory development platform , so automating our whole process . �

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