Rio Tinto: Knocking down the ivory tower

Where can an organisation find an edge when its competitors are deploying similar technologies and providing similar quality products?

For Arnaud Soirat, the answer was simple: people.

Arnaud was the COO of Rio Tinto, the world’s second largest metals and mining corporation. Myself and Adam Canwell , from EY, interviewed him for the fourth episode of a new mini series on transformation “turning points” for my Leadership 2050 podcast.

Arnaud was tasked with leading a transformation which would standardise processes across Rio Tinto’s complex global mining operations (it employs 50,000 people). This was through its “Safe Production System” to improve how it operated assets, managed performance and helped the workforce innovate. The aim was to become the “best operator” in its industry, and it was one of the successful case studies pinpointed in our latest transformation research released earlier this year.

To become the “best operator”, the instinct might have been to focus purely on the technicalities. But that, Arnaud told us, is what Rio Tinto had done in previous transformations - and while it resulted in short-term upticks in performance, the gains were never sustained.

So this time round, he told us he wanted to change the company’s “limiting mindsets” such as relying on external experts to design new production systems. Of course, technical know-how is vital. But when a transformation is executed from an ivory tower, as Arnaud called it, it’s less likely to result in buy-in from the workforce. This is why he flipped it round and approached this transformation from the bottom up, “where we asked people closest to the operations to design the best practices based on their experience - and with the help of some experts”.

By putting humans at the centre of the transformation, Arnaud created a different set of assumptions about what would create success. It brings to mind what Richard Howell of ANZ said in the previous podcast about a leader’s technical expertise on its own not being enough. He said the “sauce” on top - how a leader brings the best out of people - is what delivers true high performance. Arnaud is another leader who grasped this. Here are five insights I took from our conversation.

1) Top-down transformations don’t sustain high performance

“In order to progress in this transformation, we decided to study the past transformations and programmes we had for improving productivity, so we could learn from the past. And it's fair to say we had mixed results. We did improve productivity, but we struggled with sustaining the gains. And what we found is in the past, all of our transformations were top-down, driven by experts: internal and consultants. And we focused a lot on improving our systems, but fundamentally we were doing the transformation to our people and then we found that it was not sustainable.”

2) Be physically present to pick up early indicators of a transformation’s progress

“I ask people on the shop floor when I go and visit a site: ‘Is your job getting simpler? Is your job getting easier?’ And if the answer is no, people can tell me whatever they want in terms of how good a job we're doing in implementing our new operating system.”

3) Inclusion can address weaknesses

“One of the common mindsets we wanted to address was lack of collaboration in our organisation. Therefore we chose to involve representatives from each product group or each business in our organisation so we would build the system together. That started to create more collaboration and therefore it started to address one of the mindsets that we thought was limiting.”

4) Introspection is a winning condition of leading a transformation

“One of my learnings out of 35 years of experience in managing operations over the world [is] whenever I'm not happy with the performance of a business, I ask myself: ‘What is it that I can do differently? What is it in my mindset and behaviour I need to change, which is going to help my team change themselves and perform better?’”

5) Do the transformation with the workforce, not to

“The minute you want to accelerate the pace of transformation, you have the risk of falling into a top-down approach and that is counterproductive. There is a great saying in Australia: ‘You can bring a horse to the river, you won't force the horse to drink.’ Fundamentally, you have to touch the hearts and minds of your people and make them comfortable to give it [the transformation] a go. To try new things in a non-threatening environment so they can experiment by themselves, the benefit to them, the benefit to their team and the benefit to the performance of their business. And sometimes you have to accept: go slow to go fast later.”

There is much more in the full interview, so please listen. You can find the podcast in the following places:

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/arnaud-soirat-rio-tinto/id1587156278?i=1000657238995

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1ntrKUZfp0Np4prmoeesZb

Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/20e08961-df52-4410-ae7b-5a8b3c01483c/episodes/ec400a79-ce3d-4d85-8bf5-126356b5fbfb/leadership-2050-arnaud-soirat-rio-tinto

A message from the author

Thank you for reading the 64th edition of the Leadership 2050 newsletter. As CEO of Transcend.Space and senior fellow of management practice at the University of Oxford’s Sa?d Business School, my work, research and teaching focuses on how leaders transcend 21st century challenges such as disruptive technology change, the climate crisis and creating diverse and inclusive environments… alongside the ongoing challenge of delivering profitable growth. Through Transcend.Space and Sa?d, where I direct the Oxford Advanced Management & Leadership Programme, I have worked with leaders from many geographies, industries and governments. All this has given me a deep understanding of how good leaders create value - and bad leaders destroy it. Never before has this topic been so important on a global stage, hence why I am undertaking this work.