NEPEAN has brought more than 500 delegates from across the globe to provide unique leadership training.
In the ivy league halls of Harvard Business School (HBS), a select group of students are invited to attend the President’s Program in Leadership.
This course is only open for presidents, or chief executive officers of a corporation of significance, who attend campus annually for at least nine years to graduate.
NEPEAN chief executive officer Miles Fuller is a graduate of the program and was so inspired by what he learned that he decided to bring Harvad style training to his business.
In 2011, he invited Professor Boris Groysberg from HBS travelled to Australia for to conduct HBS-style training sessions with the NEPEAN senior executives.
Related stories:
- Stacked up: How Nepean is building a conveyor revolution
- Nepean to supply equipment to Fitzroy’s Ironbark mine
- Nepean buys Sandvik conveyor businesses
Over time, these training sessions have expanded to include general managers, then senior leaders, then key leaders and emerging leaders.
“Leadership training really matters. We want to invest in our people,” Fuller told ABHR.
The NEPEAN Leadership Academy is real evidence of that in action. We fly people in from across the world with the aim of developing great leaders for our business.
“And because we see learning together with our key customers as a win/win – as their success is our success – we have also extended this opportunity to customers,” Fuller said.
The NEPEAN Leadership Academy is now in its 12th year, with more than 500 attendees at this year’s event.
The format of the event is built around keynote speakers who provide important insights. In previous years, experts in leadership, culture, strategy, negotiation, mindset, and motivation shared valuable knowledge.
This year’s keynote speaker was John “Gucci” Foley, the lead solo pilot for the US Navy’s Blue Angels flight team. Foley has mastered the art of flying, ranking among the top 0.01 per cent of US military pilots, and was named a “Top Ten Carrier Pilot” six times. His expertise has even extended to the silver screen, where he piloted jets in Top Gun.
With a unique perspective from outside the corporate world, the learnings from the Blue Angels focused on: mission, methods, mindset and gratitude, form the basis of extraordinary teamwork, discipline, and high performance.
Fuller said NEPEAN’s culture and environment must support and encourage all employees to be engaged and motivated so they can perform at their highest potential. To do that requires great managers and leaders.
“We want to be continuously evolving as a business – you can’t stand still in this space,” he said.
“A big part of the leadership academy is trying to nurture the next generation of talent that will become managers and executives in the industry.
“There have been really great examples of this happening. We’ve had graduate engineers, fresh out of university, who are now general managers of significant businesses within NEPEAN, and the leadership academy played an important role in that process.”
NEPEAN’s customers, including major mining companies like BHP, RioTinto, and Roy Hill, have praised the event’s content and speakers.
Fuller said there is a lot of value that can be gained from learning alongside the people you work with, and it provides extra connections with key customers.
The company plans to continue investing in its leadership, with future leadership academies aiming to inspire attendees to go above and beyond.
“I hope that everyone who walks away from the leadership academy does so eager to become a better leader,” Fuller said. “They now have the skills and motivation to step up to the challenge.”