Upskilling and empowerment company Dyna Training is training 160 supervisors at Canadian gold miner B2Gold’s Fekola gold mine, in Mali, amid a greater emphasis being placed on providing discretionary training for frontline leaders in gold mining.

The company aims to create a culture of accountability and responsibility in the workplace and has contracted Dyna Training to provide its leadership team with practical skills.

B2Gold is running its Safety Leadership Development Programme that emphasises safety by training leaders to actively create a safe working environment, with Dyna Training having trained over 50% of the supervisors to date.

Dyna Training CEO Roland Innes tells Mining Weekly that gold miners in Africa are starting to recognise the importance of upskilling frontline leaders to achieve greater production, safety and environmental targets, describing them as “underutilised assets”.

“They are realising that frontline leaders have a significant influence over employees and, to meet the mining metrics of production, optimal equipment utilisation, as well as safety and environmental standards, you have to have them as part of your management team,” he notes.

Moreover, because many supervisors in the African gold mining sector report to expatriates, Dyna Training will introduce a new programme by the end of this year through which expatriates will be trained to empower and engage frontline leaders.

In providing leadership courses, the company is developing a management training programme that provides coaching and mentoring to holistically develop the entire management function.

Through its training ambitions, Dyna Training aims to become the go-to provider for leadership training that builds a culture of accountability and responsibility at frontline management level.

Frontline leaders are expected to balance leadership skills while creating a motivating environment for employees by having a good understanding of employee relations and holding them accountable with regard to safety and reaching production targets.

Innes explains, however, that key workers are often too aligned to the workforce, rather than regarding themselves as part of the leadership team, which makes it difficult for gold miners to drive strategy execution at points of extraction.

Hence, to ensure that training is done efficiently, Dyna Training customises its training to embrace local customs, languages and communities to understand leaders in the context of their broader community.

Meanwhile, the company aims to introduce technology in the human behavioural space for mines, specifically sociometric sensors and technology, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, which provide mines with data on human behaviour, to improve leadership training.

Dyna Training is testing technology in-house and aims to roll it out mid-2024.

“Gold mining organisations are beginning to understand that their frontline leaders are the engine room that drives the mine. You cannot have effective equipment utilisation if you do not have the people closest to that equipment driving that metric,” Innes concludes.