Egos & Silos Breaking the Mining System

The Challenge of Departmental Silos in Mining Operations

The hardest part of managing a mine as a complete system is getting people not to operate in silos as separate departments. In prior mines, the most challenging issue observed is that departments each have different roles. They know what they are responsible for, and they work in isolation from each other.

At some mining operations, even the bonus structure essentially causes departments to compete against each other. What works for the processing team to get their best ounce grade out of recoveries is entirely different than what the mining team in operations would need to do. Being the person with a higher-level view and getting these departments to share resources – and sometimes make sacrifices to get the entire system working at its optimum – is really one of the biggest challenges in mining leadership.

Managing People and Resources as a Unified System

Rather than relying on a specific tool, the largest scope of treating a mine like a system comes down to managing people and resources together. This means balancing staff levels in the right places and getting operations to focus not just on tonnage, but also on quality of product. Teams must work closely with the processing plant, the crusher, and everything downstream – all in schedule with maintenance.

With a large volume of equipment and trucks, cooperation with maintenance is essential. Maintenance is just as important as everything else. Getting operators to run equipment properly prevents creating additional work for maintenance teams. Parking equipment when needed so it can be maintained allows everything to be planned out and work as a system. If everything that goes down is treated as a loss of tonnage and teams refuse to stop running anything, larger problems develop downstream.

The Most Common Leadership Mistake Creating Bottlenecks

The most common mistake in leadership that creates bottlenecks is the isolation of each department as an independent team. When even the bonus structure is different for each department, everybody working within that department only cares about their own metrics. They will have competing goals, they will not work together, and the site as a system will suffer as a result.

At Golden Queen, the technical services engineering department never really communicated with operations at all. Implementing meetings between the two departments and having planning engineers go out on tour with mine operators made a significant difference. Engineers and operators sat in the same pickup truck, talked about the same issues, discussed what plans looked like for the next week, and identified what would work and what would not. Feedback revealed that operators had never ridden with engineers before.

Managing Egos Between Department Heads

The egos that appear, especially between department heads, can sometimes get out of hand. It takes a really focused effort to keep all of that in check. Hosting regular meetings with site leaders and department heads requires constantly reminding everyone that this is a team. The product that pays everybody cannot be delivered without working together, and many egos need to be placed in check.

Interdepartmental blame is a common problem. Every time bad material affected the crushing circuit, operations was blamed for bringing too much clay. Operations would respond that they shipped all the best material they had and were told they were not providing enough rock. To shut all that down, responsibilities were realigned. Putting everything under one hat removed the excuses – now it is one department’s sole job to deliver a good product, with no one else to blame, forcing people to work together.

Taking Ownership to Eliminate Excuses

The go-to thought process for effective leadership is taking ownership for everything and changing the outlook to being the personal owner of all issues so that excuses go away. If an operations team did not follow the plan or mined in the wrong area, rather than blaming them for not doing something, the leadership viewpoint should be that priorities were not clearly communicated well enough for them to mine in the right place.

This mentality must trickle down through the entire leadership team. If an operations supervisor says the crusher did not take the right material all night, ask them what they did wrong in that situation. Get them to think about whether they communicated well enough with the crusher supervisor about impacts, or whether they communicated well enough about what materials were on hand so adjustments could be made properly. There is no excuse to place on others when ownership is taken at every level.