About
What does it take to be a frontline leader in one of the world’s most demanding industries? For Orica, it means empowering leaders to drive operational excellence while staying true to the company’s core values. As one of the world’s leading mining and infrastructure solutions providers, Orica operates globally from its Australian headquarters. In an environment where safety, sustainability, and performance are non-negotiable, frontline leadership isn’t just important - it’s mission-critical.
Orica's frontline leadership program is 12-weeks of blended facilitated experiential learning and practical self-led activities. It has helped over 1,700 leaders gain essential skills for current and future leadership roles. The program has been shortlisted for two awards, winning a gold Brandon Hall Group award for Best Development Programme for Frontline Leaders category in 2024.
Orica’s frontline leaders (supervisors, team leaders and shift managers) are field based and often the first to address and solve problems on-site. The Frontline Leadership Program needed to develop effective leadership by fostering self-awareness, accountability, and foundational skills among current and future frontline leaders. It had to align and incorporate Orica’s five leadership traits and reaffirm their commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) by building leadership capability across their diverse employee base.
There were three overarching business goals:
- To be globally accessible for Orica’s entire frontline leader population – making it virtual, in different languages and adaptable to regional cultures.
- To be a flagship leadership development program, positively affecting the retention and development of talent.
- To drive measurable results against key performance indicators including safety, DEI, sustainability, and revenue.
The FLP is designed to integrate with participants’ daily work, allowing for immediate application and embedding of learnt skills, techniques and tools. As this population are field based, to maximise learning the blended and synchronous program is accessed digitally. It also promotes collaboration and social learning by bringing leaders from similar time zones and different functions together.
Before starting the program, participants complete the Hogan Personality Index assessment and receive a personalised Insight Report. A live facilitated debrief session with accompanying playbook guides them to apply strategic self-awareness in recognising outcomes they can achieve from FLP and set a development goal.
Participants then join a 12-week blended program of four facilitated live virtual sessions and purposeful self-led content and practical activities, delivered through MS Teams and Impact’s customised learning app, air™.
To ensure global accessibility, the FLP’s learning content and live sessions are delivered in seven languages across all regions and time zones, catering to diverse frontline leaders, many of whom operate in remote locations.
The program has four phases, each structured around core capabilities and development needs that are aligned to Orica’s values and leadership traits:
- Self-awareness – building a strong base of self-awareness to understand personal preferences, and opportunities to adapt and develop their style.
- Personal effectiveness – exploring the elements that help people be at their best, including wellbeing, energy, focus and time management.
- Communication – communicating with confidence and clarity, how to engage, inspire and drive performance.
- Leadership action – applying the foundational leadership skills learnt and developing the confidence to do what matters.
The facilitated live sessions are designed to foster powerful experiential learning and to facilitate life-changing breakthroughs. They focus on the real-life application of the core content by using real scenarios and challenges, through which participants can explore and practice new approaches and gain valuable feedback from each other.
Participants practice core skills throughout the program, such as developing the ability to support and challenge others through courageous conversations, and making informed decisions on leadership actions that will have a positive effect on their teams and the business.
By November 2025, 100 cohorts had successfully completed the Frontline Leadership Program across all global regions and in seven different languages. This was a significant milestone and a huge achievement for the Orica and Impact partnership. The three key business objectives showed the following results:
- To be globally accessible
Over 1700 participants have completed the program to date, with many experiencing a profound shift towards a leadership mindset and being a more effective manager. Recent data from the 12-week post program evaluation survey shows that:
83% of participants are using their learning daily or weekly.
82% of participants have made moderate to high progress with their development goal.
The Frontline Leadership Program has resulted in a Net Promoter Score of 68 across 100 cohorts.
The post program Line Manager feedback survey reports that the program has had a positive effect on participants with an overall Net Promoter Score of 73 highlighting the value the program continues to be to the business. Even after 100 cohorts, there is still a strong desire to enrol future employees to the program.
- To be a flagship program, positively affecting retention and development
60% of participants are current managers and 40% are hoping to transition into a frontline leadership role. 90% of participants successfully complete the program. FLP has developed itself as a springboard for aspiring frontline leaders. 15% of participants have been promoted in frontline leader roles since attending the FLP.
- Drive key KPI
Orica compared business results in key priority areas of Safety, DEI, Sustainability and Revenue from pre (2021) to post (2023) initiating this program. Results were positive in all areas and here are two examples:
Sustainability: Reduction of greenhouse gases has increased from 13% to 22% post FLP.
DEI: Women in leadership roles has increased from 28% to 35% post FLP.
Multi-award winning
Orica won a gold Brandon Hall Group award in the Best Development Programme for Frontline Leaders category in 2024 and in 2025 were shortlisted in the Best Leadership Development category of the AITD Excellence Awards (Australian Institute of Training and Development).
"The program (FLP) quickly became the flagship of our leadership development strategy and has built credibility and momentum which has enabled us to now extend our global development offering to graduates and senior leaders. Pleasingly, we have seen a good mix of ‘high potential’ individual contributors complete the program, testament to the immediate development outcomes that prepare them to take on supervisor responsibilities. The Executive Committee have now endorsed the five Leadership Traits as our foundation for Orica’s investment in leadership development, which our team and Impact worked together to align and refresh. Integration into our organisation not only signifies our commitment to shaping a robust leadership pipeline but also reflects the global scale and reach of the program, facilitated by the support of our HR and regional management teams.”
Carly Fergusson, Vice President - HR Group Functions