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13 August 2024 | Story Anthony Mthembu | Photo Sibahle Dayimani and Amandla Kulu
Prof Peter Rosseel
Prof Peter Roseel, Managing Director of Management Consulting and Research – a spin-off of the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium; and Prof Nicolene Barkhuizen, Director of the UFS Business School.

The Business School at the University of the Free State (UFS) hosted Prof Peter Rosseel, Managing Director of Management Consulting and Research – a spin-off of the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium – for a guest lecture during his visit to the UFS Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences (EMS).

The guest lecture took place on 19 July 2024 in the Business School Auditorium and was attended by academics from the UFS.

Reflecting on the lecture

The lecture presented by Prof Rosseel focused on how combining strategy, strategy implementation, culture transformation, leadership, and learning successfully leads to sustainable growth, creates engagement, and delivers tangible results. Throughout the lecture, Prof Rosseel spoke about how experts tend to make bad leaders and therefore stop change from happening within an organisation. In fact, he highlighted that, “Experts stop change from happening within the workplace because experts, by definition, look through the eyes of their expertise, but you cannot reduce the world to different forms of expertise, as it is holistic.” As such, he argued that to change an organisation, one must see things from the point of view of others.

Furthermore, Prof Rosseel delved deeper into the hierarchical operating model within organisations. He indicated that the above model should be one community within organisations; however, unfortunately it is not. This is because organisations are made up of several departments such as finance and human resources. As such, he regards these departments to be silos that could prove to be detrimental to organisations, as each silo can create its own culture as opposed to an organisational culture. These are some of the points he discussed throughout the lecture.

After the lecture concluded, the audience had the opportunity to engage with Prof Rosseel on his viewpoints. In fact, Lyle Markham, Academic Head of Department and Lecturer in Industrial Psychology at the UFS, was one of the audience members and described the lecture as insightful.

News Archive

"May Month of Compassion" for UFS staff
2011-05-04

 

From the left: Louis van Wyk (Central Region, Events Coordinator of ER 24) and Prof. Gert van Zyl, Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences
Photo: Gerda-Marie Viviers

The Health and Wellness Centre of our university has kick-started the “Action of Compassion” which is aimed at promoting physical health for staff members of our university. This initiative is done in collaboration with Medi-Clinic and Pathcare who will be offering medical screening tests from 3 May 2011 until 13  May 2011. This forms part of the “Wake up to your Wellness – Take Control” programme of the Health and Wellness Centre. The tests will be done at 27 stations across our Main Campus. On 16  May the Wellness Centre will be at the South Campus and the date for a visit at the Qwaqwa Campus is to be established later. “The reason why we are doing this, is to conduct a research on Staff Wellness, give the staff feedback on their health and to create a database using the information we receive, so we can evaluate the health of our staff members and have them view their own status over time and whether they are making the right wellness choices,” said Dr Annette Prins.

This is a once-a-year initiative. Last year an estimated 1 100 staff members participated. This year the Health and Wellness Centre hopes to increase the figures. The medical screenings will include services like blood pressure, weight, height and BMI which will be conducted by Medi-Clinic and the cholesterol and blood glucose screenings will be conducted by Pathcare.

 

4 May 2011

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