Hekkie Van Der WesthuizenHekkie van der Westhuizen grew up in the small citrus farming community town of Letsitele in Limpopo Province and comes from a family of teachers. After completing his military service, he graduated with a B.Com (Hons) degree in Finance from the Univrsity of Pretoria. Although he started out in finance as a financial accountant at Heckett Multiserv and then became a management accountant at Nampak Tissue, his career quickly branched out to managing various functional areas in the supply chain field. Hekkie joined the Polyoak Packaging Group in 2004, where he held various executive positions in sales, supply chain management and operations, before being promoted to General Manager for the Dairypack division in Gauteng, and finally to the National Executive for that part of the group's business. Hekkie graduated with an MBA from Wits Business School in 2005, and in 2008 he received Certified Supply Chain Professional (CSCP) accreditation from Apics (ASCM) in the United States. After serving the manufacturing industry for 22 years, Hekkie was given the opportunity to join the retail industry as General Manager of Tile Africa, part of the Norcros Group of companies. Throughout his career, Hekkie has been involved in various leadership development programmes and projects, ranging from lecturing to guest-lecturing MBA classes; speaking at conferences; developing corporate business school curricula, and acting as an accredited facilitator and assessor. In 2020, Hekkie left the corporate world to focus full-time on completing his PhD in leadership development at the University of Johannesburg. His research topic was: Development and validation of a measure of organisational leadership development process maturity. Leadership and people development have always been dear to him, and parallel to completing his studies, Hekkie started his own full-time business focusing in this area. The Southern African Leadership Development and Training Institute (www.saldati.com) partners with organisations to help grow their leaders, to positively impact on their personal lives and organisational results. Apart from consulting, developing and facilitating leadership development programmes for organisations, Hekkie also acts as an accredited moderator and Masters student supervisor for various business schools. His areas of expertise and interest in leadership development include self-leadership, organisational leadership development process maturity, and youth leadership. Outside of his full-time profession, Hekkie focuses on his lifetime commitment to personal development. He is also a passionate family man who loves spending time in the African bush. He enjoys open-water swimming and motorcycling and lends his support to various community upliftment projects. Read More Read Less