Safety culture is a fabric of organisational culture.

Industry continues to dedicate time and resources training people to be safe. This is an essential requirement especially in relation to the human interface with environments of varying degrees of risk. Technical training addresses the required skills and competencies that align with safe work methods and practices and whilst it is an all-important tactical approach, it does not guarantee safety performance.

Safety initiatives are often leader directed versus self-directed. This can contribute to a dependency on leaders from team members in identifying and managing risk, driven by following procedures.

Whilst procedures are important, an over reliance on procedures can contribute to a culture of compliance, reliant on high levels of supervision and management. Procedures can become the master versus the servant and can limit the amount of ‘real time’ cognitive awareness required to foster an aware and responsive safety culture.

Safety communications include talk box talks, pre-starts, safety audits, task observations and site safety interactions and often revolve around leaders giving the information or providing the solution rather than generating thinking within their teams.

An “aware” safety culture is achieved through ongoing collective learning by engaging with frontline personnel to reflect on and apply learnings, gain real-time insights into daily operations and generate forward-thinking about potential future variables or changes.

This requires a transformational versus a transactional leadership approach, the leader ‘facilitating a conversation’ versus ‘delivering the message’.

In several major high-profile incidents, a recurring issue has been organisations failing to systematically gather and share information that might have prevented the incident. Weak signals were often missed or ignored, typically driven by a ‘fear culture’ where people hesitated to speak up or risk disrupting production.

Leaders need to encourage ‘bottom up’ communication and the success of this can only be driven by a leader who moves from a ‘transactional’ to a ‘transformational’ leadership approach.

We view safety through the lens of physical and psychological. The four levels of psychological safety are described as:

Inclusion safety– a strong sense of connection and belonging

Learner safety – the enabling conditions and encouragement to learn and grow

Contributor safety – creating a climate for meaningful contribution

Challenger safety – promoting the moral courage to challenge at risk conditions and the status quo

When leaders foster a climate of psychological safety, members at all levels of the organisation are more socially connected, empowered to speak up and engage in identifying and managing risk. This level of psychological safety also transcends to organisational members contributing to process improvements.

Our transformational leadership coaching program focuses on the re-calibration of leadership styles from ‘transactional’ to’ transformational’ from ‘managing’ to ‘empowering’ in order to generate autonomy in the form of self-governing teams promoting increased risk and situational awareness and a greater capacity and motivation towards risk-based decision making.

Empowered teams strengthen an organisations capacity to respond to operational risks and challenges regardless of the commercial climate and pressures at any given time.

We believe that leadership has the potential to be all encompassing, in both a safety and production context, arriving at a cohesive merger of both.