Safety and 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.

Our safety leadership coaching program focuses on building leadership capability to engage the workforce through creating an environment for thinking, not just doing.

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

Inclusion safetya strong sense of connection and belonging

Learner safety the enabling conditions and encouragment to learn and grow

Contributor safetycreating a climate for meaningful contribution

Challenger safetypromoting the moral courage to challenge at risk conditions and the status quo

The program consists of leadership workshops to introduce the tools and concepts and is reinforced through 1:1 leadership coaching. We provide an online and in person program delivery option with a focus on practical application in the field at the social level in ‘real time’ operations.

We dedicate time to the recalibration 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.