Safety leadership training
If you had the opportunity to provide safety leadership training to all your senior level managers, what subjects would you put in the training? We are trying to put together a one day training for senior leaders. Would love to hear your thougjts.
Comments (9)
Is safety going to be the focus of the entire day? Obviously you’re still settling into your new role but you have experience in other fields you may be able to share. I’m sure there’s some crossover between your precious positions and your current job
It all will depend on where the management stands regarding safety, but I'd like to suggest a session based on the concept of "Extreme Ownership". Check for this title on Amazon, written by Jocko Willink, I found it very valuable for my team of front line supervisors. It is a general leadership concept, but makes all the sense in the world when you think about taking care of your coworkers.
I second Adam on the bottom line topic. Discussing how EHS-related investments can not only save the company money, but make jobs more efficient and make employees happy are important points to bring up.
I would think of the top 5 biggest challenges you face implementing EHS policies/programs and then think of how those challenges could be different with support from senior leadership, and build content around those challenges in a manner so that you aren't complaining or demanding help but stating what challenges your front line workers face and stating the process for how you could more effectively make change.
A statement I remember from a colleague:
When management would state "you have my support"
They would ask: "Do I have your committment?"
That's a great discussion. I guess it would really depend on my thoughts on management and how involved they were with the safety program. Being that they are looking to create a specific training for senior management I would say they were at least making an effort. Adam had some great topics but I would also use it to my advantage. As senior leaders they should have a pretty decent understanding of safety so i would make it more discussion based. Talk about the current safety culture, where they think issues lie and ideas for improvements. Having years of experience to your industry in the same room together is rare. Seems like a great time for brainstorming to discuss where the program is and where we want to be.
Discuss any obstacles they can remove build a better safety program. What can they do for you and what can you do for them.
Seems like you have a great opportunity to make huge changes for the better with effective team work.
This should spark some good conversation! Obviously, it would be great if senior management knew everything about safety - then you could truly have top-down support. Realistically, I know we only grab their attention for a few minutes per month so I would focus on:
- What we do (not safety police, keeping our greatest investment [people] healthy)
- How we contribute to the bottom line (ROI for various initiatives, decreased injury/illness/WC costs)
- How they can assist (incident investigation/root cause overview, importance of top-down support, encouraging transparency and opening lines of communication, proactive approaches to assess and control risk before a new process/operation starts)
These are just a few examples of which I could think. I know there are many more!