How to Tame your Elephant! Safety Leadership for the Unexpected
When emergency situations arise, safety leadership is needed to direct your organization toward the safest possible outcome. And this is not just true of positional leaders such as managers, but of all employees playing a role in the emergency. For example: a front-line worker should feel empowered to stop an unsafe act from being performed by a manager. In this keynote or interactive workshop, Allan shares a vivid, hilarious, yet terrifying story about being charged by elephants in Africa where the characters involved seem to take on three different safety leadership roles of “the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”. Allan likens this event to workplace emergency situations and explores how we might better prepare our personnel to make better choices when confronted with emergencies and become better safety leaders in our day-to-day execution of our safety duties.
Communicating with Safety Dissidents. Understanding and Being Understood!
According to data collected during previous Safety Leadership workshops conducted by Allan, having good communication skills was the main attribute that participants felt all safety leaders should possess and continually improve upon. This presentation is designed as a keynote or interactive workshop aimed at harnessing the collective intelligence of the audience to bring forth the communication techniques they feel have worked best in conveying or receiving the safety program in their organizations. Together with Allan, the audience will examine how communication affects safety in the workplace and explore ways to improve it.
To set the context for group work during the session, Allan will share his personal struggles conveying safety programs over his 16-year career through a hilarious, self-deprecating story he calls “Sisyphus Relationships”. This story explores the positive impact that contemporary “Interpersonal Communication Tools” can have on safety communications in the workplace. Interpersonal communication Tools such as emotional bank accounts, differentiated conversations, vulnerability-based trust, and many more are discussed during this session.
Fake it Till Ya Make it. But NOT in Safety!
“We are not survival of the fittest, we are the survival of the nurtured. Those who are nurtured best, survive best.”
~Louis Cozolino
In this session, Allan shares a hilarious story about a new worker who lied about being able to operate a forklift on the first morning of the first day of his first job! This story then guides the audience into a discussion on how organizations can properly assess the competency of potential hires before putting them in Safety-sensitive positions. Allan then discusses various methods of cultivating and enhancing the competency of new workers by focusing on the three pillars of competency:
- Training – initial classroom and site training to introduce the new hire to the task
- Skill development through on-the-job mentorship (i.e., new hire performing the skill in front of a competent person and being provided with feedback for improvement)
- Experience through conducting the skill over and over again to develop personal mastery
Allan concludes this keynote by sharing a story about Free Solo climber Alex Honnold to demonstrate what can be achieved when the highest levels of competence, planning, and preparation are woven into a project.
Safety’s Next Top Model: Human and Organizational Performance
For so long we have debated the best way to bring safety to our organizations. Well, this debate may not be over, but we are going to examine some different safety models and vote on which one we like best. In this fun, interactive session Allan discusses the pros and cons of previous safety models to the Human and Organizational Performance Model (HOP) or as it is often referred to as “Safety Differently” or the “New View of Safety”. This revolutionary HOP model developed by Sidney Dekker and James Reason focuses on the human element of safety assuming that human error is inevitable so therefore organizations should focus more on improving their systems, processes, planning, and operations to improve safety performance and culture.
Areas of expertise
Safety (CRSP, W. Canadian HSSE Manager with WSP, 17 years experience)
Leadership (Master of Arts in Leadership from Royal Roads University 2016)
