Coaching applied to safety: how to enhance human and organization

performance through meaningful conversations.

Alexsandro Siedschlag, HSE professional & Safety performance coach
Brazil, Phone: +55 47 991312460
alexsandro.siedschlag@outlook.com
Linkedin: alexsandrosiedschlag

Coaching has been used in many organizations thought the decades, its benefits and results
are well-know, but how this happens when coaching is deployed in Safety and cultural
change? It’s very likely that safety professionals already have faced a situation where the
conversation about safety didn’t end well, where just a modest cultural change was perceived
after a program roll-out or an minor human performance improvement could be noticed.
There is a mutual feeling that we need to balance compliance and care, to move safety
professionals and line supervisors from being an officer to a coach! To better illustrate how
this could happen and how to help organizations to enhance their human performance
through meaningful conversations, this paper describes what are the Coaching nuances and
techniques applied to safety in a practical manner and its results along the years. The afore-
mentioned Coaching nuances and techniques applied to safety have been used and tested in
high risk industries such as Oil & Gas in drilling rigs offshore in Brazil, and underground
coal mine in Australia. In both cases, hundreds of workers, permanents and contractors,
several nationalities, and the most varied working regime. The work done consisted in tree
Safety coaching nuances: (1) dynamic coaching, named “boots on the ground”; (2) safety
leadership coaching; and, (3) coach-the-coach for internal coaches. At the “boots on the
ground” coaching, safety meaningful conversations were held ad-hoc by the coach, where
the work was done. No specific agenda or topic was listed and the task at that moment was
the subject of the conversation. On this dynamic approach, a strong capability of build
rapport was required, to allow the Safety coach to enter the “worker’s space” and develop a
conversation using powerful & open questions about how performance could be
enhanced. Sometimes, the company might have a general program or concern to address,
thus the Safety coach invited the worker to share his thoughts on it. During the safety
leadership coaching, the Safety coach worked along the supervisors and senior leadership
persons in the organization to support on their role during the cultural change journey.
Group workshops or 1:1 coaching session to clarify their understand of key concepts within
safety leadership were held, self-awareness exercises were promoted to help to identify
their strengths and outline any areas of development. The Safety coach also followed
leadership worksite visits during their interactions, providing a second-observer feedback.
This allowed them to realize blind spots on their approach and improve their conversations.
Another Coaching nuance used to promote sustainability of the cultural change was to
coach internal safety coaches, in this case, professionals were resourced internally and
assigned specifically to the role. On this approach, after an external and formal coaching
education of the candidate, 1:1 coaching sessions were held with the internal coaches
towards their goals or areas of development. After 6 months, positive change has started to
be visible and felt by all. To exemplify a few, safety leadership visibility quality increased in
workers view and during a HR climate survey, the physical and psychological perception by
workers improved by 30% each.