EMPOWERING SAFETY LEADERS WITH A PROGRAM TO
DEVELOP NON-TECHNICAL leadership skills
The background.
This large supply chain and logistics company recognized the importance of developing nontechnical leadership skills in their safety leaders to effectively manage their teams, influence their stakeholders, and cultivate a culture of safety through improved accountability.
The challenge.
With a 5,000 strong safety team comprising of specialists, coordinators, and managers, this global organization has made a significant investment in ensuring the safety and wellbeing of its employees and contractors.
In 2021, the global safety team identified a gap in the development of their safety team’s leadership skills, recognizing that technical skills alone were not sufficient to foster a strong safety culture. To address this, they wanted to develop a leadership program tailored to high performers, emphasizing the development of the human skills that enable leaders to extend their influence and have a greater impact on the organization’s overall safety culture.
Our challenge was to develop a leadership program that would cultivate these non-technical skills, all within the constraints of a virtual environment.
The program had to accommodate the needs of a global workforce, account for different time zones, and allow safety leaders to participate without disrupting their busy work schedules. At the same time, the experience needed to be collaborative — allowing participants to learn from each other by sharing their knowledge and experience.
The APPROACH.
We developed a 12-week, modularised, virtual leadership program that explored leadership skills contextualised for busy, safety professionals.
Program modules
• The Leadership Mindset
• Leading Others
• Leading Self
• Communication
• Change
To make the leadership program more accessible and effective for participants with busy schedules, we adopted a human-centred approach to program design. Specifically, we structured the learning content into small, bite-sized chunks that could be completed in no more than five minutes at a time. This format allowed participants to easily fit the program into their busy workdays, making it more feasible for them to complete the program and retain the information.
The 12-week leadership program was rolled out as a mixed-modality guided learning experience which included:
• facilitated virtual classrooms
• self-paced online modules
• peer-to-peer discussions
• individual workplace assignments.
The impact.
The leadership program launched in 2022. Safety leaders across each global business unit participated, representing a diverse range of roles and responsibilities.
The program’s success is seeing it expand to include supervisors across all business units globally. This will further empower safety leaders throughout the organization with the necessary non-technical leadership skills — helping to promote a safer workplace for every employee.