Chris Ross

On the surface, things are looking good from a safety perspective—recordable injuries are continually decreasing year after year. But in digging a bit deeper, you’ll find that workplace fatalities are on the rise. Many leaders and safety professionals are not happy with the rising trends in serious injuries and fatalities (SIF) events.

A critical element in addressing today’s challenges is effectively integrating the principles of human and organizational performance (HOP) into the organization's fabric. This requires a unique set of leadership skills that are essential to creating an environment of trust, sharing and problem solving.

This interactive workshop will examine how to hone our leadership skills in all three dimensions: our personal leadership skills, team leadership skills and organizational leadership skills.

Personal Leadership Skills
Many organizations get waylaid by blame, focusing on the unimportant, and failing to recognize the difference between minor incidents with no SIF potential and those incidents that need much more focus. We will focus on several competencies to enhance the most critical skills for success and explore ways to boost their EQ: communication and listening, building relationships (teamwork and collaboration), and analysis and problem solving. Participants will engage in exercises to assess their current personal leadership skills and use some tools to improve outcomes in safety and performance.

Team Leadership Skills
At some time or another, most of us have been a member of a high-performing team. It could have been sports, performing arts, or even at work. Regardless of the setting, we remember the trust, the relationships, the synergy, the collaboration and the results we achieved. But that took a while to develop. Great teams are learning organizations; over time, they increase their capacity to perform and deliver. Developing great teams requires strong leaders (from frontline team leaders to managers to senior leaders). Creating trust and realizing effective performance is a result of setting clear expectations, providing reinforcement and accountability and accurately developing systems and processes to ensure safe work practices. Participants will engage in group activities and discussions to drive engagement, practice effective auditing and risk evaluation, and run through some effective techniques to enhance psychological safety (blame versus accountability).

Organizational Leadership
Senior leaders set the tone for performance in organizations by creating a vision, empowering team performance and effectively managing change. This can be done by creating a learning organization. A learning organization is one that prioritizes continuous learning and fosters a culture that adapts to change and inspires better decision-making and long-term success. Participants will apply several methods available to enhance their leadership skills, learning actionable steps for building and sustaining a learning organization within their own organization and use some tools to more effectively manage change.

This half-day session engages participants with group activities, small group discussions and exercises to reinforce learning and leadership skills. At the end of the session, participants will take away practical tools to apply HOP principles to all levels of leadership in order to achieve transformational change for their organizations.