Safety leadership

Coal & Allied firmly believes that leadership for health and safety is a line function and an integral part of management accountability. Good safety and health leadership is built upon a foundation of solid understanding regarding core skills, competencies, planning and execution.

Coal & Allied has worked collaboratively to develop a programme that all sites and offices can use to examine these areas and improve the quality of safety leadership at all levels of the business.

To demonstrate genuine safety leadership and commitment, senior leaders are required to drive the development of a strong safety culture by personally leading this programme. Leaders are required to clearly communicate expectations, model and reinforce required safety behaviours, as well as demonstrate a strong link between safety leadership performance and career opportunities.

The programme focuses on a number of areas in order to develop safety leadership:

• Formal training, including sixteen learning modules that take leaders through what they need to know and why to be effective safety leaders
• On the job learning such as taking on new responsibilities and working in teams
• Coaching and mentoring such as functional mentoring and career coaching
• Special projects or secondments across sites to share safety knowledge.

In 2007 our target was to develop training material to support a programme to strengthen safety leadership. The programme, detailed above, has been developed and is due for initial roll out in 2008. The programme is intended to be a process of assessment, review and development with a set of tools available to support leaders to develop their specific skill gaps.

As part of the programme, leaders are required to complete an on-line self assessment regarding their safety knowledge. Once the self assessment has been completed, leaders must discuss their assessment results and determine where their safety skills gaps exist and therefore which skills require development. It is expected that leaders will select their priority gaps, agree on their development plan and commence learning in quarter three 2008. All existing leaders are expected to have their personal safety development plan in place by the end of August 2008, with their skills gaps addressed by 30 June 2010.