Leadership: Inspiring Consistent Process Safety Performance

2015 CCPS Global Summit on Process Safety, Kuala Lumpur November 2015

LEADERSHIP: INSPIRING CONSISTENT PROCESS SAFETY PERFORMANCE

Abang Rahim Drashid, Head, Process Safety Leadership & Culture, PETRONAS Group HSE

Doug Mowle, Partner, JMJ Associates

ABSTRACT

Most organizations have already developed a sound foundation on which to manage HSE and achieve the goal of no harm to people and no leaks. In order to sustain this level of performance, we need inspired safety leadership and consistent safety operating models in the organization.

Most organizations do not need additional tools or processes; they need to make them effective. The opportunity is to strengthen safety leadership, through a dedicated and managed change programme built on the attributes of authenticity, collaboration and leaders developing (coaching) leaders.

Over the past decades, overall performance in safety has seen remarkable improvements, but remains fragile.. Specifically, we believe improvements will come from enhancing the capability and role of people in creating an incident and injury free workplaces. Although most incidents involve human behavior, humans are rarely at the root cause.  This is in fact a testament to human reliability. It is imperative that we shift our focus to supporting and developing people.  Consistent safe performance will emanate from principles of Safety Leadership:

a.        Safety is created by people

People make mistakes, and, people also create safety, moment-by-moment, day-to-day. When given the support, they will develop productive, safe and value-adding work practices. The key is to close the practical drift (the gap between procedures and the work actually performed) in the field. We need to have a mechanism which will continuously enable people to do this, instead of depending on investigations, audits and other lagging practices.

b.       Consistency in approach

Processes are created and implemented to develop and transfer inherent safety knowledge and practical wisdom to make operations not just more safe but more consistent and reliable.

c.        Organizational coherence and integrity

These practices include building capacity, cross-functional team alignment, encouraging people to reach across the white spaces and “silo’s” in their companies. .

Safety leadership breeds a culture in which leaders at all levels go beyond compliance and inspire people to want to be safe. These leaders are uneasy with the status quo, communicate bad as well as good news, do not compromise on safety standards and are motivated to view safety as an integral part of the business. Safety leaders create and shape the desired safety culture, not just operate within the existing culture.  Their efforts inspire others to learn, work together, make their operations more consistent and operate incident free.

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