Leaders, effective dialogue starts with you

Whenever the crew on board have meetings, discuss issues or there are matters that involve everyone it is important that an effective dialogue is promoted. Effective dialogue happens when the atmosphere is open, acknowledging and trusting to everyone’s safety improvement ideas and suggestions.

In this article, a Safety Delta key account manager will share with you his experiences and findings from his regular client visits and talks. Specifically, he will walk you through the challenges in improving dialogue on board and here both ship and shore staff play a role. He will also give you a few tips on how leaders can start off a good dialogue on board.

How Operations Department benefits from a safety programme

In TORM they embarked on a safety programme a couple of years ago. Safety became part of their core values and all departments are involved in the programme.

We have interviewed Casper Stokholm, Senior Operations Manager and Andreas G. Jørgensen, Head of Global Operations in TORM. In conjunction with the Technical department they are deeply engaged in ensuring safe operations. And this is not to the detriment of profit performance.

In this article they tell us about the benefits of the programme seen from their positions, what they do and give examples of safety situations where their role has been decisive.

On a voyage with the resilient captain and crew

What is it to be resilient? Is it what we do, how we work, who we are?
In this article we look at resilience from a Chief Officer’s perspective.
Embark on this voyage and experience how a resilient safety culture can look like on board the vessel MV Resilience.

Giving clear instruction across cultures

On many occasions one prevailing feedback from seafarer respondents in our Safety Delta surveys is that leaders are not always good at giving clear instructions. Why can the face-to-face instruction sometimes be so difficult, even if the leaders make an effort? Perhaps the leaders overlook the cultural variations in our way of communicating. One may be an excellent communicator when dealing with people from the same or a homogeneous culture, but what works in one culture may not be effective in others. This article provides a practical approach to this challenge.

Safety efficacy – the power of self-confidence in safety management

In this article we introduce Safety-efficacy. Safety-efficacy is defined as an employee’s confidence that he or she has the skill to work safely in the context of a specific workplace environment. It has a positive impact on the safety performance, particularly if the company’s safety standard is high and if the employees safety skills are constantly developed. Read more in this article about how these factors go hand in hand.

The teamwork paradox

Teamwork is fundamental in our work life. When it comes to safety it is important that your team members back each other up all the time and will intervene if you are about to do an unsafe act. But what if you are the only rating on watch in the engine? Who should back you up? and how do we apply best practice in the organisation to meet this challenge?

How can leaders change crew safety behaviour and awareness?

A constantly returning request from the participants enrolled in the Green-Jakobsen safety leadership courses is advice on how to cultivate/change crew safety behaviour and awareness. This article argues that leaders who are consciously capable of creating/showing unexpected, different, grotesque or even wrong actions can stimulate change. It also argues that the strongest change is achieved when humans are fully aware of their own actions, beliefs and perception.
Based on these beliefs and to help leaders develop these skills five simple behaviour change strategies will be presented.

What can human behaviour do for safety?

For a long time it has been discussed how human behaviour – or rather human error – impacts the frequency, nature and level of incidents and accidents on board. But isn’t human behaviour also the reason for a very high level of operations where people are NOT getting hurt? Yes, humans are the strongest asset for being safe because they are able to adapt to changing conditions.

Assessment and development of safety culture – can we prove the effect?

The million-dollar question to all the work Green-Jakobsen is involved in to improve the safety culture of shipping companies is: does it work? Do the many initiatives actually result in an improved safety culture of a company? Green-Jakobsen has worked closely with Seatrans Shipmanagement to improve the company’s safety culture. This article is a brief description of the course of events carried out, concluded by comments from the various Seatrans employees and observations made by a GL DNV auditor about the efforts and results achieved so far.

Often they are good managers; unfortunately they are not always good leaders

Conducting a series of leadership courses brings us in contact with a lot of different people – some more motivated for learning than others. But also experienced leaders can discover new perspectives, and however challenging a training course can be it is important to leave with a good result. And when it even creates ripples in the water everyone is happy.

Human safety performance data management

How do we gather and manage data relating to human performance and behaviour, which are ‘uncountable’ subjects? This articles follows up on the previous article ‘The art of measuring safety performance’ and describes typical challenges we face when trying to gather, process and present safety (behaviour) performance data. It also suggests a few methods believed to help shipping companies manage this challenge.

How can we manage accountability towards safety?

Accountability has a decisive impact on the level of your safety maturity. So in order to increase accountability of your crew and staff you must manage it. And in order to manage it you must observe and log work place behaviour. This will enable you to develop people and deal with consequences for the exemplary or critical (safety) behaviour. For that purpose the Accountablity Matrix is a useful tool.

Behavioural Based Safety – and leading it

Behavioural based safety is a process that helps employees identify and choose a safe behaviour over an unsafe one. This article explains the concept of behavioural based safety. What makes us behave the way we do, what affects us and what are the consequences?

What does safety need leadership for?

To help safety leaders develop own and others’ safety leadership skills this article introduces the Green-Jakobsen Safety I’s model™. In short the overriding purpose of the model is to provide shipping companies and its safety leaders with 5 safety culture virtues. Find out what those 5 virtues are

Leadership Training – compliance modus or performance focus

Why are the industry legislators now requiring leadership training? The answer, of course, is pretty straight forward – legislators believe that improved leadership competencies will improve performance on board making ships more effective, safer and environmentally friendly.

Focus on Leadership Training

At Stenersen they have inititated a Leadership Training programme for all staff groups, seafarers and office staff. We have interviewed Stenersen’s HR Manager, Linda Frederich, about what lies behind the decision. The article tells you more about how they go about the task, what they expect to gain from the project and why they cooperate with Green-Jakobsen on this.