Safety leadership performance: cultural change—learnings from major incidents

Abstract

Many companies understand that good management requires that senior managers spend time with front line workers. Some companies build into performance agreements for senior managers a requirement that they conduct a certain number of such site visits each year. The challenge is to make productive use of these visits. Safety is often a focus for visiting VIPs, but too often safety is understood to be a matter of ‘slips, trips and falls’, rather than the major hazards that can blow the plant or the rig apart. This presentation will examine a VIP visit made to the Deepwater Horizon rig—just hours before the explosion—by senior mangers from BP and from the rig owner, Transocean. It will argue that, despite their best of intentions, these managers fell into the trap identified above. The paper looks at things that senior managers can do to focus attention on the most significant hazards.

No post-Conference video or paper is available for this presentation.