Safety Leadership Program

Improve safety through care, curiosity and collaborative change

This transformative program is designed to shift how safety is led in your organisation by building leaders who create trust, enable learning, and activate people to tackle shared safety challenges.

Duration: 2-Day training; followed by monthly coaching
Location: In-house, by arrangement
Delivery: Face-to-Face training workshops; Virtual coaching sessions

Suitable for: Any group of leaders, including frontline, operational, safety, and senior management.
Program Investment:
Each program is customised to your organisational requirements and priced on expected participant numbers, and duration of coaching.

Program Overview

Safety is a shared, complex challenge. Yet many safety leadership roles are heavily focused on compliance and control – ensuring workers follow the rules instead of engaging in the process and contributing positively to safety performance. Our Safety Leadership Program is a customised 6-12 month program designed to deliver sustainable, long-term results, and create a measurable shift in an organisation's approach to safety.

Each program is uniquely designed following a Discovery phase to understand the current challenges or obstacles within the organisation, and any emerging solutions that can be amplified throughout the training program. Commencing with intensive 2-day workshops, each cohort of leaders continues through a monthly coaching program – allowing for the concepts and skills to be practiced and sustainably embedded into work.

A practice-led training and coaching program designed to build adaptive leadership skills, improve safety culture, and lead safety with people.

Workshop Modules

The modules outlined below are indicative of the content covered during the initial 2-day training workshop. These can be modified to suit organisational context or specific focus areas that are important to your organisation.

Stepping into Safety Leadership

Understanding system complexity
Understanding leadership
What kind of safety leaders are needed?

Understanding Safety

Introducing Human & Organisational Performance
Presence vs absense
Compliance vs capacity

Leading Safety

Balancing control and care
Accountability behaviours
Doing safety with people, not to them

The Role of Leaders

Hero leadership
Servant leadership
Host leadership

Safety Conversations #1

The Safety Conversation process
Creating meaningful, insightful and impactful conversations

Safety Conversations #2

Safety Conversation skills
Asking better questions

Who is the Safety Leadership Program for?

This in-house program is suited to organisations looking to enhance safety leadership capability – creating the conditions for curiosity and care to emerge, rather than just seeing safety as a compliance function.

The content is suitable for all leaders, including executives – not just those in safety roles.

Key Program Phases

Discovery & Planning

The Discovery and Planning phase is designed to understand current safety challenges, assumptions about safety leadership, and emerging solutions which can help shape the program objectives and contextualise the training modules.

Training Delivery

Commencing with initial 2-Day workshops, the module content can be delivered over two consecutive days or split over a short period of time. Each cohort will continue the work and check in with monthly group coaching sessions.

Coaching Program

Monthly group coaching sessions can be run virtually for 1 or 2 hours, allowing each cohort to continue developing relevant skills, share experiences, address challenges, and take on micro-experiments between sessions. Ongoing coaching ensures learning objectives are achieved, and the key concepts of safety leadership are sustainably embedded across the organisation.

Measuring Impact

There are several methods for measuring the impact and value of the program, including 360 feedback surveys, recording safety interactions, safety performance outcomes, and Safety Leadership Index tracking.

In-House Delivery

The Safety Leadership Program is only offered as an in-house engagement.

Each program is tailored to your organisational context, and can be highly contextualised to address specific challenges within your operational environment.

Talk to us about a proposal for developing a Safety Leadership Program for your organisation.

About HOPLAB

HOPLAB has been supporting organisations to adopt HOP and Operational Learning since 2017.

Our HOP Fundamentals and HOP & Learning Teams courses were the first in Australia and New Zealand, and have now grown to attract a global audience of safety professionals interested in learning the foundations of HOP. Alongside that, we've developed a globally-renowed Safety Leadership Program that is supporting organisations all over the world to lead safety with people, not procedures.

We work with each organisation to understand how work happens and guide decision makers to reflect, learn and grow – harnessing the potential that already exists within its people. Because of that, we can offer a unique perspective and a more organic approach that drives more sustainable results.

Phone: +61 7 5533 9988

Email: admin@southpac.biz

Attendees from Squadron Energy sit at tables in a conference room engaged in a discussion on safety leadership and operational excellence with Southpac International.

The program genuinely challenged and changed the way I think about leadership, safety and how we work through difficult problems. I have already found myself applying it in practice, and I am looking forward to continuing that journey.

Chris Buller, Squadron Energy