Tom Cohenno Profile

Surviving the Sharp End: How Safety Professionals can coach and motivate employees to define, seek and achieve personal safety excellence.

Safety professionals will learn how to strengthen intrinsic employee motivation to become as safe as possible. This occurs by eliciting and reinforcing a commitment to ongoing personal development that matches an employee’s increasing safety aspirations. Safety professionals will learn how to ask the correct questions, even if they lack exact line experience, that reveal employee safety ambivalence. These questions, essentially an extended invitation to increase their safety preparation threshold, help employees to self-define their own action steps to improvement. This requires that safety professionals affirm employee autonomy and choice, ultimately enabling the discretionary effort that is essential for spirited and knowledgeable safety compliance. This deep engagement can only be invited, not mandated.

Safety, like defensive driving, is an energy intensive series of employee choices – after all the appropriate rules, laws, and training have been repeatedly conducted – that often provides the final line of defense. It takes intrinsic motivation and performance character to master best practice, to ensure we’re physically prepared, to manage our mood and temperament, and to anticipate and prepare for accidents in advance. Safely performing our normal, day-to-day work requires a similar mindset and focus.

Learning Objectives

1. Describe the basic elements of motivational interviewing.
2. Review appropriate self-assessments that identify gaps in safety preparation and that stimulate a desire for personal improvement.
3. Evaluate one interview session in a fishbowl setting.
4. Build a learning orientation and safety culture that is employee driven, cost neutral and consistent with the high-performance cultures found in the nuclear industry, the military and in medical care.