Behavior-based coaching is essential for any mission to keep people safe. It’s human nature to get distracted or complacent on the job, and to deviate from performing the prescribed safe operating procedure (SOP).

Most organizational leaders are relatively clear about what they desire from their safety staff, but shouldn’t these same leaders ask what’s needed of them to achieve ongoing EHS success?

We know that most of us don’t like to be bounded by a set of rules around our actions and our behaviors; however, there is no sustainable safety culture if there is no operational discipline.

Standard teaching techniques apply to all types of learning. But safety training exists on a level of its own given the life and death stakes involved. While safety professionals need to find teaching ideas that work, many find themselves falling back on the same tired slide presentations.

Safety training has been around forever. There are also safety orientations, safety coaching, safety mentoring, safety education, safety feedback. These staples of safety programs have one thing in common: showing employees how to recognize risks, know the rules, and avoid injury or illness.

Micro-learning has the potential to transform the way companies do their safety and regulatory compliance training -- and save hundreds-of-thousands, even millions of dollars in the process.

Commercial aviation is a complex system that consists of several subsystems – airlines, manufacturers, airports, pilots, flight attendants, air traffic controllers, maintenance personnel, and regulators – that must all work together in order for the entire system to function.

For the past 30 years, I’ve been driven to be the best and do the best I can – in nearly any context, personally and professionally. Along the way, I’ve discovered various dimensions of growth that have helped me succeed. I want to pass them on, and share them, so they might help you.

How do people get to a point where they fear safety? How can something like a checklist or an SOP or a safety manager create fear? Our body is equipped with automatic protective wiring that reacts to scary stimuli with a fear response.

Criminal charges have been dropped against Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway (MMA), according to Quebec’s Director of Criminal and Penal Prosecutions (DPCP), for causing the deaths of 47 people when 73 cars of highly combustible crude oil derailed in the small Quebec town of Lac-Mégantic in 2013 turning the downtown into a raging inferno.