HSE & Sustainability

Safety Leadership Academy Aims for Zero

A new initiative from the Society of Petroleum Engineers has grown from the “Getting to Zero” technical report released in 2018. SPE has teamed with CEDEP to launch the Safety Leadership Academy, a three-phase program designed to address obstacles to achieving zero harm.

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A new initiative from the Society of Petroleum Engineers has grown from the “Getting to Zero” technical report released in 2018. SPE has teamed with CEDEP, the European Center for Executive Development, to launch the Safety Leadership Academy.

“The Safety Leadership Academy was born to actively help shape the next era of safe operations in a significant, even game-changing, way, placing ‘Getting to Zero’ at the heart of an ambitious learning program,” said Johana Dunlop, SPE’s technical director for its health, safety, environment, and sustainability (HSES) discipline.

The “Getting to Zero” technical report was approved the day Dunlop assumed the role of HSES technical director. “I felt like I’d been handed a safety Rosetta Stone and that simple distribution to large numbers would not come near to doing it justice,” she said.

The academy is working to establish cohorts in Houston; Abu Dhabi; and Fontainebleau, France, and will be held in three phases. The first phase is a 4-day in-person session that will examine leadership principles and apply them in facilitated workshops to current safety challenges in the oil and gas industry.

The second phase will involve virtual meetings and one-on-one coaching to address personal and organizational strategic challenges. In this part of the academy, participants will apply their newly acquired knowledge to in-work organizational and personal strategic challenges with support from the program community, dedicated webinars, and frequent one-on-one coaching.

The third phase is another 4-day in-person session focused on creating a coaching culture, sustaining emergent safety leaders, and extending influence and effecting change within organizational culture. This final part is planned for 19–22 April 2021.

The three phases of the academy are designed to address the following five obstacles that have been identified as challenges to achieving zero harm:

  • Ineffective leadership development
  • Insufficient alignment and application of human factors
  • Misalignment and confusion on the expectation of zero harm
  • Inaccurate identification and management of risk
  • Market pressure

The program is being directed by Muriel Barnier, who earned the Outstanding Young Professional Award from the International Association of Oil and Gas Producers in 2016. “We need to shift the paradigm in health, safety, and environment,” she said.
“'Leaders need a safe space to get together and define the future of safety culture with nonhierarchical conversations,” Barnier said in her column on SPE’s HSE Technical Discipline page. The Safety Leadership Academy, she said, hopes to be that space.

“There is no sugarcoating in this program,” Barnier added. “It’s not a place where they teach or train managers to be good safety leaders, because this is nonsense in itself. Rather, it’s an in-depth experience where the learners do the learning with the support of outstanding coaches and world-class experts from a variety of fields.”

Find out more about the Safety Leadership Academy here.