ABSTRACT
Coaching is a general leadership and development approach that has become more and more fashionable in recent years. Coaching has real long-term benefits in helping to improve organisation's safety performance and culture, so it is one of the fundamental new tools that safety professionals must be able to use. The organisation a safety professional worked for was committed to putting every manager through a two-day safety course. While working on a safety improvement programme the safety professional went to a location to talk through how they could improve their workplace transport safety arrangements. As part of a programme to improve the quality of safety conversations that senior business leaders in the organisation have with front-line colleagues, a safety professional was asked to coach a business leader to improve their style. The best coaching conversations are those where the person being coached does not know it, as the conversation appears normal and seamless.
