Motor Trades Care (MTC) has collaborated with Sentis, a national leader in safety culture transformation, to develop a safety leadership training program. With Sentis’ safety training experience and MTC’s industry WHS expertise, this training is tailored to the needs of leaders within the motor
trades industry.

The challenge

Are your leaders driving the kind of safety culture you want? Sentis research indicates that leaders are critical in driving positive safety cultures, yet only 24% of leaders display strong safety leadership capabilities.

Many leaders are promoted through the ranks into positions of leadership without the opportunity to develop the necessary safety leadership skills and capabilities to build a positive culture or, even more challenging, turn around a negative safety culture.

It is also common for organisations to lack a strong safety vision that leaders can get behind and support within their teams. If leaders cannot paint a clear picture and vision of what a positive safety culture looks like, it is very challenging for them to motivate, reward, and inspire their team to go above and beyond to achieve this vision.

The solution

MTC’s Leading Safely Program is designed for all leaders from frontline level to senior executives and focuses on developing capabilities within your leadership team that will support your organisation to improve safety culture. This is an important step to ensure all leaders have a common set of effective leadership skills and are aligned to drive cultural improvement with a consistent leadership approach.

The success of developing and maintaining a strong safety culture relies on authentic and transformational leadership that drives cultural change through role-modelling expected attitudes and behaviours and to effectively coach and influence teams towards a goal of “safety citizenship” – a goal that would see all employees go above and beyond to continuously improve the safety culture because they want to, not because they have to.

“Our aim is to deliver a program that will not only be impactful, but that will also keep operational interruptions to a minimum. Partnering with Sentis on the Leading Safely Program allows us to achieve both these goals,” said Trevor Ballantyne, MTC General Manager, Operations. “More than that, we’re thrilled to be able to offer a program that supports the automotive industry to build safety leadership capability and set their leaders up for success.”

The learning framework

Based on a blended learning approach, Leading Safely features a mix of three self-paced online learning modules, a safety leadership assessment, two facilitated group application sessions via webinar and optional leadership coaching pathways.

The learning journey is built on best practice instructional design and has been carefully crafted to support the transfer of learning concepts back into the workplace, so you can be confident it will support a positive shift in attitudes and deliver results.

The learning framework and interactive online platform supports training transfer by creating motivation, minimising cognitive overload, supporting active learning with staggered learning phases and focusing on practical application. Click here for more information about the Program modules and delivery mode.

The outcome

Leading Safely will build a consistent approach to safety leadership within your organisation and provide a common language and set of tools that leaders can use to build a positive safety culture.
Leaders will understand the goal of safety citizenship and how their behaviours and expectations can support their team to achieve the vision. Leading Safely leads to:

  • more mature safety cultures where employees go above and beyond basic compliance
  • increased quality and quantity of safety conversations between leaders and teams
  • greater influencing skills within the leadership team to drive team adherence to safety protocols
  • increased safety innovation and continuous improvement
  • greater commitment to the safety vision and increased motivation to achieve safety goals
  • improved engagement in safety initiatives
  • improved lead and lag indicators
  • greater willingness of employees to report errors and incidents.

“We are excited to have MTC as an Official Sentis Partner as we continue to engage like-minded businesses and their leaders to join us in creating healthy and empowered workplace cultures, and on our mission to change the lives of individuals and organisations for the better, every single day,” added Anthony Gibbs, Sentis CEO.

The program is expected to be launched in the coming months. For more information about the Leading Safely Program, contact the MTC team on 1300 006 826 or complete our enquires form here.