Work On It Together
Coaching to build influence and get everyone engaged in risk management.
Executive coaching grounded in safety science
Executive coaching for the people responsible for risk and safety. Risk managers, program administrators, and the senior leaders who oversee and support them.
A safety leader can't manage risk alone. Much of the job is about getting colleagues, staff, and leadership engaged in the risk management process, often without the positional authority to change individual and team behaviors. Yet when an incident occurs, the responsibility for leading the response falls to the safety leader, regardless of its cause. Coaching builds the influence to close that gap, so more of the organization shares the risk management work.
Safety Leadership Coaching
Coaching is organized around five challenges common to safety leadership. Each one is a real part of the role, and a leader who makes progress across them earns the influence to bring others into the risk management process.
Building Relationships. Safety work depends on trust. Before anything else, a safety leader has to build a relationship that makes people willing to raise problems early, hear a variety of perspectives, and ultimately, help to solve them.
Engaging Up, Down, and Across. A safety leader depends on people who do not report to them, including staff, peers, senior leaders, and outside partners. The job is to get them involved and engaged in risk management, like getting teachers to complete risk assessments or getting a board to truly understand safety risk and act accordingly.
Strategic Thinking and Systems Awareness. Safety is a system, and its parts affect one another. A safety leader has to see those connections and make sense of them for others in ways that change perspective and redirect attention and resources, rather than reacting to issues one at a time.
Managing Overwhelm and Prioritization. The role brings constant, competing demands, and no one can meet them all at once. The key is to read overwhelm as a signal about the system rather than a personal failing, and to manage your own capacity so you stay consistent and effective to support the organization and everyone in it.
Sustaining Self and Career. Tough incidents and continuous stress wear people down. Protecting your well-being and judgment lets you recover from difficult events and enjoy a long and rewarding career in the role.
How we work together
Safety Leadership Coaching is six months of one-to-one coaching for safety leaders. You bring the challenge(s) in front of you, and we work through them together until you have a way forward you trust.
Safety science readings and resources are thoughtfully selected and provided between sessions. Each session centers around a concept or framework, and executive coaching methods are used to draw out learnings and applications of safety science to real-life circumstances and issues. Clients gain three outcomes: deep learning of safety science, solutions to real issues, and enhanced safety leadership capabilities.
Take a free self-assessment to see where you stand across all five challenges
Coaching for Strategy and Change Management
Coaching for senior leaders who need to move the needle on a specific problem or lead transformational change in their organization’s risk management strategy and/or safety culture.
This three to six-month engagement gives the leader a strategic thinking partner and the discipline to update a risk management plan, implement recommendations from an external review (either from Slay Risk or someone else), and/or change traits of the organization’s culture to promote a new vision, direction, or approach to risk management and safety leadership. It ends with the change underway and a leader who can keep it going on their own.
Career Coaching
Coaching for emerging and experienced risk and safety professionals to break into the field or move up, step into a new role and start on the right foot, and to gain visibility among peers and the wider industry.
This engagement helps start and elevate careers. Coaching helps to leverage and grow an existing network to support transitions, like landing and starting a new role. It also helps build a reputation and develop contributions that can advance the field. Together we set goals, develop ideas, and prepare for interviews and presentations. Clients come away grounded and more confident.
Testimonials
I'm the first risk management director at my organization. I came in thinking my job was to write SOPs and get people to follow them. Since working with Stuart, my leadership team and I understand that my real job is relationship building. My executive director tells me that, for the first time, people are actually talking about safety and risk management in their leadership meetings.
Maria Santiago
Risk Management Director
North Cascades Institute
Before, when I'd talk to folks about risk, the response was always 'we got this.' During our work together, that started to change. People were reaching out, wanting to engage and do things together. Sometimes, just having a third party in the room, asking the right questions, is enough to shift things.
Amanda Grassick
Manager, Risk and Safety
I tried other coaching options and the people had zero passion. Working with Stu is completely different. He gets the work, he gets the industry, and he helped me build a framework I actually use.
Becky Donovan
Risk Management Consultant
AJ Gallagher Insurance
FAQs
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Coaching helps to reach your own professional goals by drawing out the client’s own knowledge and working through whatever might be getting in the way. The coaching process relies on questions and reflection, not advice, to move the client forward. Coaching is not consulting or training, which both center on giving advice, and unlike therapy, it does not address mental health.
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Coaching is for anyone responsible for their organization's risk and safety, including program directors, risk managers, and senior and executive leaders. These roles carry common challenges: influencing attitudes and behaviors across the organization, holding real responsibility with limited authority, and managing competing demands. Coaching supports established leaders and those new to the role alike.
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Training and consulting both pass knowledge from one person to another. Training teaches a skill, and consulting gives advice. Both are important aspects of professional development, but neither focuses on direct application to your own circumstances and follow-through on your own goals in the way coaching does. Instead of handing answers, coaching helps to find your own, and builds the skill and confidence to act on your own goals in a way that you know will work best for your circumstances, through reflection, testing ideas in practice, and working through your specific context.
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Coaching and mentorship complement each other well. Coaching helps you find your own answers. Mentorship lets me draw on my own experiences in safety leadership and with safety science, where it might help.
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No. Many people come in knowing something needs attention but not what, exactly. The early sessions are partly about working that out. You don't have to arrive with it figured out.
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Many organizations cover coaching through professional development or leadership budgets. You can register yourself or have the organization invoiced directly. If you need approval, I can provide a short proposal describing the engagement and how it supports your goals and the organization's.
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When an organization sponsors the coaching, we agree on goals together, but the conversations stay confidential. The sponsor receives general updates on progress, never the details of what we discuss.
Let’s work together.
Start with a 20-minute conversation about where you are and what would help.