Safety leadership—Weatherford Asia Pacific*

Abstract

This paper will explain the steps that Weatherford Asia Pacific took to change a safety performance that had remained static for the preceding five years. Weatherford Asia Pacific has in place five key result areas (KRA):

1. HSE performance.

2. Financial performance.

3. Operational performance.

4. Growth.

5. People and resources.

The vice president of Weatherford Asia Pacific, Mr Alistair Geddes, made a decision to personally involve himself in the improvement of the key performance indicators for KRA 1. Believing that leadership was the key to improvement, he set about developing an internal safety leadership training course—this was done alongside the regional learning and development manager Mr Robert Massy. This approach was unique for a variety of reasons:

1. It was spearheaded by the region’s vice president who not only assisted in the preparation of the slides, but personally delivered five sessions in a variety of countries in the region.

2. It was linked to the Weatherford International’s five core behaviours, thus linking safety leadership to other corporate initiatives.

3. It required each leader to complete a personal safety pledge card detailing the activities that they were going to undertake for that performance year.

4. Completion of their pledges is mandatory and linked to performance review.

5. It was pushed further down the organisation by the general managers of each Geomarket.

There have been some very positive indicators that point to the success of this approach. For the first five months of the year, Weatherford Asia Pacific remained recordable incident free (though that situation has now changed). An easy solution would have been to bring in an external training provider to deliver an established training course. This was not viewed as the preferred option as the strength of this approach comes from the person who is delivering the message.