What actually changes when we coach for safety (and what doesn’t!)

I don’t coach in laboratories. I coach where forklifts back up without warning, where job cards get smudged, and where someone always needs “five minutes” you don’t have. That’s the real test for safety coaching: does anything actually change in the noise?

I’ve learned to look for three shifts.

1) From “telling” to tested talk

Supervisors often believe they’re clear. Workers often believe they weren’t asked. Coaching doesn’t fix this by cheerleading — it changes the talk. Short, specific questions. Naming one behaviour, not the whole person. The research suggests that when leaders deliberately increase safety-specific verbal exchanges, site safety levels move in the right direction and the climate follows. Not overnight. But measurably enough to matter.

In practice, I hear fewer speeches and more curious prompts. I see foremen circling back later, not to “catch out” but to close the loop. People start to say, “We talked about that this morning,” and that little sentence is a signal: we’re building a memory of safer talk.

2) From rules to ownership (without slogans)

I like procedures. I like living people more. Coaching earns its keep when it helps crews own the risk in front of them, not just recite controls from a laminated card. Studies in high-hazard settings point to active ingredients like timely feedback, noticing what’s going right, and co-creating small goals that crews believe are doable. That mix seems to move ownership from “the system” to “us on this job.”

On a good week I’ll hear a leading hand say, “We’ll stage the lift differently; it’s slower for two minutes and safer for the hour.” That’s not compliance theatre. That’s local ownership.

3) From one-off fixes to resilient collaboration

Single-point heroics look great in incident notes. They don’t scale. Coaching inside projects — especially during set-up — helps teams surface how they’ll collaborate when plans meet reality: who calls a pause, how we share weak signals, what “good” looks like when the day turns odd. Case work in petroleum construction framed this as “resilient collaboration”: robust enough to flex, explicit enough to teach. Coaching was used less as a pep talk and more as a way to design the conversations people would need later, under pressure.

Do these shifts solve everything? No. Coaching won’t substitute for resourcing, competence, or fair work design. It won’t erase production pressure. And when coaching turns into performance management with a smile, people smell it a mile off.

So what doesn’t change? The physics. The time. The fact that trade-offs are real. Coaching doesn’t give you more minutes; it helps you spend them better — with clearer talk, more honest ownership, and collaboration that bends without breaking.

A note on standards and the practitioner’s lane

New professional standards for safety coaching are emerging. That’s a good thing. Clarity helps the field mature. My lane here is different: to stay close to practice, reflect in plain language, and show where evidence meets the messy realities of work. Standards matter; so does lived craft.

If you’re exploring a formal standards pathway, keep an eye on the Institute for Safety Coaching & Leadership (ISCL) — I’ll keep sharing the practitioner’s view here.

Wrap Up

In the end, the signal I watch for is simple: do people talk about risk sooner, with less drama, and act together a little faster? When the answer is “yes” more often than “no,” coaching is doing its quiet work.