Earlier this year, James Eastham from the Eric Wright Group, won SHP’s Rising Star in Health and Safety award at the Safety & Health Expo. As part of his prize he was sent for a psychometric assessment and coaching session with Anna Keen from Acre Frameworks. He wrote to SHP to thank us for organising it and explained how valuable it had been, so we asked him to share his experience. Here’s what he had to say:
In June this year I was fortunate enough to be awarded the SHP Online Rising Star Award at the annual Safety and Health Expo safety-health-expo.co.uk. In addition to being recognised at a great event and networking amongst my peers and meeting leaders in the profession such as Lawrence Waterman, I was also given a number of prizes including conference passes, memberships and training courses.
James Eastham (left), being awarded the Rising Star in Health and Safety Award by Lawrence Waterman
The last thing on the long list of prizes was an assessment and coaching session with Acre Frameworks.
Having only heard of Acre as a recruitment company I was unaware of their work in assessing and developing behavioural competencies within the health and safety profession with the aim of moving practitioners from enforcement to engagement.
After an initial discussion with Anna Keen, the founder of Acre Frameworks, I learned that they have spent the last 18 months working with some of the UK largest employers of health and safety professionals to define the behavioural competencies critical for success.
They then mapped this back to a leading psychometric to provide individuals with objective feedback that underpins coaching and development.
The first stage of this process was an online psychometric competency assessment that would help to identify my key strengths and areas of potential improvement.
After completing what turned out to be a challenging assessment, I was invited to Acre’s offices for a one-to-one coaching session with Anna. This session provided an excellent insight into my preferred behaviours and then a thought-provoking conversation around how these preferences were not just likely to strengthen or limit my performance, but also how my behaviour may impact the success of the creating a safe and health working environment.
Anna Keen, Acre Frameworks
From this discussion Anna was able to suggest some small changes to my behaviour and performance that were both practical in the context of my role but would also allow me to work with my preferences.
In addition to some great discussion around my performance I was left with two reports, one at a ‘Fundamentals level’ and one at ‘Leadership level’ that provided me with detailed feedback and a constant reminder of how I can vary my behaviour to make more impact.
I found the Acre Frameworks process a fantastic way to stop and take a look at your development as a health and safety professional.
Anna’s experience in recruiting and coaching health and safety professionals allowed her to really challenge me to think outside of the conventional development areas for health and safety.
She was a true professional and I left feeling encouraged by the fantastic job Acre is doing to support change in the profession.
In the short term future I will be working with Anna to implement some of the changes suggested and would encourage any individual looking to progress themselves in the profession to do the same.
POETS DAY – Thought for the weekend In a world insidiously driven by human insecurity & approval deprivation from school to the workplace I wonder how readily people will accept machine driven assessment in preference to the inconsistencies of human assessment ? The sooner the discriminatory label and stigma of Mental Health is replaced by generic header “Wellbeing” the sooner the debilitating issues surrounding work related stress fatigue and sub-optimal performance can be addressed in a pro-social environment. The boss maybe perceived as a psychopath but, that would still need a clinical Mental Health diagnoses whereas, the more common chain… Read more »