Human Element Leadership And Management. Why Does It Exist And How Is It Changing?

HELM courses focus on developing the skills and knowledge necessary to manage and lead effectively, communicate clearly and resolve conflicts that may arise in a maritime context. The aim is to enhance situational awareness, improve decision-making, and reduce human error, a significant cause of maritime accidents.

By providing seafarers with the necessary knowledge and skills to manage and lead effectively, the HELM courses can help improve safety and prevent accidents at sea. Additionally, well-trained seafarers are more likely to feel confident in their abilities and enjoy their work, which can lead to higher job satisfaction and retention rates.

Overall, the introduction of the HELM courses is a positive step towards improving the safety and well-being of seafarers and promoting a culture of safety within the maritime industry.

The HELM courses were introduced in 2010 by the IMO and began to be offered by training providers in 2013. In the early days, providing this type of training was quite fraught because most of us had never run this type of course before. In addition, the Merchant Navy training board guidelines could have been more helpful; they needed to be more precise and tell us how to run the course. Fortunately, the MCA had commissioned a book called “The Human Element, a Guide to Human Behaviour in the Shipping Industry” by Dik Gregory & Paul Shanahan. This book laid out the essentials of the programme.

Unfortunately, the MNTB guidelines did not mention this book, and many training providers were unaware of its existence.

This led to as many versions of the HELM course as training providers delivering it. Some employed “death by PowerPoint” to regurgitate whatever they had gleaned from Google to their bored classes. Others outsourced the problem to the corporate management consultant industry. One provider had students marching up mountains doing practical leadership tasks in the British rain.

Our method, having grasped the basic philosophy from the MCA book, was to adopt an evolutionary approach to course development. Even though the very first course contained many PowerPoints, there was a focus, even then, on student engagement and participation. As time progressed, we developed this more and more. The DPA of our Yacht Management Division, Ken Dales, who set up this and all our other safety courses, discovered the equipment sold by Martin Thomson, an Occupational Psychologist who owns MTa. We now use this equipment in all three Bluewater Training Centres. It can be used multiple ways to create dynamism in the course, from short 20-minute learning games to complex, challenging scenarios that take half a day. Nowadays, we consider ourselves not as HELM instructors but as facilitators. The programme’s purpose is not to ‘teach stuff”, which is why we don’t have a formal exam at the end. Instead, the course aims to change attitudes and behaviours, inviting students to reflect on their interactions with others. When the facilitators have to steer the animated discussion to follow the programme, they know they have succeeded.

The Merchant Navy Training Board has recently updated the guideline for delivering this course, and I am delighted to report that our approach has been vindicated. of course, we will need to make some modifications in light of the new guidelines, but our delivery style is now expressly recommended in the new document.

These are amongst the introductory courses that we run. However, they are the most rewarding for both the students and us. We learn something from the crew every time; every course is different, and we hone our delivery each time.

John Wyborn