The Founder of Leading Safety Partners is Rob Gardiner.

Rob is an energy industry veteran having spent 36 years with Royal Dutch Shell (“RDS”) in various senior global roles within safety and operations. Since 2000, he has been an integral part of the RDS process safety journey; from workstream developer to implementer, to leading regional and then global programs, and finally as a Shell Group process safety auditor.

In 2019, Rob joined Husky Energy to lead the field deployment of the Husky safety & operations integrity program and in 2021 he left Husky and set up Leading Safety Partners.

Then in 2023, Rob joined Petronas Canada, a subsidiary of the Malaysian national oil company, as their VP of HSE to spearhead their safety transformation from within. He left in late 2024 to reinvigorate Leading Safety Partners.

Something he has learned from his decades of experience is that leadership and assurance are always the differentiating factors between poor, good and great performance. His belief that leadership’s role in the success or failure of safety cultural transformations is why he built LSP; to coach and enable leaders to maximize their impact on culture and performance of the companies they lead.

The latter part of his career has been spent diagnosing root causes of safety issues and helping leaders build and support the resultant improvement journeys in assets and locations all over the world.
Leading Safety Partners is an incorporated Limited Company in Alberta and Canada fully compliant with relevant insurance and WCB requirements throughout Canada and worldwide.

“We were having frequent, although unrelated, potentially high risk issues with our Safe System of Work when we called on Robin to help diagnose the root cause (he was our Process Safety Global Program Lead at the time). He and I visited each site, spending significant time in the field with the teams, and talking to each leader. Jointly we concluded that rather there being a problem with the safe System of Work, the actual issue was more about lack of effective leadership at the worksite. Robin then supported me in coaching each site leader in desired behaviours around active leadership and we saw a huge change in each site’s HSE (and business) performance as a result. Each leader and I looked forward to his regular visits even though his coaching style is ‘direct’ and to the point (he says it as he sees it). The pragmatic approach, implementation of coaching solutions and the time invested by Robin enabled an embedded culture change where we all learned and applied many new leadership approaches leading continuing and tangible results in both safety and business performance.”

Ewan McConnachie

Ops Excellence Lead for Western African Business

“I had nagging concerns about the culture and performance at one of my key assets and called on Robin, the RDS Upstream Process Safety Lead, to come in and review the Safety Case Controls as a peer review. He helped me to understand the scale of gaps and cultural issues within the asset and then coached my Asset Manager and team to develop their gap closure plan and cadence / governance to drive effective gap closure using the CI tools and language we were already working on. He supported my Asset Manager in reorganizing the asset and rebuilding leader capability and to build an Operations coaching program to put discipline to key operational processes back on track with the Ops team. He did this by coaching all levels of asset leadership in practical ways of working and being meaningfully visible in the field asking the right questions to enable the improvement to happen. His key skill was in providing my leaders with clear and powerful feedback and helping them to understand the do different which they then worked on between his visits and observations - he enabled the leaders to create a culture of process discipline through active field leadership which resulted in a dramatic performance improvement”

Malcolm Mayes

Asset Director for SE Asian Joint Venture Business