Coaching for people running industrial businesses.
Delivered by someone who has stood on the floor at six in the morning with the line down and a customer waiting on an answer.
For the person who inherited Health & Safety and now needs to lead it.
For supervisors and line managers carrying people responsibility alongside output.
One-to-one coaching for owner-managers, directors and senior leaders.
A safety process nobody follows and a manager who was never taught to hold a difficult conversation can be two versions of the same underlying problem. Systems create expectations, but managers and leaders decide whether those expectations survive contact with production pressure, competing priorities and the behaviour the organisation actually rewards.
Usually something in the business has outgrown the old way of leading it.
For owner-managers, directors, managers and supervisors in manufacturing, engineering and warehousing businesses where growth, succession, change or capability has created a leadership problem that cannot be solved by another procedure.
The business has outgrown the way it used to be run.
What worked when the organisation was half the size now creates bottlenecks, unclear decisions and too much dependency on a handful of people. The leadership team needs to catch up with the business it now runs.
Someone needs to step up, or somebody needs to step back.
A future leader is being prepared to take more responsibility, or the founder wants the business to function without every decision eventually returning to the person who built it.
Two cultures now share one balance sheet.
Processes can be integrated relatively quickly. Expectations, management habits and different assumptions about what “good” looks like normally take longer. Leadership needs to make those differences discussable.
Make the six managers you have better before hiring a seventh.
Sometimes the capacity problem is not another salary. Existing managers may need stronger delegation, planning, accountability, communication and confidence to use the authority they already have.
The programme depends on the responsibility the person actually carries. An owner trying to step away from day-to-day decisions needs a different conversation from a newly promoted supervisor or an isolated in-house HSEQ specialist.
Twelve months of practical one-to-one development.
Three programmes for three different levels of responsibility. No subscription checkout, no generic course and no workbook to complete. Each programme begins with a conversation about the person, the role and what the business needs to change.
HSE Specialist Development Programme
12-month programme, stop any time with a month's notice.
One-to-one development for whoever inherited Health & Safety and now needs to lead it. The programme combines professional grounding, personal resilience and the ability to influence other people.
Turns whoever inherited Health & Safety into someone who can lead it.
Get in touch →Operational Leadership Programme
12-month programme, stop any time with a month's notice.
Coaching for supervisors and line managers carrying responsibility for safety, output and people. It develops the management skills that did not automatically arrive with the promotion.
For supervisors promoted for their technical skill and never trained to manage people.
Get in touch →Leadership Development Programme
12-month programme, stop any time with a month's notice.
One-to-one coaching for MDs, directors and senior leaders working on the decisions only leadership can make: priorities, resources, accountability, culture and what the business genuinely rewards.
One to one for MDs, directors and senior leaders: the decisions only a leader can make.
Get in touch →These are development programmes, not digital subscriptions. The first conversation confirms whether the programme fits the person, role and business before anything is agreed.
No course. No workbook. Real decisions.
One-to-one and confidential, over Microsoft Teams. The agenda comes from whatever is actually in front of you rather than a predetermined coaching syllabus.
Two hours a month or one hour a fortnight. 12-month programme, stop any time with a month's notice.
The decision that has been open for three months. The director who is not performing. The board conversation you would rather not have. The strategy that reads well on paper but is not happening in practice.
We work on the live issue and the leadership habits underneath it. The aim is not simply to solve this month's problem, but to understand what keeps producing versions of the same situation.
Work through judgement calls that cannot simply be delegated away.
Performance, accountability and conversations that have been avoided.
Decide what gets resource, attention and leadership airtime.
Examine what the organisation rewards in practice rather than what the values statement says.
You built the thing. Every difficult problem eventually lands on your desk because that is how the business learned to operate. Eventually that strength becomes the ceiling.
Getting past it is not simply about time management. It means deciding what other people genuinely own and accepting that sometimes they need space to do it differently, or imperfectly, before the capability becomes theirs.
The best operator doesn't automatically become the best manager.
The most common leadership gap in an industrial business sits in the middle. Supervisors are promoted because they understand the process, then expected to manage people without ever being shown how.
Technical expertise becomes the safety net.
When management gets difficult, good operators often fall back on the skill that got them promoted: doing the work themselves.
The supervisor knows the process inside out. What may be missing is how to run a decent one-to-one, hold somebody to a standard, delegate without immediately taking the task back, plan the week or escalate a problem properly.
Those are leadership capabilities, not technical ones. The programme develops them through situations the supervisor is dealing with in real time.
Have useful conversations rather than using them as another status meeting.
Hold a standard clearly without turning every issue into confrontation.
Move beyond reacting to today's problems and manage the week ahead.
Build capability in the team rather than quietly taking difficult work back.
Real situations are worked through over Microsoft Teams, then followed up at the next session.
That might be the operator who keeps ignoring a standard, the toolbox talk that fell flat, the absence issue nobody wants to address or the production problem the manager keeps solving personally instead of developing the team to handle it.
Where a specific skills gap sits alongside the confidence or leadership gap, the full-day supervisor course can provide the structured training while the coaching programme provides the ongoing application.
Full-day supervisor course →When you're the only person in the building who does your job.
In-house H&S, Quality and Environmental specialists can carry a lot of responsibility with very little professional challenge around them. This creates somewhere to test judgement, build confidence and develop the influence needed to make the technical work stick.
Two hours a month over Microsoft Teams. 12-month programme, stop any time with a month's notice.
There may be nobody internally to test whether a risk assessment has become overcomplicated, whether an incident response is proportionate or whether a concern has been escalated strongly enough.
The programme gives that specialist a regular place to work through real decisions. It is not outsourced responsibility. The aim is to make the person inside the business more capable of carrying it themselves.
Test judgement, challenge assumptions and build confidence in proportionate technical decisions.
Handle the pressure that comes with being the person expected to know the answer when something goes wrong.
Learn to get managers, supervisors and directors to act on the technical advice rather than simply receive it.
Bring the investigation you're unsure about, the risk decision that is bothering you, the director conversation you need to have or the technical issue you want another experienced view on. That live work becomes the development material, while the underlying professional judgement and influence skills develop over the twelve months.
Where DBIM has been providing more intensive fractional QHSE support, specialist development can provide a lower-intensity route once the internal person is genuinely ready to take more ownership. The objective is stronger internal capability, not permanent external dependency.
Coaching without the corporate theatre.
One-to-one, confidential and built around live work. No cohort, no workbook and no certificate at the end simply to prove development happened.
01 Is this coaching or training?
Coaching and mentoring, not a training course.
There is no standard syllabus, cohort of twelve or certificate at the end. The agenda comes from what's actually happening in the person's role that month.
Where a structured skills course is genuinely the better intervention, we'll say so rather than trying to make coaching solve the wrong problem.
02 How long is the commitment?
Each programme is designed as a 12-month development programme.
There is no 12-month tie-in. You can stop the programme at any point by giving one month's notice.
Twelve months gives enough time to work through live situations, revisit decisions and see whether changes in behaviour actually hold when the next difficult situation arrives.
03 Is it confidential?
Yes. One-to-one coaching conversations remain confidential between the people in the session.
Where the business is sponsoring coaching for somebody else, the sponsor receives a short quarterly progress note covering progress against the agreed development goals.
It does not become a report of what was said during individual coaching conversations.
04 Where do sessions happen?
Sessions are delivered over Microsoft Teams.
That keeps the session easier to protect in a busy working week and means the programmes can support people anywhere in the UK without adding travel time to every coaching conversation.
The normal format is two hours each month, with the senior Leadership Development Programme also available as one hour every fortnight.
05 Can you coach more than one person?
Yes. The same programme structure can be used across several people in the organisation.
That might mean several supervisors each receiving individual Operational Leadership coaching, or individual coaching for multiple members of a senior leadership team.
The conversations remain individual rather than turning the programme into group training.
06 Who actually delivers it?
Dan Bower, who runs DBIM.
Dan's own career included being handed Health & Safety as a coordinator and developing into a wider QHSE leadership role, which mirrors the journey many HSE specialists and operational managers are now making.
His background includes manufacturing, engineering and warehousing, alongside CertIOSH, the NEBOSH Diploma in Occupational Health & Safety and the NEBOSH Diploma in Environmental Management.
HSE specialist development.
Supervisor and manager development.
Owners, MDs and senior leaders.
Plenty of coaches understand coaching. Fewer understand your Tuesday.
The advantage is context. Less time explaining why the customer audit in three weeks, the agency labour problem and the machine that keeps going down are all affecting the decision you are trying to make.
The coaching is grounded in experience inside industrial businesses and the QHSE work DBIM does with operational SMEs. That means the conversation can start with the real situation rather than spending the first half translating the environment around it.
Tell us who the development is for and what is driving it. Twenty minutes should usually be enough to establish whether there is a sensible fit.
Get in touch →Manufacturing, engineering and warehousing are familiar working environments.
Advice accounts for output, customers, people and day-to-day constraints.
The development material comes from situations actually happening in the business.
If coaching is not the right intervention, we will say so.
If the issue needs an HR specialist, a structured training course or another type of professional support, we would rather identify that during the first conversation than sell twelve months of the wrong intervention.