Safety Leadership

In many industries, safety has become a prioritized focus area, some places driven by regulatory requirements and some places by sincere heartfelt desires to work safe and protect employees and environment from the consequences of accidents and incidents.

There are many approaches to how you can achieve safety leadership, but the most common mistake is that safety is treated as a separate item and not as an integrated part of the daily work and leadership. This is also why so many campaigns have good short-term results, but fail on the long term, simply because a campaign do not change the fundamental way the individual or the organization thinks. It is great to remind people, but if their mindset is still not aligned with the safety vision, it will not stick.

The PSQI approach does not come from a safety perspective only, but rather from a point of understanding how the human brain works and how you can influence the brain in a more efficient way to achieve more. In all our workshops, we integrate performance, safety and quality as the outcomes of doing things right. We call this Integrated Leadership Solutions.

Overall, we do not believe that separating performance requirements from safety or from quality for that matter works. “Why not?” You might ask… simply because our actions, behaviors and decisions happen mostly in a simultaneous fashion, so if the brain is not conditioned to think all three at the same time, it will do what provides the biggest reward for the individual, and in most cases, that will be performance.

Although many workshops exists around the topic of Safety Leadership, they tend to focus more on the technical aspect of safety leadership, but true to our mission we have developed a workshop focusing only on the real leadership aspects of Safety Leadership and we call it “Lead to Inspire Safety Culture”. In this workshop we focus on mindset and supporting leadership skills and behaviors needed to create a sustainable environment in which safety is a given factor of the daily work and strategic scope.

For us, the characteristics of a safety leader are that safety is a personal value to them, and that they relentlessly drive the message in all they do. They do not only wear the proper PPE, but also follows the safety procedures and intervene when they see other people who do not. Not because they have to, but because they believe it’s the only way to work.

Good safety leaders also work intensively to create a climate and culture of the organization that supports this message and they openly express that they expect the same from their subordinates. They consistently use every opportunity to share the importance and do not accept complacency. They also make sure that the needed resources to work safe are available, so that objectives can be met without compromising.

Great safety leaders use an open two-way communication and rewards subordinates who speak up about safety issues. They make sure that third party providers have the proper training and they spend time with them, to help them understand how things are done around here.

Leaders who want to be a true safety leader, accept the responsibility they have for the well-being of their people and the organization and the environment around it. Safety Leadership is not a “must”, but a “want-to”.

You can read more about our Lead to Inspire Safety Culture workshop here…