Safety Leadership

Peter F Drucker, the management guru describes management as “doing things right” while leadership is “doing the right thing”. Being a good manager is not the same thing as being a good leader.

• Safety Leadership is a way of leading and managing your employees where Senior Management:
• Take pride in their organisation and in their people
• Have a management style that puts people first
• Clearly state what their health and safety expectations are – zero injuries
• Are excellent role models themselves in all aspects of health and safety
• Ensure that they are up to date on health and safety issues
• Give their time to solving health and safety problems
• Provide resources – time, people, money, whatever to drive the health and safety programme

Organisations that manage health and safety effectively have been found to manage other aspects of their business well – be that manufacturing, logistics, finance, HR etc. Safety leadership is related to business leadership generally.

How to get to a Safety Leadership position

Before you can move to a position of Safety Leadership in your organisation every Manager, Supervisor or Team Leader needs to take ownership of health and safety in their own area. They are the key people who will create the working environment and culture to drive it forward. As far as your employees are concerned, their Line Manager or Supervisor is the company. Their relationship with their immediate manager is crucial in motivating them to work safely every day.

Any Senior Manager, Line manager or Team leader can become a Safety Leader in their organization. They can be coached to demonstrate the key behaviours that will make a difference to employee engagement, commitment and behaviour. Such coaching will draw on their internal “moral barometer” and their value system which should strive to protect their most important asset, their employees.

Key Elements of Safety Leadership

Safety Leadership requires that Managers fully understand the hazards, risks and technical aspects of the work but it also requires a range of personal qualities such as: ability to communicate at all levels, approachability, empathy, genuine interest in people together with good listening and influencing skills. True safety leadership supports employees when they do the right thing even if that means stopping a job due to unresolved hazards. Real health and safety culture in any organization has to be led.

So how do Safety Leaders behave?

• They walk around the workplace regularly and understand what is going on
• They ask employees regularly how could we do things better and safer and then they listen
• They regularly give praise and recognition for work done safely and well
• They provide on-going feedback on health and safety performance
• They are fair, firm and consistent in their approach
• They ensure that employees know their role and that there is participative decision making
• They observe unsafe behaviours and deal with them sensitively, focusing on the unsafe act not the person
• They ensure that everyone is competent and gets regular training
• They develop, train and support Line Managers specifically in their health and safety efforts
• They challenge the status quo, influence others and inspire others to deliver superior performance
• They hold all managers to account for their health and safety performance
• They strive for best practice in health and safety all day, every day

What about the basics?

Of course you cannot begin to develop your managers as safety leaders until the basics are in place. This means really looking at the hazards and either eliminating or dealing with them through effective risk assessments. Hazards create unsafe working conditions which in turn lead to injuries. Training in safe working practices is a key element in any health and safety programme but it is more important to ensure that the work practices on the ground reflect safe working methods and are workable, practical and acceptable to the employees. It also means investigating all incidents including near misses to get to the root causes of accidents and injuries, ideally in a no-blame culture where organisational learning is the key objective.

So where are you now?

By now you have probably fully complied with all laws and regulations that relate to you, you’ve written the Safety Statement, prepared all the risk assessments and delivered all the relevant training to your employees. In addition you have guarded all your machines, minimised noise and vibration and reduced manual handling to a workable level etc. Yet after all that time and investment you find you are still having “needless accidents” in your business. And you are asking yourself why?

Now you need to move into the safety culture area where Safety Leadership is the key tool to move you up the scale to being a truly safe and healthy place to work. It means acknowledging that health and safety really is at the top of your business priorities.

Becoming a Champion

Ultimately all Managers need to become champions of health and safety and operate in a servant-leader mode where their main job is to enable all employees to do their jobs, safely.

Ultimately Managers get the health and safety performance they ask for.

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Mary Darlington is now offering one and two day courses in Safety Leadership for CEOs and Senior Management teams across all sectors.