Safety Leadership


Safety Performance Starts with Leadership

Suppose you want to accelerate the safety performance of your organization, but you have limited resources to get started. Where would you invest your limited resources? Leadership should be your answer, as it is truly the heart of the matter. In fact, elevating Safety Leadership is the single most important thing an organization can do to set improvement in motion. Leadership is the place you want to go first, with the most energy that you can, and that will innervate all the other things that influence good safety outcomes. What does that look like? On this page you’ll find a variety of resources exploring the role that leadership plays in safety performance.

“Elevating safety leadership is the most important single thing an organization can do to set improvement in motion.”

Tom Krause & Kristen Bell

7 Insights into Safety Leadership

“If you want to improve safety, start with leadership and work from there.”

Tom Krause & Kristen Bell

7 Insights into Safety Leadership

“More effective leadership and stronger culture connect excellence in safety to excellent performance generally.”

Tom Krause & Kristen Bell

7 Insights into Safety Leadership

ARTICLES On SAFETY LEADERSHIP


What Every Executive Should Look for in a Safety Dashboard

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Why Your Safety Dashboard Deserves Executive Attention On the day of his retirement, the head of EHS at a large, global manufacturing company sent a note filled with advice for his friends and colleagues. This note summed up his decades-long experience.  The first item on this list was “Stop the Spitting Contest,” or something to…
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3 Characteristics of Strong Safety Leadership

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Suppose you want to accelerate the safety performance of your organization, but you have limited resources to get started. You can only invest in one of the following strategies to improve safety: You could build a stronger safety culture, improve your safety management systems, build an inherently safer facility, reduce at-risk behavior, or strengthen safety…
Read More 3 Characteristics of Strong Safety Leadership

Safety Leadership

In this video, Tom Krause explains why leadership is the most important aspect of improving safety performance. The video includes an interview with Paul O’Neil (former US Treasury Secretary) about how he transformed the Alcoa corporation with safety leadership.

Organizations have been using employee-driven observation and feedback to improve safety performance since the 1980s with surprising variation in the results. When a group of consultants and their client organizations wanted to better understand the reasons for the variation, they contributed hundreds of interviews, focus groups, work samples, and observation data to an analysis. The analysis led to many useful insights, the most important of which was the critical role of managers and supervisors, even in employee-driven processes. We take this finding for granted today, but in the 1990s when we did the project, it was a revelation. As a result of this work, the roles and responsibilities of supervisors and managers changed and were better defined, and organizations began to focus on leadership in a different way. Organizations that integrated these findings into their observation processes from the beginning achieved significantly better outcomes compared to those who didn’t.

Chapter 3: Safety Leadership – The Single Most Important Thing an Organization Can Do to Set Improvement in Motion

Leaders who embody a strong personal value for safety allocate resources, recognize contributions, talk about safety; and get personally involved. They hold themselves to the same high standards that they hold others to. They educate themselves, look into issues, and ask questions. They take action when they see someone in harm’s way, and, crucially, they take action on issues before bad things happen.

7 Insights into Safety Leadership

Ready to take the next step in finding new ways to improve safety leadership and culture?

7 Insights Into Safety Leadership offers an in-depth exploration of safety culture and leadership.

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