What is safety leadership?
Safety leadership is what leaders say and do to create a proactively safe workplace that prioritizes employee health, psychological safety, and learning. Effective safety leaders provide clear direction, frequent and helpful feedback, and positive reinforcement for safety-related behaviors and decision making. They remove barriers to safe behavior and create systems and processes that encourage safe behavior.
Why is safety leadership important?
Exemplary safety starts with leadership. While incidents typically happen at the frontline, leaders set up the physical and cultural setting within which the frontline works. What leaders do and do not do directly impacts an organization’s ability to create and sustain a safe work environment. Vague directives such as “make safety a priority” or “create a safety culture” provides little direction. Leaders need to be specific about the safe behavior they expect from all levels of the organization. They also need to design and align organizational systems, work processes, and leadership practices so that they encourage and reinforce the behavior needed for a high-performing safety culture.
What is ADI’s approach to improving safety leadership?
ADI’s Safety Leadership is a systematic process to enhance safety performance through more effective leadership at all levels. Through training and coaching, and with a scientific understanding of behavior, we help leaders build essential coaching skills and assess and address systems issues to enable and encourage consistent safe work.
Based on the organization’s needs, ADI’s Safety Leadership approach includes all or some of the following components:
- Safety Culture or Safety Leadership Survey – Capturing perceptions of how the site or specific leaders prioritize and manage safety.
- Site Safety Culture Assessment – Interviews, focus groups, behavioral observation, and data/document review to identify strengths and improvement opportunities in the safety culture.
- Safety System Optimization – Expert consulting to remove behavioral disconnects, build consistent use, and ensure that the systems produce the desired impact. This consulting addresses issues with safety systems identified in the survey and assessment.
- Behavioral Roadmap Development – Defining the essential frontline and leadership behaviors needed to achieve the desired safety outcomes. This provides the focus for the implementation.
- Customized Safety Leadership Training – Providing leaders with the knowledge and skills necessary for positive, proactive safety management and roadmap implementation.
- Follow-up Coaching – Positive accountability and skill-building with leaders to address improvement opportunities from the survey and assessment, and ensure successful implementation of the roadmap, safety-related decision making, and improvements to the safety culture.
What are the benefits of ADI’s Safety Leadership process?
Good intentions are not enough. Once leaders understand behavior scientifically, they can make more informed decisions about systems, processes, and leadership actions. Behavioral science provides the criteria to evaluate safety leadership practices and guides us to solutions that deliver sustainable improvement. Leaders taking part in ADI’s Safety Leadership process develop positive, proactive safety management skills that build frontline engagement, improve safety performance, and strengthen safety culture.
ADI’s Safety Leadership process helps leaders to:
- Manage safety with proactive, behavior-based metrics.
- Replace low-impact leader behaviors with high-impact activities.
- Use science to understand at-risk behavior and management’s role in it.
- Engineer positive reinforcement into the workplace to strengthen safe behaviors at all levels.
- Analyze organizational systems and align them in support of safety.
- Ensure existing safety management programs effectively deliver desired outcomes.
- Develop coaching skills that build engagement and strengthen safety performance.
Contact ADI today to learn how to improve your leadership impact and build a culture of safety excellence.
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