Practising safety leadership

摘要

How would you define safety leadership? Safety leaders from a wide variety of organisations, including Travis Perkins, BT, Centrica, Kuehne Nagel and Northamptonshire County Council, were asked this question at the recent launch event for our research project. They suggested it was "the moral conscience of the business" or "business as usual", and starting at the top it should permeate through all levels of the organisation. Safety leadership faces a range of significant challenges. These leaders highlighted legislative change, media-driven perceptions of health and safety, competing organisational pressures and individual and group resistance as being especially important. To meet these challenges they had played a variety of roles, including educator, enabler, communicator, mediator and champion, and had deployed a range of practices. Four in particular stand out: 'walking the talk' - consistently role modelling the importance of safety; clear communication -holding open two-way conversations about health and safety issues using real examples and data; recognition and reward - acknowledge and develop good practice and challenge the bad; engagement - appropriately involving everyone from board to casual worker and part-time staff in health and safety decisions.