GREAT SAFETY LEADERS change the culture for the better, but how they impact culture change depends on a leader's unique role. For front-line supervisors and managers, becoming a great safety leader is a special challenge. They occupy roles that are highly tactical compared to their colleagues at other levels. At the same time, their closeness to individual team members means they communicate the intentions and values of the organization in a way that no other leader can. For years, organizations have tried to help front-line leaders leverage their position for safety improvement by adding on to existing priorities and demands. The results are usually the same: good intentions that seldom survive daily realities. Today, some organizations are taking a lesson from lean manufacturing and embedding safety leadership opportunities into the path of the supervisors' work. In other words, innovative safety leaders use the interactions they are already having with their employees to talk about ways to manage and control exposures.
展开▼
