There are many reasons why safety is important, but why is safety leadership a critical lever to make safety happen? Here are my top reasons why safety leadership matters.
Without safety leadership, other priorities win
Every organisation says that safety matters. But making safety truly matter in practice, is much harder. Because while safety is often described as a core value, in the real world it sits shoulder to shoulder with production targets, cost pressures, resource scarcity, and legacy routines. Against this, it’s easy for safety to just slip into the background.
Leadership is needed, at all levels, to actively keep the discussion about safety alive, or else other priorities will decide for them. As such, safety leadership is needed to make safety part of how work really is done, not just how it’s supposed to be done.
Because safety is a human adaptive challenge
While many safety challenges have relatively clear technical solutions, successful implementation and integration of those solutions require changes in the values, beliefs, relations and mindsets of people involved, across multiple places of an organisation. And people generally resist adopting values and beliefs that are defined by others. So, they need to be involved in figuring out how to tackle safety challenges.
Safety leadership is needed to:
Activating people to tackle shared safety challenges, is the work of safety leadership.
To unlock human potential
Every organisation is a bundle of (more or less locked up) intelligence, passion, knowledge, creativity, collaboration, knowhow, innovation that can be used to improve, detect, assess ambiguous environments, optimise cutting edge technology that we haven’t fully understood yet, carry out work under competitive pressures to do more with less, care about colleagues, speak up, and to lend a helping hand. And organisations are free to make use of this resource – to realise its intellectual, emotional and creative potential.
Safety leadership is the key that unlocks this: creating the conditions for people to contribute, to speak up, to bring their expertise to light. This means:
When leadership fails to do this, human potential lies unused and with it, many of the answers to today’s safety challenges.
Going beyond the predictable
When safety performance stalls, the response is often predictable: more rules, more messaging, more oversight. That’s safety management, built to control and prevent. It assumes that the system is perfect, deviations are errors, and more control equals more safety. This may work for routine risks, but real work is rarely that tidy. In complex environments, surprises are normal, priorities collide, tools and equipment work to a degree, and safety is shaped by how work is actually done under pressure.
Safety leadership begins where management runs out of script. It recognises that not every risk can be predicted or controlled, and that normal work patterns often create the conditions for incidents long before they occur. Real learning happens when we explore and address the system, not just the event.
This question shifts the focus from error to the systemic conditions that made the outcome likely. It moves from control to double-loop learning – challenging the assumptions and conditions behind the way we work.
Safety leadership moves a workplace from protecting business as usual to shaping a new business as possible.
The bigger picture
Safety leadership isn’t about enforcing standards, policing behaviours, or creating followers. It’s the practice of keeping safety alive, human, and adaptable – every day, at every level. It’s about creating the conditions for people to contribute, speak up, and bring their expertise to light to create a future that wouldn’t happen otherwise.
I’d love to hear from you: what do you see as the most important reasons why safety leadership is needed in your organisation? Drop me an email with your thoughts, or connect with me on LinkedIn.