One of the most important ingredients in creating a successful safety culture in your business is having strong, safety-forward leaders. Great leaders can create and enforce effective safety standards and set an example for the rest of the team.

But how exactly do you find and train these leaders, and how do you use them to their fullest potential?

The Value of Leaders in Organizational Safety

Safety is primarily a culture issue. If all your employees, managers, and supervisors believe that safety is the highest priority and are genuinely committed to enforcing that idea, your organization will be much safer. Even the best safety policies and procedures aren’t going to do anything if your employees don’t take them seriously or don’t follow them.

Leaders help establish and reinforce a safety culture in your organization, and in a multitude of ways:

•  Create and enforce policies. Strong leaders are responsible for creating and implementing policies in most contexts. They make rules and procedures that employees can follow to increase their safety on the job site. Without good leaders, your policies are going to suffer.
• Set a tone. Leaders also set a tone. This further changes employee actions dramatically based on how leaders direct them and talk to them. If leaders consistently take safety seriously and treat every possible accident as significant, employees will as well.
• Set an example. Leaders are always focused to establish an example that motivates others. If your supervisor is constantly wearing a hard hat and safety goggles, you’ll be more likely to follow suit.
• Guide employees to better habits. Your supervisors, managers, and other leaders will be responsible for guiding employees to better habits, especially if they violate or dance on the line of safety regulations. Oftentimes, a simple conversation is all it takes to help an employee adopt better safety habits.
• Hire better employees. In many organizations, leaders are primarily responsible for recruiting and hiring. They’re the ones conducting interviews and making the final decisions. Good leaders can hire better, more safety-conscious employees who will be much more likely to keep the organization safe.
• Train employees effectively. Employee safety training takes many forms, but it always needs to be handled with care and attention. Good leaders make good safety training programs and prioritize education and experience on their teams.

The Hallmarks of Strong Safety Leadership

You can tell someone is a good leader when it comes to safety based on:

• Prioritization. Does this leader treat safety as the highest, ultimate priority in the organization? If so, take it as a good sign.
•  Consistent enforcement. Strong leaders who make your organization safer also make an effort to consistently enforce safety rules and regulations. They treat everyone the same, and infractions seriously, and they do what it takes to guide both the organization and the people within it to safer habits.
•  Education and development. Excellent safety leaders make efforts to pursue education and development, both for their staff members and for themselves. They’re constantly learning new things, working with their employees, and trying to find ways to improve overall.
• Communication. And, of course, good leaders communicate openly and transparently. Employees feel comfortable approaching them with concerns, and they go out of their way to address employees with direction and feedback.

How to Find and Support Better Leaders?

How do you find and support better leaders within your organization?

Consider culture fit when hiring:

Don’t neglect the importance of cultural fit when hiring. Your organization values safety, and it will be much more likely to achieve its goals if it hires employees who similarly value safety. This is something you can gauge from the very first interview. Consider screening out candidates who seem apathetic or dismissive of safety topics, and prioritizing the higher of candidates who seem serious, professional, and value driven.

Train and promote from within: 

Similarly, you should train and promote from within, based on qualities you observe in the workplace. If you see someone who consistently follows all the safety rules, reports incidents proactively, and guides other employees to follow safety procedures, consider them an excellent leadership candidate. This way, you can select based on the best safety leadership qualities from within.

Pursue ongoing education:

Even the best safety leaders still have new things to learn, so pursue ongoing education for them. Encourage them to sign up for new seminars and workshops, and guide them to new reading materials so they can stay updated.

Reward commitment to safety: 

People respond well to incentives, so make it a point to reward the leaders in your organization who show striking commitments to safety improvement. Issuing bonuses, awards, or extra perks in exchange for maintaining a safer workplace can help already excellent performers do even better.

With better, more safety-conscious leaders in place, your organization will be safer and more consistent. Finding, training, and developing leaders can be a challenge, but it more than pays off in the end.