The Safety Excellence Leadership Process

To me, the best way a safety leader can create a culture of excellence in their company is to focus on the following three elements: 

Reality — Where is our company at right now? What’s our safety culture? What’s our approach to excellence? 

Vision — Where does our company want to go? What do we want our safety culture to be? What do we want our employees to think of when they think of excellence? 

How — How will our company get to where it wants to go? What aspects of our safety culture do we need to overhaul? How do we improve our approach to excellence? 

I recently discussed some of these topics with Shawn M. Galloway on my podcast. 

Shawn is the President and Chief Operating Officer of ProAct Safety. He is a keynote speaker, consultant, advisor, and author of the following books: 

STEPS to Safety Culture Excellence.

Hazardous Materials Management Desk Reference.

Forecasting Tomorrow: The Future of Safety Excellence.  

Inside Strategy: Value Creating from within Your Organization. 

Lean Behavior-Based Safety - BBS for Today's Realities. 

On my podcast, Shawn and I discussed various aspects of the following safety trifecta: safety excellence, safety culture, and safety leadership, including: 

The need for safety professionals to continuously mature our thinking around what is and isn't excellence in safety. In other words, why we should always challenge our thinking around safety. 

What is our strategy around safety culture? What does success look like? What direction are we headed? How are we going to realistically get there? 

How, sometimes, the best safety consulting isn’t about just safety consulting—it’s about talking about other factors related to a company’s business. Instead, you should look at processes, systems, and a company’s overall strategy for growth. 

An indicator of leadership capability for the CEO of a company to ask themself and their team:  If we're not great at something as important as safety, what else aren't we good at?