Alive and Well at the End of the Day, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 3THE PRACTICE OF LEADERSHIP

Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do what you want done, because he wants to do it.

—Dwight Eisenhower

No follower on the planet wants to get hurt, but without the strong influence and management of safety performance by their leader that simply won’t happen. Leaders must lead. The question is how: as the leader, what do you actually do to lead your followers to work safely?

The answer to that question is found in the practice of safety leadership. As to finding out what that practice should be, the perfect place to begin is to examine your own practices: what exactly do you do to lead your followers to work safely? If you’re a supervisor, manager or executive, no doubt there is a long list of practices you engage in. What exactly are they?

Pose that question to leaders, there’s always a long pause, followed by a surprisingly tentative reply. For most, it isn’t easy for leaders to explain exactly what they do to lead their followers to work safely.

Rest assured, it’s not because they aren’t doing much in the way of leading. A more plausible reason is they’ve been at leading for so long, they largely lead out of habit; habit being behavior performed without conscious thought. Another reason could be that so much of safety leadership seems to be “just part of doing my job.”

Complicating matters is confusion about what exactly constitutes “leadership”, as differentiated from “management.” Not that the lack of clarity stops ...