If This is What Safety Does Now, What Will be Different in Two Years?

How leadership decisions shape safety performance, engagement and organisational

improvement.

I was sitting in the boardroom of a 70,000person, worldclass company.

We had low accident rates, exceptional performance indicators, an enviable reputation.

The CEO looked at the 20 senior safety leaders in front of him and said:

“I don’t know if you’re good enough.”

He wasn’t questioning anyone’s commitment, he was questioning our impact.

He had asked the organisation to stop hurting people, and yet, incidents still happened. He

wasn’t looking for marginal improvement. He was asking a different question:

“What is safety doing to make this company better?”

Not just safer, better: More innovative, more engaged, more resilient.

The realisation:

That’s where it got uncomfortable, because all of our plans, the KPIs, the audits, the

interventions, were built around one thing: Better compliance.

Other functions had growth strategies.

HR, Finance, Procurement, Sales, all looking ahead, testing new approaches, contributing to

the future of the business.

Safety, despite being “world class” in terms of outcomes, was asking for more of the same:

• More audits.

• More training.

• More reminders.

• More awareness.

I looked back over what we had asked the organisation to do with their resources, and

compared that to what we asked this year. Our plans for the next year looked a lot like the

last five.

The uncomfortable conclusion: We hadn’t run out of problems, we’d run out of ideas. We’d

run out of strategic evolution and out of new ways to improve performance.

Our CEO had seen it. We hadn’t.

I undertook the same review globally, five years’ worth of plans. What I found was consistent:

• Dashboards were green but not driving anything new.

• Audit scores hovered around the same level everywhere.

• Leadership and employee involvement were measured through activities and

• Transactions, not contribution.

• Actions “adjusted” existing procedures rather than improving how work was done.

Nothing was really moving year on year.

The leadership trap

The default model is familiar:

It feels productive. It feels like control. But in practice we were measuring “busy”, not progress.

We had created a pattern: organisational groupthink on a corporate scale.

Every intervention, no matter how well-intended, and no matter the “tool”, subtly reinforced the same message:

• Workers fall short.

• Processes find it and fix it.

The unintentional narrative: the person intervening is the hero, saving the worker from harm. Check, correct, report, repeat. Nowhere in that cycle do we truly ask:

• “How do we make this work better?”

• The question that changes everything

So I asked myself a different question. A yes/no question you can ask yourself: If this is what we plan to do now, what will be different in two years?

• More inspections?

• More corrections?

• More compliance?

For me, the answer was yes, which meant we were focused on sustaining a narrative, not

improving performance. We were maintaining our systems, and the organisation, in the

same place. The review had validated the CEO’s concern: this is where we’ll stay without

real change.

Is safety improving, or just proving?

Consider this: If your safety process revolves around checking, correcting and reporting,

then – whether intentional or not – the perceived purpose becomes different from the

intended (imagined) purpose:

The perceived purpose had become: finding fault, not improving work.

People respond to what they experience, not what we intend. We intended to create safer

work. But as delivered, the experience became: criticise work, adjust paperwork, repeat the

process.

If effort stops feeling meaningful, the purpose behind the activity gets lost.

If safety feels like a checkandcorrect function, where “on time” is perceived as more important than “safer”, then people will comply with “more activity” targets instead of “better thinking”.

Our CEO had clearly told us his belief that our check–correct–comply approach hadn’t made

us safer. It wasn’t improving engagement, innovation or problem-solving. The implication

was that our approach was suppressing the very things we wanted.

A better way to lead

If our profession was going to contribute strategically to performance, we needed to move

beyond correction and improve how work is actually done.

We needed to create:

• Better conversations.

• Shared problem-solving.

• Belief that effort leads to improvement.

That wasn’t going to come from more activity. It was going to come from changing what

people experience when they engage with safety.

What you could try:

Look at your last three safety initiatives. Ask yourself:

• Did they change how work is done?

• Did they unlock better thinking or new ideas?

• Did they make the business better, not just safer?

Or:

• Did they reinforce compliance?

• Repeat existing processes?

• Maintain the status quo?

Now take it one step further

For one of those initiatives, ask:

• What value did this create for people who applied effort?

• What changed as a result of the effort?

• If it stopped tomorrow, who would ask for it to restart?

And if the answer is unclear…you don’t necessarily have a performance problem, you may

have a cultural challenge, and social operating problem.

Effort that doesn’t clearly create value rarely sustains attention, engagement or

improvement. If you ask for effort that doesn’t return a benefit, the story shared about

engagement is not a positive one.

Final thought:

We built future plans around translating effort into beneficial changes. We didn’t abandon

the tools and processes. We adjusted them to focus on value creation, problemsolving and

innovation.

Award-winning transformations followed.

Please think about this:

If your safety plan for this year looks much like it did two years ago, then in performance terms, what will be different two years from now?

Ask yourself the questions my CEO asked of our profession:

• How does safety contribute to performance?

• What will be different in two years if we do this now?

Close:

You don’t need to start again. In my experience, building on what you already have with a

few well-chosen improvements can make all the difference.

That’s what we do: helping organisations turn everyday effort into real performance by

adjusting systems to work for people, not the other way around.

If you’d like to explore what that might look like for you, I’m happy to talk through one of

your current plans and ask the same questions we were asked in that boardroom.