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Baines Simmons Knowledge Expertise Safety Risk & Safety Management Safety Leadership

Safety Leadership

The role of safety leaders is to support and enable teams and individuals to behave in a safe manner and reduce harm to the business. The mindset should be one of assisting people to understand and achieve, rather than tell.

To achieve effective safety leadership, leaders need to provide direction through communicating a clear safety vision and motivating, inspiring and enabling the right behaviours.

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Types of roles

Active Safety Leadership is a key performance enabler and provides the energy and the spark by which safety management people, processes, procedures and tools deliver results. Safety Leadership is the effect of influencing people to be fully and willingly committed to a series of safe behaviours and values in order to meet commonly agreed safety vision and objectives. Without active safety leadership at all levels of your management organisation, your management systems will not effectively perform and you will not be able to capitalise on the investment you have made in developing them.

Strategic Safety Leadership consists of directing and focussing behaviours. It is required to help teams and individuals understand what safety values, standards and objectives they have been set and why.

Operational Safety Leadership consists of supporting and inspiring behaviours. It energises and motivates teams and individuals to perform their tasks, and supports them in finding ways to achieve them.

Challenges you may be facing:

  • You need a cohesive safety vision
  • Your leaders need to understand your regulatory obligations, roles, responsibilities and accountabilities for safety performance
  • You need help to ‘sell’ your safety message to your employees and stakeholders
  • You need to develop the right safety behaviours to raise safety performance
  • Your teams are often unclear of their accountabilities and don’t have the right competencies to achieve their goals
  • You need to have greater confidence in knowing your Top 5 Safety Risks are understood and are being controlled effectively
  • You need help measuring and benchmarking performance
  • You want to give your regulator greater confidence you are managing safely

How we can help 

We have a range of services designed to support management teams, helping them to become effective leadership teams. From bespoke active safety leadership workshops through to organisation-wide safety management, culture and leadership diagnostics, contact us to find out more about our services, including:

  • Safety Management Diagnostic – to establish where you are on your safety journey and identify areas for development and action plans to achieve them
  • Safety Strategy Development – to help develop a robust safety vision, strategies and objectives and formulate action plans to achieve them
  • Safety Leadership Workshop – one-to-one sessions for Accountable Managers to explore the implications of their role and what it means to be actively leading safety at a strategic level
  • Safety Performance Measurement – developing key performance indicators and safety balance scorecards to generate predictive safety measures
  • Accountable Manager / Executive Advisory Support – for resolving technical and regulatory challenges
  • Accountable Manager / Executive Leadership coaching – facilitated sessions to encourage greater teamwork to implement your safety vision and goals in the face of operational demands.

Best practice

Developing and enhancing your safety leadership performance takes time. Knowing the steps to follow and sharing best practices from across the aviation industry are areas where we have specialist experience and expertise. Working alongside you, we can develop and strengthen your ability to actively lead safety. Our experienced consultants will partner you and your management team as professional trusted advisors to:

  • Develop a shared understanding of your organisation's safety principles across the management team
  • Extend your understanding of safety performance and safety leadership
  • Enhance your safety management and leadership competence
  • Enable your team to more efficiently discharge your safety accountabilities to deliver enhanced safety performance and harm reduction to the business
  • Improve your understanding with respect to legal accountabilities for aviation safety management
  • Create an engaging safety strategy and vision and help you engage your employees in it
  • Identify and measure your safety performance through leading indicators, rather than basing decisions on what has already happened