Safe to Fail: Rethinking Safety Leadership
The question that keeps coming up in my conversations with safety leaders is: why is it so hard to get people to report near misses? The answer, more often than not, is about fear. When people don't feel safe to speak up, e.g. when they believe that honesty might cost them their job, their reputation, or their standing with a manager, the problems go underground.
That's the thought that led me to bring a group of senior safety leaders together in March for a roundtable dinner I called ‘Safe to Fail: Rethinking Safety Leadership’. We had safety leaders from across a range of sectors, all grappling with the same fundamental questions about culture, trust, and what it really takes to build an environment where people feel genuinely safe to speak up.
The conversation was one of the most honest I've been part of in a long time. Here's what stayed with me:
When you separate investigation from discipline, everything changes
One of the most striking examples shared on the night came from an organisation that had made a simple but significant structural change; it separated its investigative and disciplinary processes. The result of that change was that near-miss reporting rose dramatically. The culture had shifted because the fear had gone.
A suspiciously clean record is a red flag
If near-miss reporting is very low, that almost certainly means people don't feel safe enough to come forward, not that nothing is going wrong.
The goal isn't fewer reports; it's a culture where reporting feels natural, welcomed, and genuinely acted on. And when someone does report, they should be thanked. That simple act of acknowledgement matters more than most realise.
Safety culture has to outlast its leader
Culture starts at the top. But what happens when the leader who built that culture moves on?
If the safety culture is built around one person's presence and personality, it's fragile. The real work is embedding safety so deeply into an organisation's values that it becomes self-sustaining, regardless of who's in the top chair. That takes time and intentionality.
Get onto the shop floor
Some of the most meaningful safety conversations happen wherever people feel free to speak without performance. Leaders who show up, leave the suit at home, and talk to frontline workers as peers build a quality of trust that no formal walkabout can replicate.
One organisation introduced a set of simple conversation prompt cards to help managers move from one safety conversation a month to something approaching a daily habit. It may start as a prompt, but over time it becomes the culture.
Learn to speak the Board's language
We discussed the need to present safety metrics in a way that really lands with senior leadership. Many felt that boards respond more to financial risk, not safety metrics. So, the job of a safety leader is, in part, translation.
What does a reduction in near-miss reporting actually cost the organisation in insurance, legal exposure, agency fees, and reputational damage? When safety is framed in those terms, it's far more likely to be heard.
This is why emotional intelligence, influencing skills, and the ability to negotiate should be as central to the development of safety professionals as technical knowledge. The leaders in that room who had won board-level trust had done so by being willing to say the difficult thing but to say it respectfully, persistently, and in language the board could act on.
The conversation that matters most
What struck me most about the evening was the honesty in the room. We didn’t have easy conversations, but they were necessary ones.
If any of this resonates - whether you work in transport, or in any sector where safety leadership is a daily reality - I'd love to hear your thoughts. This is exactly the kind of conversation I want to keep having.