11
June
2025

Leadership Safety Series Library

The Safety Leadership Series is a collection of articles emphasizing the critical role leadership plays in shaping and sustaining a strong safety culture. Each piece addresses specific topics designed to support leaders in fostering safer environments.

Please find below the available articles in this important Safety Leadership Series.
We encourage you to review and share these valuable resources with your leadership teams and supervisors to support continued growth in safety culture and performance.

Steps to Safety Excellence: Fostering a superior safety culture and delivering safety excellence are essential for business viability and sustained success. The benefits of a strong safety culture and performance include fostering an engaged workforce that delivers on customer expectations, protects your company reputation, and enhances productivity, quality, and profitability. In a perfect world, all risks would be engineered out, but this is not practical. Please click the link for the full article.

Sustainable Management of Change: It is well-known that people do not like and actively resist change. Organizations often espouse the need for change, but organizations are also resistant to and often unable to effectively implement sustainable change. Please click the link for the full article.

Leadership Traits & Styles: Leadership and Management are not the same. Leaders foster culture, energize employees and teams, influence and motivate individuals and organizations to envision and achieve a vision and stretch goals. In a rapidly changing, complex, competitive environment with limited and strained resources, and employees' tendency to resist change, leaders must be agile, resilient, combat distractions, and eliminate hurdles that prevent employees from dealing with adaptive issues and challenges. Please click the link for the full article.

Innovation that Facilitates Safety: Too often, Technology or AI is dismissed or actively resisted because people believe that it will eliminate jobs, is utilized to track whether employees are working, or simply because people and organizations (management and unions) don’t like change. Everyone working at afa Member site has a personal obligation and responsibility to work safely and in a manner that protects their peers. Please click the link for the full article.

Human & Organizational PerformanceLeaders may believe that improving safety performance focuses on enforcing rules, drafting safety procedures, or verbalizing safety expectations. This fails to recognize the fundamental premise that safety, like other operational imperatives such as productivity, quality, and cash flow, depend on influencing and motivating people (difficult) and multifaceted normal human behaviors (difficult to control). Please click the link for the full article.