Ask a group of executives to name their most significant hazards and you'll hear about mobile plant, working at heights, stored energy and possibly the contractor everybody worries about. You'll rarely hear “the way our supervisors talk to their crews at 3pm on a Tuesday.”
That's an expensive blind spot. Leadership behaves like a hazard when it's poor, and like a control when it's good. And we now have the numbers to show the gap.
Why a safe, well and engaged workforce starts with leadership
The best safety results, and the best productivity and profitability, come from a workforce operating with safe, well and engaged brains. In this state, we notice the unusual noise, make decisions clearly, and feel connected enough to question the shortcuts and speak up early. A stressed, exhausted or quietly furious brain does none of that reliably, no matter how good your procedure looks on paper.
That optimal brain state of focus and felt safety is an outcome of having a positive experience of work: physically, socially and psychologically. These three areas of our experience of work are interconnected, not three separate issues to manage. Fittingly, the strongest influence on that experience isn't the roster, the gym subsidy or the values poster in the crib room. It's leadership.
What our safety leadership research reveals
In 2017, we published a whitepaper on The State of Safety Leadership drawing on around 8,000 participants. We've just repeated the research with 23,595 to see what's changed, what has remained stable, and what new insights we can learn.
One sobering and relatively stable finding is that only 33% of people say work has a positive impact on their personal wellbeing, and 27% say the impact is negative.
The picture sharpens through the lens of safety leadership quality. When comparing those that report working for a good vs poor leader, we see this gap widen. Of those that report working for a poor leader, a whopping 44% report that work negatively impacts their wellbeing, and only 18% report a positive impact of work on their wellbeing. On the flip side, for those working for an effective leader, 16% report work has a negative impact on their wellbeing and 47% report work positively impacts them.
The statistics seem to reveal an inextricable connection between the quality of leadership we experience, and the toll that work takes on us and our ability to feel safe, well and engaged at work.
The risk exposure created by poor leadership
To play devil's advocate for a moment though, so what? What does it matter if leadership is poor and nearly half of the workforce have a negative experience of work? Well, firstly, it only takes a little bit of research and some educated guesses to recognise that a negative experience of work might coincide with long-term factors like retention and absenteeism.
But here's where this stops being “culture stuff” and starts looking like risk exposure. Under good leadership, only around 5% of people reported production pressure that compromised their physical safety or wellbeing respectively. However, under poor leadership, that number balloons sixfold to around 30%.
No leader announces that safety comes second. They don't need to. Poor leadership communicates it in quieter ways: the sigh when someone stops the job, the meeting where the production schedule gets forty minutes and the near miss gets four, the promotion that goes to the manager who “gets it done” and everybody knows how. Capable leaders carry the same commercial pressure. They just don't pass it down the line as an implied instruction.
Why incident reporting drops under poor leadership
One fundamental characteristic of capable leadership is that they make their people feel safe to speak up, challenge, and admit fault. This also shows up in our research. Under poor leadership, 33% of incidents are going unreported. Under good leadership, underreporting almost halves.
It's uncomfortable arithmetic. Your worst-led areas generate more risk and tell you about less of it, so lag indicators can look respectable in precisely the places your exposure is highest. No other hazard on your register does that. A quiet dashboard is not the same thing as a strong safety culture, and leadership quality determines the difference between the two.
That's because leadership isn't one factor sitting alongside the others that shape a safety culture. In the Safety Culture model we work through with clients, workplace safety culture breaks into four dimensions: leadership, person, practices and environment. Look closely and one of the four behaves differently from the rest. How a leader shows up changes how safe a person feels raising a concern, how consistently a practice gets followed on a bad day, and how an environment feels to work in when something goes wrong. Leadership is the lever that reaches into all three of the others.
Meeting psychosocial safety obligations
Regulators across Australia and New Zealand now expect psychosocial hazards to be managed with the same rigour as physical ones: job demands, support, role clarity, recognition, fairness, conflict. Nearly every one of them is created, amplified or controlled by a leader's daily behaviour.
Building safety leadership capability
If leadership is a potential hazard, the solution is to treat it the way you'd treat any other hazard. Identify it. If you can report lost time injuries to two decimal places but can't say how your leaders are experienced by their teams, you're steering by the rear window. Control it. Leadership capability is a skill set, not a personality trait. We use our ABR model to explain how it's built with clients: attitudes drive behaviours, behaviours drive results. Get a leader's underlying beliefs right and the visible, teachable behaviours follow more naturally. Skipping straight to behaviours without addressing attitude produces compliance without conviction, the kind that evaporates the moment a leader is under pressure. Capability like this is teachable and measurable, and can be improved with the right support and environment. And finally, resource it. Hold it to the same level of importance as production.
So, is your biggest hazard on your leadership team? Potentially. But it doesn't have to be.
By building the capability of leadership, which is the work we do with clients across mining, utilities and other high-risk industries, you don’t just improve psychosocial safety and performance. You strengthen the control with the widest reach in your operation, that reaches every worker, every shift.
