No. 200: Overcoming Safety Complacency

Keep safety leadership fresh and effective by challenging complacency, reconnecting with your mission, and embracing continuous learning to adapt to an ever-changing workforce.

• By Robert Pater
• Jun 30, 2025

You’ve heard Star Trek’s Spock say “Live long and prosper?” Well, longevity by itself is overrated, at least in terms of making positive impacts. Being “retired on active duty” doesn’t cut it in a “what can you do for us—now” world.

I’m reflecting on this for what’s my 200th article for Occupational Health & Safety: generating a sea of sentences has less weight than effectiveness-added. For example, haven’t you seen those leaders who sound like they’ve been singing the same old song with (mostly) similar lyrics? Contrarily, I’m reminded of one of my favorite quotes from Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, “That which isn’t growing is dying.”

It doesn’t have to be this way. Experience can offer much more than a reflexive “this is the way we’ve always done it, so just keep on keeping on.”

Do you have any concerns about your company or yourself remaining fresh, timely and effective over time? Revitalizing both your safety culture and leadership to keep safety fresh? Preventing the devolving rust of complacency from spreading in workers and managers?

Here are some of my personal principles for spurring and energizing redirections or for potentially activating what you may already “know” but perhaps not be actually doing:

• Begin with self-leadership. Improvement first happens at home. You can’t do anything for others that you can’t do yourself. Basically, this is saying, “Am I doing my utmost to practice what I teach? Do I honestly notice any resistance?”

• Know and get back in touch with your mission. One of my prime focuses is surfacing disconnections in the safety and organizational universe, where potential step-ups either slow to a crawl, halt or are dropped off the edge.

When feeling overwhelmed or helplessly overcome, I try to remind myself what I’m dedicated to doing, what I’ve helped accomplish, those who have thanked me, and what I’ve learned. At the same time, I revisit and reassess my mission: is what I’ve believed still valid and applicable to current situations? Where do I have to adjust?

• Remain open to not knowing and enjoying being brightly informed. Realize that we each can be prone to the Einstellung Effect. According to senior operations and quality leader K.C. Barr, writing on LinkedIn, “The Einstellung Effect is a cognitive bias where an individual’s initial solution or approach to a problem inhibits them from considering alternative solutions.”

Essentially, in this effect,  our past personal experiences, and even our even successes, can blind us into making assumptions that newly erupting situations can be summarily approached in the exact same ways we’ve dealt with past ones.

Rather, we must embrace and accept the fact that everything is always changing and not expect others to be the same as they were in the past. (I’m certainly not.) As my esteemed colleague Ron Bowles used to say, “The workforce you have is not the one you had.” This entails continuing to question, re-examine, revisit, and revise my approaches (hopefully all of which are aligned with my mission.)

• Connect before persuading. It’s first critical I consider the actual concerns of those I wish to reach before attempting to tempt them to upgrade their safety and performance.

Moreover, I do that while reminding myself that I should not make assumptions about their experiences and values, etc. Those assumptions could be statements such as: “strains and sprains affect us all,” “everyone has lost balance and fallen,” “others, like me, don’t respond positively to smugness or disdain or being blindly ordered without understanding why they’re supposed to do things a certain way,” or “the more I ask them to do things differently the less likely they’ll do it.”

• Think in terms of principles from other disciplines that can be applied to safety. For example, some areas of interest that I pursue include the martial arts, science (and especially neuroscience, medicine and physics), Sherlock Holmes mysteries (thought processes), acting and improv (connection with others), music (rhythms of changes), gardening (nurturing, supporting growth), and Shakespeare (human nature), and all of those interests can all be successfully applied to safety leadership.

And inspiration can come from even unlikely sources. For example, David Johnson, Pittsburgh, Pa.-based Director of EHS at a global heavy manufacturing company, communicated that he recently watched an animated television show with his children that spurred him to think of how he might apply some of the “lessons” displayed.

Specifically, he discussed how the challenging interactions between a group of cartoon animals could be applied to complexities in safety performance to help those who haven’t been successful in the past figure out effective safety performance on their own. David further related he gets inspiration by “focusing on continuous learning, reading as much as I can to see what I use to hone my acumen and leadership skills.”

What disciplines or arenas outside of safety have spurred ideas or methods you’ve been able to apply to safety performance, leadership or culture? In what ways?

• Try to make a different mistake next time. Learn and adapt, rather than resorting to Will Rogers’ admonition that if you’re in a hole, stop digging.

David Johnson views people as complex, saying, “People bring a level of complexity to any complicated context because of all the things that make us human.” Because of this, he says he doesn’t believe there’s one right approach that’s persuasive with everyone. “Some want explicit guidance,” he says, “while others want to figure things out on their own.”  

This article originally appeared in the June 2025 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.