Refreshing Safety Mindfulness

Why safety leaders must stay energized and mentally present to inspire mindful, self-motivated performance across teams.

• By Robert Pater
• Jul 16, 2025

The best leaders not only understand the importance of staying fresh and helping others be as Safety-mindful as possible, they embrace it. The old admonition that workers should “check your brains at the timeclock” doesn’t work well, especially in a fast-changing world, where many perform tasks with minimal supervision at best, in the field or at home, or often with less-than-optimal staffing. Creative thinking towards solving problems is not only desirable, it’s necessary to be able to redirect resources advantageously for high-level performance — for Safety and overall.

This begins with leaders being mindful about Safety for themselves. It’s very difficult to meaningfully help others move up to a place where the leader hasn’t first gotten to him or herself. “Do as I say, not as I do,” or just going through the motions rarely works, just as someone who is angry themselves is unlikely to calm a crying baby in their arms. It’s essential to put on your leadership oxygen mask yourself before trying to assist another.

So, I was inspired by a recent LinkedIn post by Pete Cutbush, someone across the world from me who I see as a luminary leader. Pete works with Safety in mining operations, currently as a Safety Leadership Coach in AIC Mines Ltd. in Cloncurry, Queensland, Australia, and is an advanced and sincere practitioner of internalizing Safety (in fact, Pete’s “tagline” on LinkedIn is “Safety from The Inside Out.”)

Cutbush posted: “Early morning moonset reset before embarking on following my trustworthy intuition for another dynamic day of deeply connecting with frontline leaders amidst subtle suggestions for tweaking their safety-related communication skills.

Quietly sipping my kick-off coffee under a star-studded sky always inspires both wonder and appreciation. And that brings me to my leadership query/discussion request for today: In a nutshell, how best to keep a team fired up to give every shift their very best, to remain focused, self-propelling, and action-oriented — without micromanaging?”

My response: Good question and approach, Pete, and I resonate to the way (that I think) you think. Micro-managing = spoon-feeding = doing the thinking for them when it’s far more preferable to help them think for themselves. Implying there’s only one right way (the leader’s) to approach a task diminishes employees’ problem-solving or their surfacing genuine reports or concerns. That, in turn, quashes reflection and instead promotes automaton-like “cover-their-rear” thinking. And that, summed up, is the antithesis of high-level Safety.

Some considerations that cross my mind:

• Energizing is crucial for best Safety, and critical for turning around the mindless absence of now. Energy-deficient Safety promotes the complacency of just going through the motions and not seeing the uniqueness of each situation, rather pretending that simplistic templated pre-set responses to complex, unique, or changing challenges will always hold the day. (There are several cognitive biases that specifically apply to such a limited mindset.)

I believe one of the highest objectives of an effective leader is to help others energize themselves rather than attempting to externally cheerleader them with reminders, affirmations, and atta-boys. Asking rather than just telling is critical to make this more likely to happen. Leaders might consider drawing out, “What’s different about today’s work? No matter how small it might be, from yesterday or last week?” Sincerely inquiring calls on them to think and respond (even if in their own minds) and stimulates their mental motor revving. Whereas the energy from trying to externally pump them up to energize tends to dissipate as the leader’s presence is no longer there (see Kurt Lewin’s research on “Superpowering.”)

 • It starts with leading myself. Yes, there’s a component of energizing that requires my initially sparking others. A car that doesn’t turn over can’t readily jumpstart another. Another physical analog: if I’ve not magnetized myself, I can’t magnetize others. Rather than trying to prop up juiced Safety proponents, my goal is to energetically foster the team to be self-energizing to the point where my presence and energy aren’t necessary for them to continue being truly committed to safer thoughts and actions. Of course, this can be a process that happens over time and multiple exposures. Enlisting the process of discovery leads to self-motivation.

What can we do to keep Safety leadership fresh? When I’ve had to make multiple presentations on the same day or present to the same group many times, I’ve found it best to challenge myself to approach each meeting differently (that can be as simple as starting one presentation standing and another seated). Or I might begin one by communicating an agenda and the next by asking them what about the topic they would like to know. So, what can you do to keep Safety fresh for your team?

• Pare it down? “What would make it easier for you to be able to actually do this in real work?” (You don’t have to lend credibility to every shortcut they might surface, just the “safer” ones.)

• In advance, privately ask someone in the group if they’d be willing to start off the meeting or discussion with a question, story, application, or challenge. Anything in their mind that they’ve found relevant, etc. Off-work applications can be especially pertinent here.

• To spur thinking in terms of principles rather than just overly specific applications, consider asking them, “So what do you see as really operating here? Is there anything you might take away that might help in your personal life?”

I hope this has spurred some ideas. Most importantly, I applaud your asking and approach — it’s crucial that leaders refresh themselves first when aiming to foster mindful Safety in others.  

This article originally appeared in the July/August 2025 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.