Creating Safety Leaders: Avoid These 7 “Don’ts”

Forcing worker advocacy, utilizing guilt-based management, and withholding operational logistics create systemic blocking forces that torpedo modern safety leadership initiatives.

• By Robert Pater
• Jun 18, 2026

We’ve found that creating Safety leaders is a two-for,  elevating performance (injury prevention) while simultaneously cultivating culture. Thankfully, relatively recently, many companies have also been embracing this approach – both within their executive ranks and with selected grassroots workers.

Because we’ve been assisting organizations globally in doing this for over thirty years, we’ve seen what consistently works – and what doesn’t.

When creating leaders, it’s as important to know what to sidestep as it is to know what to aim for. This is akin to a tenet of the Hippocratic Oath: “Above all, do no harm.”

Begin by identifying what doesn’t work and avoid these seven blocking approaches:

1. Forcing people to lead.  “Volunteering” for others is inherently inconsistent, akin to trying to force someone to relax (parallel saying:  “The beatings will continue until morale improves.”) Yet we’ve seen companies “make” workers become Safety advocates, at times going to the extent of having them cancel pre-planned, pre-paid vacations in order to attend safety leadership training. Reminds me a Jack Crosby admission about being drafted into military special services as a singer when he’d expressly said he wanted to fight, “They may be able to make me sing, but they can’t make me sing good.”
2. Not communicating specific and cogent expectations of what it means to “lead.” People are not mind readers. Leaders have to clearly communicate their intentions and expectations. And should be discussed by leaders of leaders and newly minted leaders as well. There are numerous approaches to leadership, some of which contradict others. One of my views – leadership is supporting others to make better and safer perceptions, decisions and actions. Encouraging others to ultimately become more effective Safety leaders in their own lives, rather than just checking off a box or trying to ram ideas or methods down their throat.
3. Guilting executives or managers into leading safety because “it’s the right thing to do” (implied statement – if you don’t lead safety to the standards I expect, you’re subpar both as a leader and as a human being.) Pressuring is unlikely to create peak performance (see Jack Crosby above).
4. Insincerely delegating up or down – expecting designated leaders to just be mindless mouthpieces without question, mimicking someone else’s directives or the Safety “party line.” One of the surest ways to torpedo leadership credibility is to expect them to just repeat pre-set policies without understanding or providing a deep explanation. Most adept persuasion is founded on helping others understand, surfacing their objections or concerns and responding in ways that they consider and might accept.
5. Not providing skills for them to lead – expecting them to just “lead” by determination or force of will, without providing them strategies, methods and skills needed to be effective. Expecting just old-style rah-rah motivation to upgrade Safety performance and culture is unrealistic (often leading to blaming accident victims for “not caring about their own safety”, “not wanting to be safe”, “being too stupid or foolhardy, etc.. And because this is seen as dishonoring/accusing, this approach creates pushback. Tangible, practical skills that are transferred beats appealing to “will” every time.
6. Failing to support them, whether with follow-up or opportunities for them to receive and provide feedback. Or not offering needed logistical support. One of the proven ways to turn off employee/peer leaders is to fail to provide the little things needed for them to function as improvement agents (sadly, we’ve seen this so many times in our work of training internal Safety catalysts) Such necessary logistics might include rooms reserved/ready/open at scheduled meeting times, providing needed AV and other equipment, sending out positive expectations messages in advance about the value of what the leaders will discuss/transmit, etc. Or, perhaps the worst, canceling peer leaders’ meetings at the last minute (which conveys the underlying message these are unimportant – also seen this several times where it torpedoed the new Safety leaders and their initiative.)
7. Telling, rather than helping them discover for themselves. Recent neuroscience studies corroborate the finding that learning is faster and lasts longer when people have a choice and “self-determine” their own directions and how they personally adapt to generally required actions.

You might wonder why I focused this article on what not to do? Because recognizing and reducing dysfunctional tendencies is addition by subtraction. Often – and studies by Kurt Lewin and others support this – the most powerful and lasting change occurs by reducing the “blocking forces” that otherwise keep us mired in the land of disappointment. And I strongly believe that “clearing the path”, making it easy for others to lead and change, is critical for internalizing the highest-level Safety and overall performance.

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