Operational Excellence Begins with Safety Leadership: A Call to Action

More than 5,200 workers were fatally injured on the job in 2023, an average of 15 people every day. A significant portion of those fatalities occurred in high-risk industries like utilities, where safety is a matter of life and death. 

Yet despite layers of protocols, polished dashboards, and well-meaning commitments, serious safety incidents continue to happen. And they’re not always due to negligence or a lack of training. In many cases, they reflect a deeper disconnect: one between leadership assumptions and field-level realities.

With over 37 years in utility operations and EHS&S, I’ve learned that real safety success doesn’t start in the field, it starts with the C-suite. If we’re serious about building a zero-incident culture, we have to shift our perspective from ground-level compliance to top-down accountability.

The Safety Disconnect in a Transitioning Workforce

When something goes wrong, it’s easy to question the frontline on what steps were missed in executing the job. Rather than asking that question, leaders should ask, 'Did we create the right conditions by having systems and processes to allow employees to work safely?'  

I've visited job sites where the procedures and work instructions were printed, laminated, posted in conspicuous locations, and even signed by employees. However, when under pressure, due to crew shortages, adverse weather conditions, or tight deadlines, critical steps were often skipped, not out of malice, but out of misplaced urgency. Meanwhile, internal observation and inspection reports indicate that compliance is exceptional.

But ask a crew member if they feel empowered to pause work without fear of retaliation, and you’d hear a different story. This is the leadership gap that puts lives at risk. Leaders must ensure that all employees understand that safety is a value that cannot be jeopardised under any circumstance and that STOP WORK Authority is an expectation when the situation is compromised and that work arounds, unless evaluated and approved by the crew, contractor and client are not to be done.

And this gap is widening as the workforce transitions. Experienced professionals are retiring, taking with them decades of instinctive safety knowledge. Newer workers haven’t yet built muscle memory for high-risk situations. Veteran crews are often stretched thin, frequently under pressure to prioritize speed over precision.

Safety isn’t always second nature anymore and we can’t assume that digital compliance tracking alone is enough. Software may highlight trends, but only field leaders know whether the culture matches the dashboard.

What Safety Leadership Actually Looks Like

Safety leadership isn’t just about setting protocols, it’s about living them visibly. It means creating systems and expectations that prioritize people, not just metrics. Here’s what that looks like in action:

1. Leadership Accountability

Safety metrics shouldn’t sit buried in EHS&S reports. They should be tracked, reviewed, and acted upon by executive leadership. Linking executive scorecards to leading indicators like safety observations, hazard mitigation, and near-miss reports, not just lagging indicators like incident rates.

2. Leadership Visibility Builds Trust

Safety culture thrives when leadership is present, not just for inspections, but also for meaningful conversations. When I walk job sites, I don’t just look for PPE compliance. I ask, “What slowed you down this week?” or “What made your job feel unsafe today?” or “What can I do to assist you in being more effective at doing the job safely?”

Those conversations build trust. And trust encourages field teams to speak up before something goes wrong.

3. System Clarity > System Quantity

More rules won’t make us safer; clear procedures and explaining why, not just what, will. Pair scenario-based training with real-time data collection, and ensure crews understand the reasoning behind every control and validate it through field-level intelligence, not just dashboards.

4. Reporting Culture

In high-performing organizations, the absence of incident reports isn’t a sign of success; it’s a red flag. Crews must feel safe sharing what almost went wrong.

AI-based reporting tools and regular audits to assess the ease with which workers can raise concerns are a good start. If reporting is risky or complicated, issues will remain hidden until they escalate into tragedies.

Safety Enables Operational Excellence

There’s an outdated mindset that pits safety against productivity, as if one comes at the expense of the other. I couldn’t disagree more having worked in both safety and operational roles throughout my career.

In our work on major infrastructure projects, we’ve found that strong safety systems actually drive productivity. When crews are confident in their leadership and tools, they make fewer mistakes, finish jobs faster, and feel ownership of outcomes.

As I often say, “When safety is viewed as a cost of business, it becomes a liability. When it’s seen as an investment in people, it becomes a multiplier.” 

A Call to Action for Utility Leaders

We’re at a pivotal moment in utility safety. As the workforce shifts and operational complexity grows, our safety strategies must evolve, not just on the ground, but in the C-suite.

Here’s where I believe leadership should start:

• Ensure that all leaders have scorecards (KPI’s) are integrated into their personal performance objectives and are clearly understood, tied to results and can be easily measured and reported.
• Invest in training for all levels, employees, supervisors and executives included.
• Update safety procedures proactively, not reactively.
• Reward honesty over optics. If every dashboard shows green, dig deeper.
• Encourage stop-work authority and back it up when crews use it.  

To build operational excellence and to send every worker home safely, true safety success begins in the C-suite. Field-level vigilance is essential, but without executive ownership and system-wide accountability, it’s not enough. Leaders must reflect the standards they set, listen actively, and treat safety as a shared responsibility, not just a metric to be met. Safety isn’t a checklist. It’s not a laminated binder. It’s a lived culture and that culture starts at the top. I encourage all leaders to travel with your safety team into the field, be seen together, focus on having dialogue with employees and always have one to three takeaways from each conversation on something that you or your team will do to integrate safety and operational excellence. What do you think?