The Executive Leading With Safety® Approach
The Executive Leading with Safety® Approach helps executives strengthen their personal safety ethic to move organizational culture in a way that places an increasing value on safety. The value of this approach comes from the belief that safety starts at the top. A positive change in safety leadership behavior creates a higher shared organizational value for safety, which motivates employees to help reduce exposure, resulting in fewer injuries, illnesses, and lower costs.
Thousands of leaders have benefitted from this service. DEKRA provides a support team that has deep knowledge in leadership, culture, safety, change execution, and practical experience in adapting this methodology to each client’s unique circumstances.
Advantages of Executive Leading With Safety
- It develops safety leadership knowledge and skills.
- It moves the organization from a focus on preventing injuries to a focus on understanding and reducing exposure.
- It provides individual development at a depth and pace set by the executive.
- It drives executive team alignment.
How Does It Work?
It engages leadership through a mix of assessments, working sessions, and mentoring. Each component is unique, reflecting the individual’s objectives and level of safety understanding. The purpose is to give each participant the necessary skillset to lead the organization and the culture toward continually improving safety performance.
The engagements include some, or all, of the following three elements:
Individual Safety Leadership Assessment
This assessment measures each executive’s leadership of safety, using DEKRA’s Safety Leadership Diagnostic Instrument (LDI). The LDI assesses perceptions of how the executive uses a transformational leadership style, as well as his or her use of the seven safety leadership best practices — vision, credibility, action orientation, communication, collaboration, feedback/recognition, and accountability.
Each leader receives an individual report that benchmarks his or her scores against the scores of thousands of other executives.
Team Working Sessions
These working sessions build alignment within teams and help them set clear direction on expectations and the culture they want to create. DEKRA OSR offers numerous working sessions, depending on the organization’s objectives. Each session has a duration of two hours. The sessions are:
- Transforming Your Culture Through Safety
- Moving From Injury Prevention to Exposure Control
- Moments of Safety Transformation
- Actions That Matter
- Brain-Centered Hazards and Reliability
- Creating an Engaged Workforce
- Influencing Behavior
- Personal Safety Ethic
- Prevention of Serious Injury and Fatality (SIF)
- Voice-to-Voice Communication
- Preventing Soft-Tissue Injuries
- Continuing the Journey
Individual Mentoring
This component matches individual executives with an adviser, or mentor, who has extensive expertise in changing organizational culture, exposure causation and prevention, human performance reliability, and safety. The adviser works with the executive to understand the results of the individual assessment, clarify what he or she wants to accomplish, and develop a plan to help the executive demonstrate a commitment to safety.
The mentoring relationship can involve one-on-one conversations, observations of the executive in action, and follow-up conversations to help hone the executive’s skills in moving a culture of safety forward. The scope of the mentoring is at least once a month, and the duration is at least a year.