Safety Culture Excellence®

One day during my management career, I got visited by four specialists from corporate, then by my regional manager.  The safety, quality, logistics and IT specialists in sequence told me about all their new initiatives that would require my support, understanding, and staffing.  Then my boss showed up and asked me if I had any questions.  I simply asked him, “While I am doing all these programs would you like to try to continue to do business as well?”

Almost all managers must juggle a number of priorities without dropping any.  Safety should not be one of these!  Safety is not something else you do; it is the WAY you do everything.  It is not a conflicting priority with anything else if you integrate it into the flow of work and the fabric of culture.  Yes, safety meetings take time, but not if they are simply a part of shift start-up meetings or tool-box meetings, which you have anyway.  Yes, safety training takes time, but workers attend training of many kinds, none of which is expendable.  The best safety is completely imbedded into the workflow and not perceived as separable or competing.  If you think this is not possible, seek out some of the excellent organizations that have made it happen.

-Terry L. Mathis

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Terry L. Mathis is the founder and CEO of ProAct Safety, an international safety and performance excellence firm. He is known for his dynamic presentations in the fields of behavioral and cultural safety, leadership, and operational performance, and is a regular speaker at ASSE, NSC, and numerous company and industry conferences. EHS Today listed Terry as a Safety Guru in ‘The 50 People Who Most Influenced EHS three consecutive times. He has been a frequent contributor to industry magazines for over 15 years and is the coauthor of STEPS to Safety Culture Excellence (2013, WILEY).

I used to ask the airline pilot who lived across the street to suggest things to my teenager because he accepted them better from him than from his dad.  Organizations have similar leanings; they prefer to get new ideas either from inside or outside.  Some organizations are highly specialized and it is hard for outsiders to deeply understand their issues. They tend to prefer to listen to experts from within their ranks.  Other organizations believe everyone on the inside thinks alike and new ideas need to come from outside experts or other organizations.

It is important to detect and understand which of these tendencies your organization has and to work with it rather than against it.  External organizations should outsource training and speaking, and lean heavily on subject-matter experts to bring in new ideas.  Internal organizations can still use outside expertise, but should consider bringing it into the mainstream through train-the-trainer and internal-consultant models that share the expertise with insiders who then, in turn, share it with the rest of the organization.   The message is important, but the messenger can spoil it if you ignore where your organization prefers to get its new ideas.

-Terry L. Mathis

For more insights, visit 

Terry L. Mathis is the founder and CEO of ProAct Safety, an international safety and performance excellence firm. He is known for his dynamic presentations in the fields of behavioral and cultural safety, leadership, and operational performance, and is a regular speaker at ASSE, NSC, and numerous company and industry conferences. EHS Today listed Terry as a Safety Guru in ‘The 50 People Who Most Influenced EHS three consecutive times. He has been a frequent contributor to industry magazines for over 15 years and is the coauthor of STEPS to Safety Culture Excellence (2013, WILEY).

If safety is truly a value, and not just a changing priority in an organization, it must be led by the leader of the organization, not simply delegated to a safety professional.  Other values such as integrity or honesty are not delegated, but led and demonstrated by organizational leaders.

Many safety professionals are titled as safety managers and, as such, can be delegated the job of managing the safety activities and recordkeeping of the organization.  However, if these safety managers are expected to truly lead safety, they find themselves competing with the organizational leaders of finance, engineering or sales. This very delegation suggests that the true goal of the organization is being led by the leader and everything else is less important.   Safety becomes a sub-culture led by a sub-leader and takes a secondary and non-integrated priority in the minds of workers.  This division can lead to a dichotomy or conflict of priorities in which workers have to choose between pleasing the boss of production or the boss of safety.

Leading safety means establishing the value and walking the talk.  Workers take cues from organizational leaders about what is most important.  Leaders who regularly talk about safety and lead by personal example make the job of the safety manager much more fluid and truly integrate safety as a core organizational value that is woven into the fabric of daily work.

-Terry L. Mathis

For more insights, visit 

Terry L. Mathis is the founder and CEO of ProAct Safety, an international safety and performance excellence firm. He is known for his dynamic presentations in the fields of behavioral and cultural safety, leadership, and operational performance, and is a regular speaker at ASSE, NSC, and numerous company and industry conferences. EHS Today listed Terry as a Safety Guru in ‘The 50 People Who Most Influenced EHS three consecutive times. He has been a frequent contributor to industry magazines for over 15 years and is the coauthor of STEPS to Safety Culture Excellence (2013, WILEY).