POSITIVE SAFETY CULTURES: Developing your safety team
Quite a few safety pros I’ve worked with feel that even with support from a team or committee, they personally do much of the heavy lifting needed to create a positive safety culture. Sometimes they feel like a solo performer with a cast of observers — not a leader of a powerful guiding coalition. In a classic Harvard Business Review article a few years back entitled, “Why Transformation Efforts Fail,†John Kotter noted that a common denominator in failed culture-change efforts is the “failure to build a powerful guiding coalition.â€
What are the characteristics of an effective guiding coalition for safety transformation? Based on decades of team-effectiveness research and practice, four features appear to be central: