A person doesn’t succeed just by being a great leader; they succeed by leading great people. Often, those holding leadership positions view their role as managing the efforts of others. If this is true, then to achieve safety success, you need your team more than your team needs you. A great leader alone cannot achieve nor sustain success in safety; it takes the discretional effort of all levels within the workforce.
I have yet to see an organization achieve sustainable safety excellence through forced, mandatory effort alone. Conversely, I have seen it achieved through influencing others to perform proactively on their own behalf. Discretional effort increases in criticality as an organization moves toward attaining a high-impact safety culture. Achieving the cultural position where workers want to be involved in safety efforts cannot be enforced or simply managed.
To be an effective leader and enable discretional effort to flow freely, rather than managing, consider influencing. I have found the difference between a manager and a leader is the ability to influence. Managing someone is to apply extrinsic motivators to prompt the action of others. To influence is to create a physiological environment where someone is driven by intrinsic motivators. Do we want people to act in safety exclusively because they have to, or because they want to?