We all agree that leaders excel when they unite their teams around a common cause and promote lateral, open communication -- complete with employee empowerment and ownership of the cause. We can agree that no safety culture is built entirely on behavior-based safety or regulatory compliance alone. Ultimately, we can all agree that safe behaviors must exist within safe conditions in the workplace.
Safety professionals work diligently to engage both leaders and employees. But there is often a challenge: leaders wish their employees would just "be careful" without doing diligence to hazard identification, assessment and control. The result: workers claim leaders are only concerned with productivity and budgets.