Safety Leadership

Workers do not commit errors intentionally nor wish to get injured. Rather, latent hazards conspire with human factors, and it is in this combination that unintended safety outcomes occur. And this is where a leader’s ability to ‘see’ safety becomes all-important. Visual Literacy helps leaders understand both how they themselves see safety, and also how workers see safety. Building awareness of inherent human factors and how hazard recognition is impaired by visual bias allows leaders to better understand what they must do to improve safety performance. A leader who is ‘literate’ in these skills will be better able to see safety as the worker does, better able to understand perception, bias and its impact on the safety system. Thus visual literacy helps the leader affect positive change across every aspect of the safety management systems and safety climate.