By Natalee Johnston
With 24 years of military experience as a helicopter instructor and safety leader, Natalee Johnston brings unique perspective as the first female Naval helicopter pilot in the Royal Australian Navy. Her journey through Defence Forces’ cultural transition offers invaluable insights on breaking barriers in established organisational cultures. Growing up in Western Australia’s Wheatbelt and later becoming the first woman in the RAN to return to flying duties after having children, Natalee understands the delicate balance of professional demands and personal responsibilities. She is passionate about how an organisation’s culture and resilience can positively impact employee welfare and safety outcomes.
In the aftermath of workplace accidents, one phrase echoes with haunting regularity: “I saw this coming.” These five words represent the gap between recognising potential dangers and creating systems that prevent them—the very essence of effective safety leadership. In today’s high-speed, information-saturated world, bridging this gap has never been more challenging—or more crucial.
Navigating the Information Deluge: The Modern Safety Challenge
Today’s world demands constant vigilance. We are bombarded with information from all angles, requiring real effort to disconnect and take moments for ourselves. These pauses are essential to recharge and reflect on our physical and mental state, ensuring we perform at our best. The challenge intensifies as we must decipher reality from fiction, constantly judging and checking sources against algorithms designed to play on our biases. Understanding these biases, your own state, and what influences you improves your ability to navigate this information maze and become a more effective leader.
For safety professionals, this challenge multiplies. We’re expected to ensure our people return home in the same condition they arrived (or better), while simultaneously maintaining regulatory compliance and business sustainability.
Many organisations focus primarily on quantifiable metrics—compliant procedures, established processes, and systems to record and track risks and incidents. While measuring these elements matters, they tell only part of the story. The critical difference between organisations that merely meet safety standards and those that excel in protecting their workforce often comes down to one factor: leadership.
Safety leadership transcends catchphrases, monthly morning teas, or toolbox talks. It extends beyond regulatory compliance or maintaining incident logs. It requires creating a culture where safety isn’t just a priority—it’s a core value woven into the organisation’s fabric. This distinction is crucial because priorities shift with circumstances, but values remain constant.
The Human Element: Understanding Yourself to Lead Others
As a military leader, I learned that knowing your people and yourself is fundamental to success. With deeper understanding of human factors and witnessing workplace evolution (technological advances, increasingly complex operations, heightened expectations, and changing workforce demographics), this principle proves even more vital today.
Recognising what influences your behaviour and that of your team enhances emotional intelligence. It enables identification of optimal moments for critical decisions—or when patience is warranted. Incorporating these human factors when creating processes reduces error-producing conditions, leading to a more engaged workforce and improved safety outcomes.
Visible Commitment: The Power of Genuine Presence
Being present doesn’t necessarily mean physical proximity. It means ensuring your people know you’re available, that you genuinely listen (not just hear), provide feedback, and take action when required.
The most effective safety leaders actively participate in safety discussions. They understand the business, their role, and yours. They demonstrate authentic interest in their people’s concerns and ideas.
When employees know a leader truly listens, they speak up and contribute. This promotes positive reporting, openness, and continuous improvement. Great safety leaders demonstrate accountability, taking responsibility for their actions and decisions, setting a powerful example for all.
Systems Thinking: Preventing the “Inevitable”
“I thought that might happen” or “it was inevitable” often follows incidents. With hindsight, we see system gaps where errors went uncaught or mistakes were allowed to happen. The key is closing these gaps before accidents occur.
Effective safety leadership requires understanding that incidents rarely have simple, linear causes. Leaders must approach safety with systems thinking, recognising the complex interplay between human factors, organisational processes, and workplace conditions. When investigating errors, finding WHO is easy, but failing to ask WHY leaves the organisation vulnerable to more severe consequences when similar errors recur.
While personal responsibility matters, sustainable safety excellence requires addressing systemic factors. Leaders must willingly examine and modify organisational structures, processes, and cultural elements impacting safety performance.
Culture Creation: Where Safety Becomes Second Nature
Creating an environment where employees feel safe to speak up about concerns is essential. This requires fostering a culture where near misses and safety observations become learning opportunities rather than causes for punishment. Individual accountability must be balanced with consideration of contextual influences.
Effective leaders recognise their people’s state and what impacts their performance. They lead with empathy and emotional intelligence to nurture a positive culture.
This positive environment creates psychological safety, encouraging people to identify and address potential hazards before incidents occur. It promotes innovation as employees feel empowered to suggest improvements to existing procedures.
The challenge for safety leaders lies in sustaining this positive culture, especially when its return on investment is difficult to quantify. When safety becomes a core value, costly incidents and employee turnover decrease, compliance improves, and hazards are identified and managed before materialisation.
The Horizon: Future-Proofing Safety Leadership
As we look ahead, safety leadership continues to evolve. Remote work, increasing automation, AI integration, and changing workforce expectations present new challenges and opportunities. Successful safety leaders must be adaptable, embracing new technologies while maintaining their fundamental commitment to worker well-being.
Modern safety leadership requires balancing standards with empowerment, allowing employees to take ownership of their safety and that of their colleagues—making safety a value that “just happens.”
Tomorrow’s safety leaders must recognise that safety excellence intertwines with organisational culture and employee engagement. The most successful organisations view safety not as a separate initiative but as an integral part of how work gets done.
The Safety Leader’s Imperative
Leadership in safety transcends titles or positions—it’s about actions that demonstrate genuine commitment to worker well-being, knowing your people, and active listening. It requires courage to challenge unsafe conditions, compassion to understand worker concerns, and unwavering commitment to maintaining safety as a core value even amid competing priorities.
As safety professionals, we must continuously evolve our understanding of effective leadership. By focusing on genuine commitment, psychological safety, systems thinking, and positive culture, we create organisations where every worker returns home safely.
This isn’t just our professional obligation—it’s our moral imperative, the true measure of leadership that matters.
