The Five Challenges of Safety Leadership

How to build influence to move the needle or initiate transformational change at work

Safety leadership is isolating work.

I mumbled as much during my opening remarks at the Wilderness Risk Management Conference a few years ago. I was surprised by how many people approached me and said that they hadn't thought of it that way, but yeah…it is isolating.

I was surprised because, for years, I assumed isolation was part of my own leadership flaws. After advising and coaching safety leaders in schools, universities, and outdoor program provider companies, I now understand that professional isolation is structural. It's built into how the role is designed and how it functions.

Schools and outdoor programs have learned a lot from aviation and healthcare, two much larger, better-resourced safety-critical fields. Safety science is becoming more widely discussed and adopted in our field, and we still have a way to go in getting these concepts and principles into our everyday, social language around work.

But safety science means little if we don't know how to use it. It doesn't matter if you are the only one who knows about systems thinking, safety culture, or normal work in your organization. In my experience, I find it matters more that program directors and risk managers can effectively influence others in their organization to change attitudes, perceptions, and behaviors.

That's how safety leadership can influence and disperse the safety of work into thoughtful, coordinated action throughout an organization.

It's harder than it sounds.

Structural constraints and barriers are in the way. For instance, program administrators have limited visibility or say in how the organization sets its goals and priorities. Risk managers, as important as their jobs are, typically have little positional authority over other departments to make the changes they see should happen. Even executive directors are constrained. While being tasked with the overall health of the organization, including its fiscal health and the well-being of its people, they rarely have sufficient visibility into how actual safety and operational decisions are made at the ground level. I wrote more about safety leadership and what I actually mean by that term in a recent blog.

Since my comments at the WRMC a few years ago, I've entered a rabbit hole of safety science and executive leadership literature. I've reflected deeply on my own experiences as a program director and risk manager, and I've thought about my colleagues and clients.

I've identified five common challenges in safety leadership. They are building relationships; engaging up, down, and across; strategic thinking and systems awareness; managing overwhelm and prioritization; and sustaining self and career. With this framework, I see shades of these challenges everywhere. I can't stress enough that these are not personal flaws or failings. In fact, most people who wear a safety leadership hat as part of their role are typically quite competent. Instead, I find it helpful to approach each challenge as a structural issue. When I do, I find each challenge is easily reversed, and it becomes instructive in a way that helps work out the next move that will push an issue forward at work.

1. Building Relationships

Relationships are the safety leader's currency. Investing in trust is the only sure way to actually get things done when positional authority is limited.

Humble inquiry has taken over the safety science world as a useful approach to building trust (Schein, 2013). At its core, it's quite simple. Humble inquiry is about asking questions we genuinely don't know the answer to. I find that, as educators and outdoor educators, we're typically already pretty good at this. We're used to being curious and asking our students questions to understand their views and provoke change.

Yet, for some reason, we don't apply the same approach or set of tools to our peers and colleagues. Within the organization, I often see program directors and risk managers telling other departmental leaders how it is or how it needs to be. We are, after all, the resident experts in programming.

When we take the time to learn about someone else's work, like what other forces or pressures are driving their priorities or impacting their decisions, we're building a collaborative start to whatever the issue is. We're depositing money into the proverbial piggy bank, and we're building the allies who support operational and safety work long before we need it, before it comes time to make a withdrawal.

2. Engaging Up, Down, and Across

I remember a conversation with the leaders of a business development department. They were adamant that safety was the program department's job. Their role in risk management was to ensure revenue, partnerships, and enrollment so the program department had programs to run.

They weren't wrong, but they weren't exactly right, either. This was, after all, the message that CEO after CEO showed up and told them to focus on. They didn't yet understand how their upstream business development decisions created context for programming and safety downstream, in the field. Early on, I tried to present charts, numbers, and data to show how, year after year, business choices and priorities were impacting operations and safety.

The data barely resonated.

When I started leading with stories and data to help make sense of the narrative, I gained much more influence and traction. As a result, people understood what was going on in the organization and their role in it.

Influencing others is based on credibility, not authority. Credibility comes from understanding and speaking to what other people already care about. Take, for instance, organizational leaders, like heads of school and executive directors. Executives are responsible for the organization's overall health, and thus, financial pressures like enrollment and stakeholder management are at the forefront of their minds when they go to bed at night. Middle managers and field staff, on the other hand, are constantly stretched by workload and often feel they don't have enough time or resources to get their work done. When we tailor the safety message to others' language, goals, and realities, we're much more likely to be heard.

3. Strategic Thinking and Systems Awareness

One of the most useful concepts from grad school that I wish every safety leader knew is leverage points (Meadows, 1999). These are places in a system where a small change has the greatest impact on the rest of the system. Leverage points tell a safety leader exactly where they should put their effort.

Feedback loops, communication and information flows, rules, who makes the rules, and the goals of the system are all extremely powerful leverage points.

Let's go back to the story about business development and program departments. When I started as a risk manager, the vice presidents of business development would say to me in one ear: "Stu, you need to get the program department to follow through with our partnership agreements, and do XYZ…" In the other ear, the program admins would say, "Stu, you've gotta get the business development folks to slow down; we don't have enough people/time/equipment for all of this!"

My message was simple. "Do you really want to tell the executives of a non-profit outdoor program to turn away funding?" and "Are you really promising program elements that you're not sure we can deliver?" After thoughtful reflection, both sides shrugged and said something to the effect of "well, not sure what we can do about that, we have our goals and constraints, after all!" (see challenge 2).

After flipping through grad school and systems-thinking resources, I came back the next week with a different plan.

"When was the last time you met with the [insert other] department?"

Ummm….never. We don't talk to them.

Okay. Then promise me one thing: set a meeting on both your calendars to debrief after this program season, and another meeting when it comes time to renew and sign partnership agreements.

That's a feedback loop, and that's one example of putting systems-thinking into action.

My other favorite ways to put systems thinking and leverage points into action are focusing on the rules of the system, like policies and the unwritten norms for how people make decisions, and the goals of the system itself. For instance, if we only measure and report on incident data, the goal of our risk management naturally becomes reducing incidents. If we start reporting on training completion, onboarding, and whether risk assessments are actually being completed and used, the goals shift toward improving those things instead.

The most effective yet hardest leverage point to tap into is the mindset from which the system arises. This is what I studied in grad school, and I wrote a 10 part blog series about culture and how it shapes risk and safety management in outdoor programs.

4. Managing Overwhelm and Prioritization

The safety leadership hat comes with constant and sometimes competing demands for your attention. This is doubly so for the executive or program director, where overseeing safety and people's wellbeing is just one facet of their job.

With so much safety science information and ideas about how to improve safety, it's hard to wade through it all. Luckily, a beautiful concept is circulating in the safety science world: safety work versus the safety of work (Rae & Provan, 2019). Essentially, there is no shortage of more, more to do, more policy to write and follow, more training, more checklists, more risk assessments, and more meetings.

All of these help us feel our organization and its people are safer, especially from behind our computer. That's safety work. But how much of it actually improves the way people do and experience work, or the safety of work?

Safety leaders can prioritize safety [of] work in several ways and manage their own sense of overwhelm. For instance, of all the things people are looking to you for, which ones are strategically important to the mission of the organization and its commitment to people's wellbeing and safety? Which ones, instead, are performative and look good on paper? Which tasks can be delegated (see challenge 3 for an example), and which tasks, including showing due diligence and defensibility on paper, should require 80% of your effort, versus the ones that should require 100%, like doing a site visit to observe and talk about work with actual workers? And, finally, which tasks do you learn to say "not yet" to, because you are choosing and articulating improving the cause(s), and not going after the symptom.

When I stepped into my risk management role, a predecessor told me to figure out my one thing and let it guide what got my full attention.

One key lesson I hope every reader leaves with is this: Overwhelm is a signal about the system (again, see challenge 3), not an indication of personal performance or failing. Let's talk more about it in challenge 5.

5. Sustaining Self and Career

The fifth and final common challenge of safety leadership is about you, the safety leader.

Safety leadership carries a burden, a certain care and responsibility for the wellbeing and safety of other people, colleagues, participants, and community partners. Responding to and managing incidents, what I call firefighting, is part of the role, and the long-term effects add up.

A couple of years ago, a few colleagues and I surveyed outdoor programming practitioners from around the world who were involved in serious incidents (Dallat, Mitten, Slay, Mitchell, Ajango, 2025). We wanted to understand the long-term effects of second victim syndrome (Wu, 2000) and coping/recovery strategies they found helpful.

The most common effects are hypervigilance in risk and safety management at work, and strain on relationships at home. It's easy to see how these can be a problem in your personal life, but they also affect your judgment. As a safety leader, you rely on your judgment to navigate and guide others through complex and challenging circumstances.

It's clear from the research that talking with trusted colleagues and peers is helpful for dealing with second victim syndrome and the effects of cumulative stress. In our data, the most helpful thing was not a formal program but a peer who had been through it and could make space to just be a person for a while. Coaching, in particular, can help identify and change core beliefs about work and identity that limit your ability to cope and recover. For instance, learning to count on others to do things as well as you, addressing the inner need to take over when things go even a little wrong, and sometimes even letting go of the feeling of being needed.

Your powerbase (see challenge 1) shouldn't just apply to moving your work forward with colleagues. It should apply to you, your wellbeing, and your support network, helping you navigate cumulative stress and address the limiting beliefs that feed the cycle.

Everyone has a unique profile of their own five challenges.

On my own assessment, I score well on strategic thinking and systems awareness, which tracks with my academic background and the lens I bring to risk management. I consistently score lower on managing overwhelm and prioritization, which tracks with my experience as a risk management director and a program director. Knowing my strengths and weaknesses helps me make sense of my experiences and navigate organizational dynamics to improve safety and get everyone engaged in risk management.

I built a safety leadership self-assessment around this framework. Take the free version and see how these challenges might actually be instructive in influencing change at your organization.

FAQ

What are the five challenges of safety leadership?

The five challenges are building relationships; engaging up, down, and across the organization; strategic thinking and systems awareness; managing overwhelm and prioritization; and sustaining self and career. They describe structural barriers that come with the role, not personal shortcomings. Each challenge, once named, points toward the skills and strategies that improve it.

How can a safety leader influence others without positional authority?

Safety leaders rarely have direct authority over the departments whose work affects safety outcomes. Influence comes from credibility built on relationships, not from a title on an org chart. That means learning what keeps other people awake, translating safety priorities into their professional language, and leading with stories that help people see their role in the whole system.

How do I get other departments engaged in safety and risk management?

Most departments don't see their work as safety work. Business development focuses on revenue, HR focuses on compliance, and field staff focus on getting through the day. Engagement work isn't about arguing with them. It starts with understanding what they already care about and showing them how their decisions create the context for downstream safety outcomes.

What is second victim syndrome in outdoor education?

Second victim syndrome describes the lasting effects on staff who respond to or manage the aftermath of a serious incident. Research shows that program administrators and managers who were not at the scene are affected just as deeply as those who were (Dallat, Mitten, Slay, Mitchell, & Ajango, 2025). Common effects include hypervigilance at work and strain on relationships at home.

What is the difference between safety work and the safety of work?

Safety work includes policies, checklists, training requirements, risk assessments, and meetings that make an organization feel safer on paper. The safety of work asks how much of that activity actually improves the way people experience and perform their jobs. Rae and Provan's distinction helps safety leaders prioritize efforts that change real conditions over those that only demonstrate compliance.

What are leverage points in safety management?

Leverage points are places in a system where a small change produces the greatest effect on the rest of the system (Meadows). In safety management, examples include the goals of your reporting system, feedback loops between departments, and the unwritten rules for how people make decisions. Identifying these points helps a safety leader focus effort where it will have the most impact.

Why does safety leadership feel so isolating?

Safety leaders typically have limited positional authority, limited visibility into executive decision-making, and limited say in how goals and priorities are set. The role sits between the tactical and the strategic, translating operational detail for executives and organizational priorities for field staff, often without a peer group that shares the same pressures. That isolation is structural, built into how the role is designed, not a personal failing.

References

Dallat, C., Mitten, D., Slay, S., Mitchell, W., & Ajango, D. (2025). The silence is deafening: Exploring the impacts of serious incidents on practitioners across the outdoor and adventure programs work system. Human Factors and Ergonomics in Manufacturing & Service Industries, 35(4), e70017. https://doi.org/10.1002/hfm.70017

Meadows, D. H. (1999). Leverage points: Places to intervene in a system. The Sustainability Institute.

Rae, A., & Provan, D. J. (2019). Safety work versus the safety of work. Safety Science, 111, 119–127.

Schein, E. H. (2013). Humble inquiry: The gentle art of asking instead of telling. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Wu, A. W. (2000). Medical error: The second victim. BMJ, 320(7237), 726–727.