What Is Safety Leadership?
How program directors and risk managers lead without positional authority
If you manage programs or lead operations in outdoor education, you already know this: your job is hard, and authority doesn’t get you far.
You may or may not have formal training in risk management. Maybe you came up through field work and are naturally suited for risk management work, and you are used to carrying more responsibility than you have support for. You notice risks that others miss, and you're often the one raising concerns that don't seem to register with anyone else. When you bring up safety issues, it can feel like you're speaking a different language. The work is isolating, and the weight of what you see and what you carry can be exhausting.
That burden you're carrying is not paranoia. It's leadership.
Safety leadership isn't about compliance or authority. It's about influence. It means managing up without direct power, building buy-in across departments, and helping others see risks and opportunities they might otherwise miss.
I've been in these roles. I know how isolating the work can be, and how much the weight of it takes an emotional and physical toll. Supporting other program leaders now, I see that same experience in others. Community and professional support makes a difference.
This is the first in a series on safety leadership. The series explores how safety leaders build influence, navigate organizational challenges, and lead effectively.
What Safety Leadership Is (and Isn’t)
Safety leadership is about creating foresight, not managing hindsight. It means helping organizations anticipate and adapt to risk before incidents occur, rather than just responding after things go wrong.
Good safety leaders spend their time:
Understanding how work is carried out in practice
Spotting early signals of emerging risk
Influencing decisions that reduce risk and make work easier and safer
Contrary to what some boards and executives expect, safety leadership in an organization is actually different from being the internal compliance police or the go-to firefighter, tasked with directly managing every incident and issue. Effective safety leaders create foresight, and effective leadership helps to improve the conditions in which people make decisions. Good safety leaders stay close to the work, listen for various signals, and help teams and organizations make sense of change before harm occurs. The safety leader’s influence comes from helping others understand what normal work really looks like, not from enforcing how it should look (Provan, 2021).
A friend of mine and Risk Management Director of a regional outdoor education organization said it well in a recent conversation:
“I used to think my job was about making people follow the process. Now I see it is about helping them understand why the process matters.”
That distinction captures the essence of safety leadership. It is not about enforcing rules. It is about helping others see how their actions connect to the safety of the whole program.
Safety science gives us language for this. By studying how work normally happens, and by looking at how people adjust, succeed, and cope with change, we learn where our systems help and where they get in the way.
The goal is simple: to make the safer way the easier way.
Who Is a Safety Leader?
Safety leaders are often the people who shape conditions for safe and effective work, whether they hold formal authority or not. In most schools and organizations, this includes program directors and operations managers, risk managers, and even executive directors….anyone accountable for risk management. Some of these roles, like program and executive directors, have the luxury of formal authority. Others, like the risk manager, often do not. But, when it comes to their ‘safety leadership hat’, they all have in common that influencing is more powerful than directing how others should think and act about safety. Influence, then, is not just about hearts and minds, but also about the barriers, constraints, and enablers on work, itself.
Safety leadership can exist anywhere in the hierarchy. What matters most is not the position but the influence a person has. Influence comes from credibility, relationships, and understanding how work is actually done. A strong safety leader connects what happens in the field with the choices being made in meetings and at the leadership table. They act as a bridge between practice and policy, helping both sides see the other more clearly.
In practice, this often means translating. The same person who spends time on-site with instructors may later explain to executives why staff skipped a step in the gear room. The goal is not to defend or excuse, but to help the organization understand why it made sense at the time, so it can learn and adapt rather than blame.
The Unique Challenges Safety Leaders Face
These challenges are real, but they're not insurmountable. Progressing as a safety leader means continually refining how to navigate them. Even the most capable leaders find this work hard.
Here are four common challenges I hear from my clients:
Working without formal authority. Many safety leaders are expected to influence behavior and decisions across departments without having authority over those areas. They depend on credibility and relationships, rather than positional power.
Feeling isolated in the role. The work can be lonely. Safety leaders sit between executives and frontline staff; they are accountable to both but belong to neither. Much of their work happens behind the scenes, and it often goes unseen unless something goes wrong.
Being misunderstood or undervalued. Many supervisors and executives still view safety as a compliance function. Helping them see the broader value of proactive safety leadership is, unfortunately, part of the job. This means managing up, connecting safety to business priorities, and proving the work matters beyond audits and paperwork.
Absorbing organizational stress without burning out. Safety leaders deal with incidents, conflicts, and constant pressure, and they usually do so without much backup (they’re usually the backup for others). The work demands empathy and patience, but it’s hard to sustain that for others if you don't protect it for yourself.
Developing as a Safety Leader
Many program directors and risk managers come from the field. They already know how to build and educate teams, set expectations, and make decisions under pressure. Those leadership skills remain essential.
What changes is where these skills are applied. In the field, you lead a team with shared experience and perspective. In an office, you need to build relationships with people from different professional backgrounds, like HR, finance, and legal, who see the world through different lenses. You have to understand their priorities and how they see risk, then show how those priorities connect to programming and safety.
To be effective, you need to build credibility and alliances across the organization. You need to manage up by helping senior leaders and boards see risk more clearly, and by supporting them as they develop their own understanding of safety leadership.
Technical knowledge matters, but it's not enough. Developing as a safety leader also requires organizational and executive leadership skills, including the ability to broaden your influence and help your organization make better decisions about risk.
If you manage programs, direct operations, or are accountable for safety in your organization, you are a safety leader. The question is how effective that leadership will be.
Authority cannot create buy-in, but influence can.
Influence grows from understanding the realities of everyone’s work, building credibility across departments, and connecting safety to what people already care about.
The next post in this series will explore how to build that influence: what makes it work, what undermines it, and how to strengthen it over time.
Does this match your experience? I'd love to hear from you. I work with safety leaders on developing influence, navigating organizational challenges, and building sustainable approaches to this work. Reach out.
References
Provan, D. (2021). A field guide to safety professional practice (2nd ed.). Safety Futures. ISBN 978-0-645-22652-2.
