What Better Safety Leadership Looks Like

Dr. Ken Wagner has spent thirty years studying why some safety programs fail and why others stick. As founder of Daylight Advisory and a doctorate holder in Cognitive and Behavioral Psychology, he’s worked with organizations across six continents to help their leaders understand where safer performance comes from. In the latest episode of The Pragmatic Safety Podcast, TenForce COO Julia Dubois sat down with Ken for one of the most informative and practically applicable conversations about safety leadership we’ve had on the show.

Watch or listen to the full episode: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube

The real value of safety

Ask Ken about safety, and he’ll tell you it shouldn’t be a priority. Priorities change when deadlines loom or urgent work takes over, but values don’t. “If it’s a core value, it informs the decisions you make,” he explains, especially under pressure. But safety doesn’t become a core value overnight. It takes consistent repetition, feedback, and positive reinforcement until safe behavior becomes second nature.

Why safety initiatives keep failing

Ken calls it the “flavor-of-the-day” problem. A new initiative launches with plenty of noise and enthusiasm, but without the right values behind it, attention fades, and old habits return. Before long, it’s replaced by the next initiative…and the cycle begins again.

The core flaws in these failed initiatives are almost always the same. There’s too much focus on telling people what to do without creating the conditions that could make the behavior stick. “Those initiatives tend to go away because they are designed with flaws in them,” Ken said. Frontline workers get clear expectations, but leaders are rarely given the tools to support the change.

Introduce a cascading accountability system

What works, according to Ken’s Leading with Intention framework, is a cascading system in which each level of leadership has a specific role. It starts with senior leaders asking the right questions and allocating the right resources. This trickles down to managers, who then help supervisors develop their skills, who in turn help frontline workers repeat the right behaviors and receive feedback on them.

If that chain holds, a safety culture can start trending in the right direction, but if it breaks at any level, everything below will eventually fall apart.

“If I’m a supervisor and you’re asking me to do things, but my boss is still asking me to do the old stuff, then I’m more likely to do what my boss is asking me to do over time,” Ken explained.

Zero incidents don’t ensure safety

Aiming for zero incidents sounds like the ultimate safety goal. But when the number becomes more important than how work is done, people may feel pressure to hide problems or leave near misses unreported. A culture of safe operations focuses instead on doing the work correctly, every time.

“We cannot get to world-class safety through the whack-a-mole game by simply trying to knock down all the bad things that we see,” Ken explained.

TenForce’s audit and inspection tools and incident management software support this approach. They create traceable records, turn operational data into useful insight, and help build a culture where people learn from problems and take responsibility for improving safety.

Monitoring without micromanaging

Measuring behavior is among the hardest parts of safety leadership. How do you know whether safety procedures are shaping behavior rather than simply being ticked off?

Ken suggests asking about the outcome instead of checking whether the task was completed, for instance: “What was the most unusual thing you found in the pre-task risk assessment?” Someone who carried out the assessment properly will have a meaningful answer. It’s a simple way to verify the work without treating experienced professionals as though they can’t be trusted.

Once again, the same principle applies at every level of the organization. Managers can ask supervisors what they learned from conversations, while directors can ask managers how they allocated resources in response. Precise questions, asked at the right level, reveal far more than a completed checklist, and without undermining trust.

Where technology can take us

Like most of us, Ken sees technology’s potential, particularly when it takes administrative work off leaders’ plates and gives them more time with their teams. The risk, however, is that organizations record everything and do nothing with it.

“We ask people to record lots and lots of stuff, it goes into a black hole, nobody hears about it again,” Ken said.

When that happens, entering data becomes the goal rather than a tool for safer operations.

He sees the same tension with AI. Its ability to make work more efficient is exciting, but relying on it too heavily can weaken critical thinking. Ken calls this the GPS problem: if technology always tells you where to go, you eventually lose the ability to navigate for yourself.

TenForce’s AI capabilities are engineered to support that balance. They bring the right information into the workflow at the right time, while keeping the human judgment that effective safety leadership depends on firmly in place.

What the next generation of safety leaders needs to know

Ken advises the next generation to focus on understanding the human element before anything else. “A hundred percent of our customers are people and a hundred percent of our employees are people.” Yes, technology will keep changing, but the fundamentals of human behavior won’t. Leaders who understand why people make the choices they make and who assume positive intent will bring out the best in their teams.

The Pragmatic Safety Podcast exists to bring conversations like this one into the open. Each episode features an honest conversation with a hands-on leader who has spent decades tackling real challenges in safety, operations, and environmental performance.

Let’s make safety pragmatic. Starting now.

Watch or listen to the full episode now: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube