EHS excellence is an outcome of an enterprise that clearly values and cares for its employees and includes safety as a strategic element of its organizational culture. One of the most important aspects of a healthy company culture is effective leadership. Leaders who support their employees and care about their success can help improve their employee’s confidence, clearly define expectations, and cultivate a sense of community among their teams. These in turn support their company’s long-term goals, industry reputation and employee engagement. In other words, a successful safety and health professional must be aligned with her or his corporate culture and values. Recent events have impacted corporate values. A world-changing pandemic, competition for labor, technological investment have all entrenched health and safety as a value and extended its roots more deeply in corporate culture. EHS professionals have new leadership opportunities in these new value systems. They can connect with and leverage people, public trust and profits and embrace transformational EHS leadership and increase their influence. This session will introduce the concept of transformational safety leadership (TSL), explain how critical TSL is in engaging the workforce, establish the linkage between TSL and achieving EHS excellence, and present specific performance characteristics that drive TSL. It will then explore how to understand your corporate culture and values, how to introduce TSL into the organization, and how to align TSL with the corporate culture to achieve EHS excellence.

Key takeaways:

• What goes into transformational safety leadership and how it drives worker engagement and EHS excellence.

• How safety professionals can integrate EHS into their organizational cultures and leverage corporate momentum.

• The lost opportunities that result from EHS leadership vacuums.