If safety is part of everyone’s job, supervisors and managers have to be safety leaders. However, what it takes to be an effective safety leader has long been difficult to define in a specific, actionable way.
To further assist customers in their pursuit for safety culture excellence, Caterpillar recently launched the first statistically validated Safety Leadership Assessment, a tool to measure the degree to which individual leaders demonstrate four specific domains of safety leadership: accountability, connectivity, credible safety consciousness and trust.
Caterpillar Safety Services partnered with Development Dimensions International (DDI) and behavioral experts for a four-year study into leadership effectiveness which included surveys of more than 1,000 employees, front-line leaders, middle managers and top managers in the industries of construction, energy, forestry and manufacturing.
Hawaiian Cement was one of the first Caterpillar customers to utilize the tool as part of its continuous improvement efforts.
“This is a powerful tool to help leaders at all levels be more effective in all forms of leadership, not just safety,” said President John DeLong (Ret.). “Supervisors and managers can see how their team ranked them on individual questions, so they know exactly what they need to work on to improve, or what they’re doing well and should continue.”
Once an organization completes the assessment, Caterpillar provides detailed reports to each leader and conducts an on-site workshop to discuss the results and facilitate action plans for improvement.
