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58 Advances in Productive, Safe, and Responsible Coal Mining

Include leaders who demonstrate their strong commitment.
l
Consider safety and health to be a value that is strategically important.
l
Ensure components of a safety management system are visible in all processes.
l
Establish buy-in to safety within the culture.
l
Include respected safety staff who are a visible part of the leadership.
l
l Commit to continuous learning and development.
l Proactively seek to learn from and advance technology within/from industry.
Ranking an organization on these seven dimensions can be done to determine a total
maturity assessment score. From this, action plans can be created based on gaps iden-
tified among the various components. The output from the total maturity score assess-
ment, which ranges from “needs immediate action” to “maturity fully actualized,” can
be used to help organizations realize their potential either to improve or to celebrate
the organizational behavior strengths contributing to a high level of safety and health
maturity.
Benchmarking an organization’s culture based on a health and safety maturity
model can allow for a deeper understanding about the “way we do things around here”
and provide a roadmap for making safety leaders visible. The applied skills and behav-
iors of visible safety leaders have the greatest chance to affect change in workers’
behavior on the front-line, which is why leadership development and visibility is
so important at the front-line leadership level.
The applied skills needed by leaders to develop desired behaviors they would like
to see in others require a significant level of training and opportunities to continue
learning. This concept relates to all members of an organization, regardless of their
age, background, education, and so on.

4.6 A roadmap to develop visible safety leaders

Considering both dimensions of health and safety maturity in organizations as well as
insights from what constitutes a positive safety culture, leaders can commit to behav-
iors that help them be more “visible” and effective in their organizations. The roadmap
of four key behaviors shown in Fig. 4.1, can be thought of as a self-awareness reflec-
tion tool or a daily reminder of the values leaders could demonstrate through their
behavior. Following this roadmap will allow leaders to be more visible and effective
in their influence on others and on organizations as a whole.
Stop 1: Self-awareness—acknowledge one’s individual strengths and personal challenges.
Stop 2: Team-building—utilize strengths—one’s own and others’—to build effective teams.
Stop 3: Effective communications—work to ensure effective communication in all
interactions.
Stop 4: Organizational commitment—demonstrate commitment to organizational values.
The first stop, developing self-awareness, is crucial for leaders, so they can clarify
the type of people or leaders they aspire to be. By examining personal strengths
and potential challenges associated with personalities, generational differences,
personal learning styles, and past experiences, leaders can better understand their