Paradoxical Safety Leadership: How to Lead Safety When Priorities Collide
Paradoxical safety leadership helps leaders weigh safety and production trade-offs consciously. Insights from a myosh Academy webinar with New View Safety.
Paradoxical Safety Leadership: How to Lead Safety When Priorities Collide
It is Thursday afternoon. A production target is slipping, a job is partly underway, and someone raises a concern. The decision you make in the next few minutes will say more about your organisation’s safety culture than any policy on the wall.
In a recent myosh Academy session, Kym Bancroft and Dr Tristan Casey of New View Safety explored paradoxical safety leadership, a way of thinking that helps leaders handle exactly these moments. When we asked registrants how their organisation handles tension between two safety priorities, 69% said inconsistently or reactively. In this article, you will learn what creates those tensions, why the quick fix keeps failing, and what a smarter approach looks like.
Safety leadership is moving from behaviours to decisions
For decades, safety leadership research focused on behaviours: rewarding good practice, monitoring, building relationships and inspiring a vision. Dr Casey explained that the next step is to look at how leaders decide, particularly in complex and uncertain situations where there is no obvious right answer.
Kym Bancroft put it simply: safety professionals are not compliance officers. They are decision makers who work in a grey zone, often under stress and often on the fly.
“The goal isn’t to eliminate the tension, it’s just to get better at leading through it.”
Tension is built into modern organisations
Tension, Dr Casey explained, is simply competing goals: safety, production, innovation, quality, the environment and more. It shows up through limited resources, shifting priorities, differing viewpoints, decisions that cascade down to the front line, and incentive schemes that reward one goal over another.
There are also tensions within safety itself. Dr Casey described a construction team that introduced fall restraint harnesses to remove a fall hazard, only to create a musculoskeletal hazard because the restraint was too short. In healthcare, a worker can face the choice between catching a falling patient and protecting their own back.
This is also why he questioned the “safety first” mantra. An unwavering rule can intensify the tension and push people towards shortcuts. He suggested “safe production” as a goal that asks leaders to optimise both.
Quick fixes versus smart fixes
Under pressure, our thinking narrows. The session described common quick fixes: ignoring the tension, reverting to what worked before, picking one side, or swinging back and forth between options. These relieve the pressure briefly, but the tension returns.
A smart fix does one of three things:
- Separates in time: stop the job, resolve the issue, then resume.
- Separates in space: assign a dedicated safety spotter while others focus on production.
- Gets creative: involve the people doing the work. In one example, workers given a budget designed a lifting device that removed the manual handling and sped up the job.
What this means in practice
Leaders can start with four habits from the session:
- Notice the tension in yourself and the leaders you support.
- Pause and engage your thinking before you react.
- Make conscious trade-offs that signal commitment, such as declining a risky task or making stop work authority easy to use.
- Think several moves ahead. Consider how a decision at your level cascades to the front line. A procurement budget cut too tightly can make safety impossible to deliver later.
For safety teams, tools that make critical controls and decisions visible, such as the controls and actions tracked in myosh, help turn a conscious approach into something the whole organisation can see.
Key takeaways
- Safety leadership is moving from behaviours towards decision-making.
- Tension between safety and other goals is inevitable, so the aim is to lead through it.
- Quick fixes relieve pressure but bring the tension back. Smart fixes resolve it.
- “Safe production” asks leaders to optimise both goals rather than trade one off.
- Conscious trade-offs, like easy stop work authority, signal commitment.
- Consider the cascade of your decisions, thinking three or four moves ahead.
Watch the full session
Watch the full recording of Paradoxical Safety Leadership: Leading Safety in the Grey Zone, a free session in the myosh Academy webinar series.
https://youtu.be/2NpZARftmdU?si=XZPHAzVd9diszL1a
This session is part of the myosh Academy free weekly webinar series. Browse the full library: https://www.myosh.com/academy/webinars
Presented by Kym Bancroft, Director, New View Safety, and Dr Tristan Casey, Co-founder and Principal Associate, New View Safety.
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