Breakfast Meeting – September 9, 2025

Overcoming Hurdles in Safety Leadership: The “E’s” Have It

Daniel G. Hopwood, MPH, CSP, SMP, ARM, FASSP

Overcoming the Hurdles we face as Safety Leaders requires knowledge, skill, patience, and an approach that is both meaningful for everyone involved and leads to success.  Safety leaders are often asked to prevent incidents with little investment in terms of available hours, manpower, education, and budget forcing us to find ways around, over, and under the obstacles in our way.

This presentation uses an escalation of E’s as a thought device to reinforce the tools at our fingertips to overcome the hurdles we face as safety leaders. The first group of E’s includes Effort, Energy, Engagement, understanding Emerging issues and more.  These are the tools and skills we need to build our approach.  How we integrate and leverage others also includes critical E’s such as Education, Enrichment, Empowerment, and Enabling activities.  These are skills that serve to engage others, recruit them to help solve the problem, and encourage them to step up.

The presentation will define the E’s, how they help operationalize practices and unify our safety leadership approach, connectivity, and integration with all constituents we are working with in the E’s process.

Overcoming hurdles requires our intention-based engagement; together, the E’s create a thought device to identify challenges in safety leadership and developing strategies to overcome them.