Servant Leadership in Safety: Building Community in the Workplace with David Sarkus
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What can we learn from servant leadership in safety? “Servant leadership has such great breadth and depth in terms of establishing a great philosophical and applied foundation for greater learning and performance in safety.” In this energetic and engaging episode, we welcome David Sarkus, Chief Servant Leader and Founder of David Sarkus International Inc., who explores what servant leadership truly means in the context of safety and how it can transform safety culture by building a strong sense of community in the workplace. David introduces the Five Dimensions of Community and shares how safety leaders can foster greater belonging, trust, and connection through caring, listening, and meaningful relationships, creating an environment where people feel valued, heard, supported, and committed to protecting one another. He also explores the concept of the “risk ceiling,” revealing why organizations can plateau in their safety journey and the profound impact this can have on long-term safety success. Don’t miss this episode filled with actionable strategies to implement servant leadership to strengthen community, build trust, and enhance safety performance across your organization. Tune in now!
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Real leaders leave a legacy. They capture the hearts and minds of their teams. Their origin story puts the safety and wellbeing of their people first. Great companies ubiquitously have safe yet productive operations. For those companies, safety is an investment, not a cost for the C-suite. It’s a real topic of daily focus. This is The Safety Guru with your host, Eric Michrowski, a globally recognized ops and safety guru, public speaker, and author. Are you ready to leave a safety legacy? Your legacy success story begins now.
Hi and welcome to The Safety Guru. So excited to have with me David Sarkus, who’s Chief Servant Leader. He’s a speaker, a consultant, a coach, and an author. Been around for 35+ years. David, welcome to the show. So excited to have you with me.
Thanks, Eric. I’ve been waiting for this. We’ve both been struggling to get on the same page schedule-wise, but I’m Happy to be here, and I’m glad for the short introduction because my mother had written a long intro for me years ago, and some of your, uh, audience might just fall asleep. So, I’m glad you went with that short one.
So, tell me about your journey and how you got that passion for safety.
Wow.
I grew up here in steel country, just south of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My father was a steelworker. My grandfather was a steelworker. Some of my best friends went into the steel industry in various ways, even as safety professionals. And I was always astonished at the harm and hurt that occurred in the steel industry with such high risk. And one of my good friends, Chuck Smith, who worked for Wheeling Pittsburgh Steel in the early 1980s, got me involved in a perspective about being a leader for safety in the steel industry. And Chuck and I still are good friends to this day, but it was the steel industry and listening to my father’s stories about people who were injured badly and even killed here at the Donora Mill and my father’s passion for this area, his hometown and the steel industry. Carried on to me and I became more and more aware of people who were injured and the harm that took place. And my friend Chuck Smith, about my age, bridged the gap. So, it was a pretty good path for me to take in terms of being a safety professional and helping a part of my history in my life turn into a passion.
And that passion, as you lead Your discussions with many professionals is all about building our credibility throughout the organization, passion, expertise, and trust. So, I’m really happy to be here speaking with you today, Eric.
Excellent. And I love your title, Chief Servant Leader. Great pivot to servant leadership and how it applies in safety.
Yeah, servant leadership. I started my career in the high-tech industry in Washington, DC. Went to Central Florida where I experienced the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, one of those SIF, one of those SIF stories and events that a lot of people like to talk about.
Oh, wow.
Was there for 3 years, went on to United Airlines and a great, great company in TRW Space and Defense. And that’s where I began to learn about servant leadership in the late ’80s, early ’90s. A relative of mine introduced me to Robert Greenleaf’s work. And I just said, wow, this, this is something every safety professional should embrace because I think every leader should have a model, a philosophy of the kind of leadership they want to utilize on a regular basis and share with others so we could duplicate and sustain leadership throughout our organization and on many different levels. And we know that safety-related leadership is needed on all levels of our organization in many varied ways to enhance safety performance, to take our organization to a whole new level. So, it was in 1996 as well, in mid-1996, where I wrote a cover story for Professional Safety Magazine, Servant Leadership Advancing the cause and profession. I kind of wanted to write it over. You look at it 20 years later and you say, man, I wish I could do that over again, which I will in some ways. But Servant Leadership has such great breadth and depth in terms of establishing a great philosophical and applied foundation for greater learning and performance in safety.
And there’s a lot of empirical information now that serves us well in terms of servant leadership and helping us have a direction or a vision for safety that we may not have had without servant leadership.
And so obviously I’ve heard the term servant leadership many times before. Some people have a different perspective, interpretation. They’ll call themselves a certain leader, but it can be questionable. Tell me a little bit about your view as to what servant leadership is all about.
Absolutely. I have friends in some various organizations that are really, really large. I mean, super large organizations. And some of my friends say, well, we call ourselves a servant-led organization, but we’re pretty far from that, you know, which probably resonates with a lot of groups. But servant leadership is about turning the organizational pyramid upside down and saying, I’m here to serve you. I’m here to help you. And in our case, in our context, servant leadership is about how can I help you to become safer? How can I help you build safety into everything that we do? How can we help build a greater sense of community? Because servant leadership isn’t the endpoint. I think it’s the starting point to building a better culture. And in my case, and what I share in building a greater sense of community and Greenleaf in his writings, probably touched upon at least 10 servant leadership principles. And we could probably in the course of this discussion at least touch upon some of those.
All right.
I remember I had a leader way back and he said the most powerful thing you can say is my job is to support you, which is essentially a form of servant leadership.
Absolutely. And some people, when I speak overseas, some people have a hard time with the connotation of servant in any form.
Sure.
So, at times I call it caring leadership because caring, as Greenleaf has said, caring is the base and foundation for building a greater sense of community in the workplace. Some people spend much, much more time with their coworkers than they do with their family at home. And we see that over and over again. But servant leadership and central to servant leadership is caring, caring for the more and less able in our organizations to help them become better performers in all ways, not simply in terms of safety.
Sure. And I would say a lot of safety professionals would probably say that’s the definition of our profession, but is it really? What’s the difference between somebody who’s in safety versus somebody who’s in safety and is Showing up as a servant leader?
Great question, Eric. I think in terms of what I see, and I’m not casting shadows on younger people out there, but just servant leadership is about having passion for our work. And passion is a part of credibility. And credibility leads us to an avenue of discussion about believability. When we have passion, when we have expertise and we built trust, then we could be listened to, and then people see us as a believable and credible individual that can help them move to another level. So, man, passion is also a part of servant leadership. And I don’t always see enough passion in safety. I’m not sure about you. I’m not conducting the interview, but I’d kind of like to ask you.
Yeah, I know. I think it’s a fair question. I think unfortunately some do, and I’ve certainly met quite a few that are very, very passionate. They want to leave a legacy. They truly believe in what they’re doing. But I would have to admit there’s a lot that are very transactional, very process driven. Let me, let me follow the step. Like, me come up with a new method, a new procedure that we’re going to follow. But they aren’t really passionate with their team members and shifting their thinking, supporting them, getting their insights, treating them as somebody who’s truly knowledgeable about the work they’re doing.
Exactly. Now, a lot of people simply haven’t heard of servant leadership before, and I always have to inform them and discuss it with them and say, wow, as a safety professional, as a leader of some sort, you need to have some philosophical or conceptual or practical basis for how you’re going to lead and how you would like to see others lead. And I’ve been sharing that since 1995, 1996. Call it caring leadership at times. Again, as I referred to before, and I have, one of my first books was written about the 7 Cs of social influence in the workplace. And those are really servant leadership principles.
Yeah.
And so, you touched as well earlier on this idea of building a community in the workplace. And I really like the connotation of this. It’s beyond culture. Tell me a little bit about this concept of community in the workplace.
Well, Robert Greenleaf’s writings that go back to 1970 highlight 10 principles or so that he really bases his principles on. And as I mentioned earlier, lots of great empirical information out there now versus 20 years ago, 300, 400 studies on servant leadership improving productivity and quality and morale. But I began to look at some of the safety climate surveys that I was conducting over the years, and there were some common themes that I began to pick out. And I said, wow, these look familiar. As I dug deeper into these common trends I was seeing in my climate survey work or perception survey work for safety, right? I began to think about community. So, I did some research in the last few years and said, to myself through the research, well, what are the particular dimensions that are pretty solid and substantial if we talk about community? And I came up with 5.
Yep.
I used more contemporary language than some of the original authors, but it’s all there in Professional Safety from the 2023 article. And there were 5 particular dimensions about community that are really relevant to safety.
Okay.
The first is having a sense of mission and purpose. So, what’s the sense of mission and purpose every day? Well, it’s putting safety central to our task, quite possibly having a risk assessment conducted before every shift, whenever anything changes, so that we build safety into everything that we start for a given shift or a given day, and we focus on safe production and safe production is only separated by a hyphen. So, we’re building it in a sense of mission and purpose for community has to build safety into the central part of it. Another element of community would be having diverse and inclusive opinions.
Sure.
So, we need a lot of different opinions to make things safer at times. Building in people and their thoughts Sure. With the right diverse opinions from an engineering standpoint, maybe from a human factor standpoint, from a senior leader standpoint, and maybe an outside opinion from an expert, especially when we’re dealing with high-risk activity. So having diverse opinions, having opinions that are not only inclusive but exclusive to the organization where we could bring in the exclusivity and make that a part of the task itself in building community. The third part, Eric, in terms of building a greater sense of community for safety, in and through safety, is openness and honesty.
Sure.
Openness and honesty are so relational. I mean, we don’t really trust people. We’re not really open with people unless we trust them, unless we work with them before.
Of course.
And another important thing about trust is trust is situational. You might trust me in terms of working and building a porch for you at your home in Toronto, but you may not trust me to put all the electrical in. So, it’s often very situational, and we build trust. We build trust one event, one situation at a time.
Sure.
And if trust is broken, we try to heal that relationship and make that trust work again. And healing is a part of servant leadership.
Right.
Another part, the fourth part of servant leadership would be fairness and cooperation. So, our leaders need to be fair and cooperative with their workers. Workers need to be fair and cooperative with each other in working on a task, on the workload, quite possibly in terms of discipline. Or issues that might relate to discipline. So, we can really allow our organization to implode when we’re not fair and cooperative with each other. And then it takes time to build that trust, build those relationships again, and build back onto the fairness and cooperation that we so often need in terms of working safely together.
Right.
And what might be the most important part or the most important part besides mission and purpose is building consensus. So often, you know, one individual or one safety professional has one thought relative to reducing or abating risk, and another individual has another sense of where one needs to go in terms of abating a hazard condition or risk. But we need to build some form of consensus, maybe not always complete consensus, but we need to move towards working together and deciding before we move forward, then we have a stronger team. We have a stronger community, if you will, to move forward. If we don’t build consensus, I think we’re missing a lot and we could be facing more resistance, more pushback if we don’t have those inclusive opinions and build some form of consensus before we move forward, especially in high-risk jobs or environments. So that’s the basic nature of community, and it’s more than team because communities are built together, they live together, they survive together. Oftentimes the values are something more substantial for them to rely on, and we should rely on our values to direct us back on a path whenever we may fail to stay on a path for safe production in a given day or through a given event or project.
This episode of The Safety Guru podcast is brought to you by Propulo Consulting, the leading safety and safety culture advisory firm. Whether you are looking to assess your safety culture, develop strategies to level up your safety performance, introduce human performance capabilities, reenergize your BBS program, enhance supervisory safety capabilities, or introduce unique safety leadership training and talent solutions, Propulo Consulting has you covered. Visit us at propulo.com.
What I like about your— this idea of community is also this— it connects with me as well on the thought around brothers and sisters keeper. We all say, yeah, of course I’ll be your brother and sister keeper. But it’s not that straightforward. Many times, I’ve seen it’s not the case. You talked about aviation. In aviation, there’s been some plane crashes where people didn’t speak up, um, and they chose death over raising a concern to their captain. Um, so, but when you have this sense of community, it— you sense of duty to each other, I think, becomes much stronger. Yes.
Yes. And I tell people at a lot of my speaking events, especially when I’m speaking to the workers, is you should be open for correction because that’s how you know somebody really cares about you. If they’re open enough and feel strong enough to correct you, you better thank that person because sometimes that takes a little bit of courage to correct someone that might have 30 years’ experience. Maybe they’re the gruffest guy on the job, but someone took time to care about you, and they showed caring concern by correcting you, informing you about a better way, something to do with your actions and activities that could keep you safe and whole and send you home.
Right. And so, a leader who comes in, this is a tall order though to create this idea of community in the workplace. Absolutely. Especially if they’re taking over a group where there was a very hostile environment.
Absolutely.
How can you step in and start building this? Because it’s not an overnight flip switch. Wow.
Another great question. How can you step in as a leader, maybe a safety professional? It’s a hostile environment. How do you introduce these principles? I think that’s what you’re asking, right?
Yeah, exactly.
Well, I think it takes time to build the relationship first. Let people know that you’re there to help them, there to serve them, and you take it one step at a time. Maybe you share one or two principles, and those principles gain some traction, and then you have your foot in the door, and you could gain more traction. So, it takes time. I think first you have to build the relationship. Let these people know, or whoever you’re working with, that you’re there to help them, not to harm them. You’re not a gotcha kind of guy. You’re not a compliance guy. We’re here to take you beyond compliance, and it’s going to make your job easier. You’re going to build the kind of relationships that make your group more productive. And as a leader who’s likable and trusted and admired, people will want to follow you. So, there’s always new lessons for leaders to learn. No matter how long you’ve been in an organization.
Yeah.
And again, I don’t always use the term servant leadership. I talk about caring leadership. And this is what we see when we practice caring leadership. We see greater forms of change relative to productivity, quality, relationships, morale, and certainly safety. So, I’m all about listening first. Listening says that I care about what you have to say. Yeah, I care about what happened in the past. And listening is another great, great servant leadership principle that we need to use with peers, those above us, those below us, and especially getting closer to the front line. Getting closer to the action means that we could listen better.
Mm-hmm. I love what you’re talking about there. And one thing that comes to mind, just because I had a conversation on this not so long ago, when you talk about caring, some leaders interpret caring as giving out candy, just only candy. But caring candy is not— it’s not caring.
Absolutely.
And I like what you said before, when somebody speaks up and gives you may be a better idea, a different way, that’s also caring, right? So, there’s a balance as well in caring, but it’s the essence of it is different. I, I care about you, but I also want you to succeed.
Yeah, some people interpret servant leadership as being soft because of this whole caring element and relational aspect. But caring means that you’re going to do the right thing for the majority of the people.
Right.
And if you have one person, one outlier who doesn’t want to be a part of the organization and our central mission for safe production, that means at times they may have to go because they’re going to drag the whole organization down. And servant leaders need to recognize that that’s the tough side of servant leadership that we really have to tap into and utilize at times. Because again, if I haven’t mentioned it, caring isn’t about kindness. Caring is about doing the right thing for the individuals, but more so for the collection of people that we’re working with.
Right. So, it’s not just being a softy. It’s not about handing out candy and creating cavities.
It’s not about simply grabbing babies, holding on to them, kissing babies, shaking hands, and leaving the website. It’s about doing the tough things that some other people may not want to do. And at times, you know, the best thing for an organization and that individual is to leave. They might get hurt really badly. They might cause other people to be injured badly. And some people simply don’t fit within every organization.
Yep. One of the things that you talk about as well is this idea of a risk ceiling and how the risk ceiling can be set by others. Tell me a little bit more about that.
You know, I haven’t thought enough about risk ceiling, although I’m a bit prepared to talk about it, but I discovered my thoughts about the risk ceiling about 15 years ago. A young man, a young safety professional called me and wanted to know about my climate survey and what it can do for him and how it can be applied. And then he talked about some other things, but I came back with a question, which was, well, what do your top leaders have in mind for safety? In other words, what’s their vision for safety?
Sure.
And he wasn’t sure.
Oh dear.
And I said, well, why don’t you ask the right individuals near or at the top what their vision is for safety? And then that way we could begin to interpret how far they want to go. How far they want to reach. And we could begin to think about that risk ceiling being high or low or somewhere in between and how we could lower that risk ceiling or the acceptability of risk.
Sure.
So that we could move on as a healthy organization. And I left it up to him to call me back, and I never heard back from him. That kind of told me either I didn’t do a good enough job explaining what I could do with him through my perception survey, or there was no vision for safety at that point in time.
Right.
And having a great vision for safety allows us to begin to recognize how much we’re willing to invest in safety or safe production, how much we’re willing to hold people accountable for, how much we’re willing to raise the bar for safety in terms of being better than good. As my friend in California might say, Larry, my friend in Northern California, Larry Washington, would say, do we really want to be good than good? And I think the vision begins to unveil that and the values that support it begin to unveil how far we’re willing to go and certainly our budgets, our accountability, all those kinds of Things that build day in and day out help others, workers and other leaders realize what the leaders at the top really value.
Sure.
When the leaders at the top really value safety, it speaks loudly day in and day out, shift by shift, day by day. And people take that home and they talk about it and they bring it back to work the next day. Could be good, it could be bad, it could be somewhere in between. But the risk ceiling is something that we need to pay attention to, and we need to do our best as safety professionals to build enough credibility with people so we become believable, so we invest in safety appropriately, and always look at ways to lower our risk profile or lower the risk ceiling so that we could feel good about what we’re doing and make our organization much healthier and build that greater sense of community. Belonging.
Sure. And are there things that safety professionals can do to help influence that?
Absolutely. One of the most important parts is continuing to lobby to have a seat at the table, if you don’t already. Right. Learn the language of love. Learn the language of love in our organizations, which is another ceiling, the financial ceiling, right? The operational ceiling, the risk ceiling. That’s at least 3 ceilings. But we need to learn the language of the operations, build credibility, and continue to influence our people to realize how safety benefits everything and has a profound influence in terms of the way that we can live out our values. I like to work with organizations that say, hey, can we begin to operationalize our values in terms of safety? And you’ve likely done this. You know, if one of our values is listening, If another one of our corporate values is building a sense of belonging, listening to our customer, and we could create an endless list, but how do we operationalize that in terms of safety to bring it alive day in and day out so we could go to the table with other leaders and begin to discuss it in that way or that realm? I think that makes a lot of sense, Eric.
Sure, absolutely. So, David, you speak with and you’ve spoken to many different organizations. You help from a consulting. You talked about surveys. You’re a coach as well as an author. What is some of the best ways for somebody to reach out to you if they want to continue this conversation, if they want to seek your help perhaps to speak at an event?
Sure. Thanks, Eric. Well, my website is davidsarkis.com. That’s S-A-R-K-U-S dot com, davidsarkis.com. And there’s a lot of information on my website. They can even begin to assess their own culture and plot it along a continuum. And I have other models there, but my website davidsarkis.com, my phone numbers on there. There’s many, many ways to reach me. I have a lot of articles out there as well, Eric, but, uh Real easy to get in touch with me. Just spell my name, DavidSarkus.com. A lot of people call me other names than that, but they don’t call me late for dinner.
You know, thank you, David. Thank you so much for joining me today and sharing your wisdom around servant leadership. I think it’s a great topic for leaders, particularly safety leaders, but leaders in general that want to make an impact on safety in terms of how I really reshape, rethink, How I show up as a leader. This element of caring, I think, is really key that you brought up. And how do you build a community in the workplace? I think that’s such a powerful concept. If you can get people aligned, moving with a sense of community, then they’re looking out for each other day in and day out.
Well, you had a great summary there, Eric. I would synthesize it in the same way. You know, being a servant leader doesn’t mean you arrived. Servant leaders create other leaders. Those leaders create a great culture for safety. And that culture for safety evolves into a community for safety where we have greater strength, greater sense of belonging, openness, trust, all those kinds of things that allow the culture to become a sustainable form of community. You did a great job summarizing it better than me.
I doubt it. But thank you so much, David.
Thank you, Eric. I enjoyed your time.
Thank you.
Thank you for listening to The Safety Guru on C-suite Radio. Leave a legacy. Distinguish yourself from the past. Grow your success. Capture the hearts and minds of your teams. Elevate your safety. Like every successful athlete, top leaders continuously invest in their safety leadership with an expert coach to boost safety performance. Begin your journey at execsafetycoach.com. Come back in two weeks for the next episode with your host, Eric Michrowski. This podcast is powered by Propulo Consulting.
ABOUT THE GUEST
David J. Sarkus, MS, CSP, is Chief Servant Leader and Founder of David Sarkus International Inc., a leading health and safety management consulting and training firm based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. David is a motivational safety speaker who delivers keynotes, training, and consulting in various industries. His experience, education, and leadership qualities have allowed him and his firm to successfully apply strategies and tactics within a large variation of mainstream work processes for over 30 years. His customized safety interventions have improved key performance indicators from 35% to more than 85% over the previous year. He’s proven that results like this are possible, scalable, and sustainable.
Sarkus holds master’s degrees in safety management and organizational psychology. He is a recognized thought leader in safety management and has written cover stories for various major industry magazines, including Professional Safety and Industrial Safety & Hygiene News. ISHN has recognized David as one of the “Top 50 Leaders” in the field. He has also written five books and over 100 evidence-based articles.
Sarkus works with some of the world’s biggest and best-run organizations and can help you move toward—and embrace—sustainable excellence in safety.
For more Information: https://davidsarkus.com/
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