Our Approach

Visible leadership is an approach of leadership style, in which leaders through their actions and commitment make all concerned feel ‘safe’ and ‘cared’ at their workplaces. Through their visible presence and demonstrative actions, leaders have an opportunity to reinforce safety as a priority for business and operational decisions. They can cascade responsibility to their reports and hold them accountable for the safety performance of their segments.

To bring in uniformity of approach in leadership styles and in deployment of Adani safety management systems, the ‘Adani Visible Leadership: 10 Commandments’, outlines the expected behaviours for establishing an effective safety culture through visible leadership.

The Impact

Group Safety has developed this framework for leaders to lay the path for propagation of positive safety culture and bring in cultural maturity. The aspiration of the Adani Group is to achieve generative stage of safety culture; wherein all appropriate risk controls are deeply embedded, and each one working for the group has an anticipatory mindset to risks and hazards faced by the business. The leaders would facilitate cultural building in following stages:

• Building Trust

Through chosen and demonstrative actions, leaders build trust in safety management systems and within their teams for the deployment in its words and spirit. Their actions on the ground make employees feel ‘cared’ and ‘safe’ at their workplaces. In this environment, employees feel responsible for their own safety and their peers. The support and recognition provided by leaders enables them to implement risk controls, capability building, etc.

• Resolution of Competing Commitments

As teams work cohesively and collaboratively for propagation of safety culture, the environment would allow them to feel secure to address their competing commitments. The onus falls on the leaders to resolve these conflicts and align values, commitments, and business imperatives with the assistance of Adani visible leadership framework. Through their safety-centric decisions, they set safety as a business priority and by recognising the extraordinary efforts taken by employees to enhance safety, they set examples for others to emulate.

• Reinforcing Accountability

To reinforce the commitment, mindset, and behaviours towards safety in their team; leaders must hold themselves and their team accountable for transgressions and willful infringement of safety systems and processes. Top leadership’s acceptability of regular infringement of set safety processes, decides continued occurrence of incidents in the organisation. Success of safety programs lies with the leadership. There is a fine line between delegation, which is necessary and dereliction where the oversight function is careless. Only through their decisions on consequences for unacceptable behaviors, they set the precedent for acceptable behaviors. It is a well-accepted fact that a well-structured, unbiased, and well deployed consequence process decides whether high-risk behavior will be repeated or not. These decisions would cascade down the chain and enable managers at all levels to enforce safety accountability. By committing to one set of behaviors along with the salient implications attached to them, leaders set a mechanism of social controls and bind all associated with it.

• Results In Improved Safety Performance

When leaders have demonstrated their commitment to safety by building trust, bringing commitment, and reinforcing accountability, they lay the foundation for safety culture propagation in their segment or business. When the ‘Culture of Care’ takes root at all layers in the organisation, one can see engaged employees and improved operational efficiency which in turn leads to improved overall safety performance.