The Occupational Safety Leadership Podcast · Dr. Ayers/Applied Safety and Environmental Management

Episode 268 - Rod Courtney - 8 Habits of a Highly Effective Safety Culture

·34 min

Rod brings a practical mind to safety culture, and the host keeps the conversation close to the book's eight habits. He says the numbered structure made him pause after each habit and think about using it, instead of just reading the book and putting it aside. Rod starts with his own route into the work. He came through the United States military as an Army combat medic in the 1990s, spent time in law enforcement, and says he ended up in safety almost by accident. That gives the episode a boots-on-the-floor feel. Safety is treated as work people have to carry when the safety person is somewhere else. The first habit is simple on purpose: stop calling safety a priority and start calling it a value. The host recognizes the problem right away. Companies can say safety comes first all day, but Rod points out that it does not always show up in the written values. The wording is not magic. Still, if safety only comes from the safety person, the whole culture depends on that one person being there. Operations has to own it. The host and guest keep circling that point in plain language: safety cannot be a value that clocks in only when the specialist does. Rod defines safety culture by behavior. It is what employees do when nobody else is around, good or bad. That cuts through the usual culture fog and puts the focus back on what people actually do, who leads it, and whether the behavior holds when safety staff are not nearby. By the end, Rod points listeners to Amazon for the book and names his role as director of safety for Power Grid Services. The episode works because it stays practical: ownership, habits, and safety showing up in the way operations runs.

As heard by us

A plainspoken case for treating safety as a working habit, not a wall slogan.

This episode keeps its focus on safety as something people actually do, not something they just talk about. Rod's eight habit framework lands best when it gets back to a simple idea: if safety only matters when the safety lead is nearby, the culture is still fragile.

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Why you'd press play

If you want safety culture framed as an operating habit, not a poster slogan, and not something you read once and shelve.

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