Learning Through Leadership

Authors

Mike Alison

Files

Description

2025 ASEM 620 Capstone Project

Publication Date

4-16-2025

Publisher

University of Alabama at Birmingham

City

Birmingham, AL

Keywords

safety engineering

Disciplines

Engineering

Comments

“We often think that safety means not having any incidents or accidents. That safety is the absence of negatives” (Dekker, 2014, p. 167). One idea of workplace safety is to counter harm by displaying its benefits. Showing safety exists in some way that is supposed to make sense. This is where an optical illusion of safety (Smith, 2018, p. 3) can become fortified by bureaucracy, and the meaningful idea of safety for the workers gets diluted. It is important to reflect and navigate personal experiences within Public Utilities through acknowledging human variability, hindsight, safety intervention development, and learning. The focus is on pulling people in and moving information in a manner that meets the needs of operational employees. Empowering field employees at specific points of work and departmental leadership to build worker capacity. It is developing learning ideas with employees doing the work and recognizing opportunities to move toward “a more inclusive, humanistic approach to safety leadership to sustain a meaningful learning environment over time” (Lloyd, 2021, p. 82).

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Recommended Citation

Alison, Mike, "Learning Through Leadership" (2025). ASEM Capstones. 5.
https://digitalcommons.library.uab.edu/asem/5