By Benjamin De La Rosa MSc, CMIOSH
Managing Director, Benjamin De La Rosa HSSE Consultancy Limited

Effective leadership is dependant, to a great extent, on the level of collaboration that is engendered by leaders. This is evident when different people from varying levels within an organisation are persuaded to work together to achieve the same goal. Excellence in health and safety performance is one of the goals of an organisation that will have far reaching consequences for overall success and relies heavily on the extent of the engagement of the workforce.

Collaboration offers leaders two important opportunities; the first is to broaden the quality and diversity of content that goes into making organisational decisions, the second, to build engagement into the decision making process and resulting decisions. This can be especially advantageous in safety where engaging employees at every level is critical to creating an injury-free culture (HSE, 2004).