About the Safety Leadership Assessment

When organizations are striving to develop and sustain a culture of safety excellence, leadership words and behaviors influence employees’ attitudes, beliefs and ideas about safety. Research shows it takes four key leadership skills to inspire a positive safety culture that influences safe employee behavior. 

The Safety Leadership Assessment is a statistically validated instrument designed to help you assess those essential safety leadership skills, utilize quantifiable data, and appropriately develop leadership to inspire a culture of safety excellence in your organization. 

After more than five years of research and collaboration from behavioral assessment experts, Development Dimensions International (DDI), Caterpillar has developed the Safety Leadership Assessment to assess key leadership attributes that, when demonstrated with a high degree, will positively influence employee safety behavior.

The Safety Leadership Assessment provides individual supervisors and managers a measurement of their leadership capability from those who regularly observe the leader’s behavior: their direct reports. Participants rate statements on a 5-point Likert scale. 

The assessment will determine where leaders score within the four primary safety leadership domains: trust, accountability, connectedness and credible consciousness. Within the four domains are 14 elements that influence an individual leader’s effectiveness. 

Once validated, organizations will be able to correlate a leader’s actions to the true presence of safety in the field to answer the critical question, “Am I leading in such a way that I am creating a safer place to work for my employees?”