Why Real Safety Leadership Starts With Empathy, Not Authority with Josh Brown

There’s a topic in safety and risk management that doesn’t get nearly enough airtime.

The industry spends enormous energy debating regulations, programs, systems, and metrics. And all of that matters. But most safety programs don’t fail because the rules are wrong. They fail because the leadership posture behind them is wrong.

That reality is exactly what emerged in a recent conversation with Josh Brown, VP of OHS at B&S Site Development. Josh joined host Michael Zalle to talk about safety. Josh doesn’t speak about safety from behind a desk. He’s lived the work. He’s felt the fatigue. He’s built a safety function from scratch and scaled it to 30 professionals in under two years, across multiple states, under real operational pressure. His takeaway is disarmingly simple: if you want people to care about safety, you have to care about them first.

Authority Doesn’t Build Buy-In. Presence Does.

One of the most powerful moments in the discussion came when Josh described climbing into a trench box to perform the same chiseling work his crews were responsible for. Within 15 minutes, his muscles were locking up. He was drenched in sweat. And suddenly, the familiar question, “Why don’t they just follow the procedure?” disappeared.

That experience fundamentally changed how he led.

Here’s the hard truth: safety cannot be led effectively from the sidelines. Leaders can observe work all day long and still miss what it feels like to perform that work under pressure, in heat, with time constraints, and real physical strain.

When leaders skip that step, safety guidance often comes across as disconnected at best—and condescending at worst. But when guidance comes from someone who has walked the job, held the tools, and felt the fatigue, it lands differently. It feels like coaching, not enforcement.

That shift, from authority to presence, is where credibility is built.

The Problem With Compliance Theater

There’s an uncomfortable reality in the industry: many safety programs are designed to satisfy audits, not people.

Josh has seen 300- and 400-page safety manuals sitting untouched on shelves, technically compliant and practically useless. Nobody reads them. Nobody remembers them. And nobody follows them when real-world conditions take over.

That isn’t a workforce problem. It’s a design problem.

Josh’s approach flips the script by focusing on consumable safety:

• A small set of non-negotiable core principles
  
  
• Clear, modular guidance that can be adapted by state and site
  
  
• Language and structure field teams can understand in minutes, not hours
  
  

If people can’t grasp safety guidance quickly, they won’t use it. Period.

This mindset allowed B&S to scale rapidly without losing consistency. The core remained intact. The execution adapted. And safety stopped feeling like bureaucracy and started feeling like support.

Scaling Safety Without Losing the Plot

Growth exposes weakness, especially in safety leadership. When companies expand into new markets, the instinct is often to copy-paste programs or rebuild everything from scratch. Both approaches create problems: inconsistency on one side, unnecessary complexity on the other.

Josh took a different path.

He clearly defined what was sacred: the values, principles, and expectations that would never change. Then he intentionally created room for regional leaders to adapt to regulations, norms, and site-specific realities.

That balance matters.

Hiring 20 new safety professionals doesn’t magically preserve culture. Culture has to be documented, modeled, and reinforced, but it also has to respect the fact that Virginia, Ohio, and Georgia don’t operate the same way.

Treating safety like modular software, rather than a monolithic rulebook, allows leaders to scale without diluting standards or burning out teams.

Hiring for Capability, Not Speed

Rapid growth creates pressure to hire fast, and safety roles are no exception. Josh is candid about the challenge: the industry doesn’t have a strong track record of consistently vetting safety talent. Bad hires cost time, trust, and momentum.

His solution wasn’t to slow growth, but to get smarter about staffing.

Instead of defaulting to full-time headcount, Josh advocates for flexible models that allow leaders to validate capability before making long-term commitments. Trainers, assessors, and regional support roles can be deployed based on real needs, not assumptions.

It’s not about buying bodies. It’s about buying outcomes.

That shift reduces turnover, prevents burnout, and keeps the focus where it belongs: protecting people and operations, not managing churn.

Respecting Life Outside the Jobsite

One issue rarely discussed in safety leadership is travel fatigue.

Josh intentionally structured his team geographically to avoid forcing people into constant hotel stays or endless driving across the East Coast. He mapped project density, coverage radius, and workload to ensure his team could do their jobs and have lives.

That isn’t soft leadership. It’s strategic leadership.

Burned-out safety professionals don’t protect anyone. They miss things. They disengage. They leave. And replacing them costs far more than designing coverage intelligently in the first place.

When leaders respect boundaries, people stay. And when people stay, safety culture stabilizes.

Why Humility Scales Better Than Ego

As Josh’s role expanded, he encountered a reality many leaders face: technical expertise doesn’t automatically translate into leadership effectiveness.

Executive coaching became a turning point, not because he needed more knowledge, but because he needed greater self-awareness.

Josh speaks openly about “biting the humble pie.” About recognizing what he didn’t know. About choosing presence over performance. And about understanding that leadership isn’t about the leader, it’s about the people depending on them.

In a world full of noise, real presence is hard. Work expands. Life pulls. Attention fragments. But presence builds trust, psychological safety, and honest reporting. In safety, that matters more than any metric.

Safety Is Human Work

The throughline in everything Josh shared is simple:



Safety isn’t a system problem. It’s a human one.

Programs don’t protect people. People protect people.

When leaders lead with empathy, curiosity, and presence, safety stops feeling like a burden and starts feeling like a shared responsibility. Resistance drops. Conversations change. And outcomes follow.

This isn’t about lowering standards. It’s about raising leadership.

For leaders scaling fast, struggling with buy-in, or wondering why a safety program looks strong on paper but feels disconnected in practice, this episode offers a clear answer.

Because real safety leadership isn’t built on authority. It’s built on understanding, humility, and showing up where the work actually happens.

👉 Listen to the full episode of  The Canary Report: Safety & Risk Management and help push the industry toward what actually works.

Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/4b0EwhD
Spotify: https://bit.ly/3NnhOXd
YouTube: https://youtu.be/KgTSQ1b1kIE