WholeLife™ Safety Leadership Development for a Global Engineering Firm
Genii Earth partnered with a global engineering and consulting firm of 18,500 professionals across five regions to transform how safety was experienced across the organization — shifting it from a compliance obligation into a genuine expression of leadership and values. Through a multi-phase engagement spanning more than two years, Genii Earth helped the firm reawaken safety as a shared purpose, build the infrastructure for psychological safety at the team level, and redesign senior leadership training from the ground up.
The Challenge
Despite a long history of values-driven principles emphasizing social usefulness and humane organizational culture, a 2023 internal safety culture survey revealed a fundamental tension: safety was being experienced primarily as a regulatory burden rather than a deeply held value.
The data told a clear story. 84% of members did not identify safety as the organization’s number one priority. Senior leaders struggled to name strong examples of safety leadership within their own ranks. Only 31% of higher-grade members regularly engaged with health and safety policies, 69% did not believe leaders openly admitted mistakes, and 27% felt unencouraged to raise concerns. Existing training was viewed as monologue-driven and disconnected from the people it was meant to serve, while deep hierarchical barriers stifled the psychological safety needed for people to speak up. As one leader admitted, “We care so much about the impact we are having on the world that we aren’t putting as much focus on the impact we are having on our people.”
Genii Earth’s Solution
Genii Earth engaged the client not as a vendor delivering a product, but as an embedded thought partner and co-designer, grounded in the belief that transformational change begins by connecting people to what they already value most.
The engagement unfolded across three phases. Phase one reframed safety as a domain of contribution and care rather than obligation, culminating in a September 2023 session that engaged 300+ senior directors in a transformational conversation about safety and their own leadership identity. Phase two translated that shift into action, co-creating evidence-based team conversation guides built directly from the client’s own data and grounded in proven frameworks including Edmondson’s psychological safety research, Timothy Clark’s Four Stages of Safety, and Theresa Wiseman’s empathy model — designed to be facilitated by team leaders themselves rather than external trainers. Phase three redesigned the firm’s mandatory senior leadership safety training across all five global regions, replacing a compliance-focused program with a blended pre-event, live-event, and post-event learning journey built around real-world scenarios, leadership identity, and a personal commitment-based close.
The Results
The partnership delivered a unified global safety leadership program in place of fragmented regional training, along with a team-level ecosystem of psychological safety tools designed for everyday leadership practice. Senior directors re-engaged with safety as a core part of their leadership identity, and training was rebuilt from deep diagnostics — audits, surveys, and direct observation — rather than generic content.
The shift was felt at the human level as much as the organizational one. “The people deeply appreciate their colleagues more, love working here more,” one team leader reflected. “This work created a dissatisfaction with the way things were and a satisfaction towards knowing how things should feel.”
Lasting Value
Beyond the immediate training redesign, the engagement embedded design principles, evidence-based toolkits, and facilitator capability that allow the organization to sustain and scale this work internally — with an assessment framework ensuring completion and three-year recertification. The foundation built across this partnership positions the firm’s 18,500 members to carry safety forward not as a policy to follow, but as a value they lead from.
Interested in what this could mean for your organization’s safety culture?
Visit geniiearth.com or contact Billy Afghan at billyafghan@geniiearth.com.
For the full case study PDF, click here.
