Summit on Safety Leadership 2026

8:30am – 12:00pm – Building Your Safey Leadership Skills – Greg Schaefer, City of Fayetteville, (Ret.)

This is a session that everyone that participates in safety in their workplace should attend, because on the job everyone who works in safety should be a leader.

Topics covered include:

• The primary purpose of safety leadership
• What good leadership really is
• Different leadership styles
• How leaders influence safety outcomes
• Why improving your leadership skills is essential for you and your safety program

Taught by a career military veteran, this presentation teaches you proven methods to build your leadership skills in all areas of your work responsibilities.

12:00pm – Lunch

1:00pm – 3:30pm – Safety Jeopardy – Greg Schaefer, City of Fayetteville, (Ret.)

Test your safety protocol and regulatory knowledge in the exciting and fun game of Safety Jeopardy! Participate with other attendees and accept the challenge to pit your safety awareness and know-how against theirs. You will enjoy and learn in this unique session, plus prizes for winners will be awarded.

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1:00pm – 3:30pm – Who is on the Hook? Essential Information for Host Companies and Contractors – Julie Martin, OSHA Instructional Designer/Safety Education Specialist, NC Department of Labor-OSH

In this session we will explore how to effectively manage safety for host employers, contractors, and temporary workers. This session will cover compliance oversight, communication strategies, and ways to integrate third-party workers into your organization’s safety culture.

Addition 8-MESH Hours for entire day!

7:30am – Registration/Coffee – Safety Pavillion

7:30am – Visit Exhibitors – Myers Park Ballroom – Exhibitor Card on back of Program (All Questions Must Be Answered)

8:30am – The Silence That Costs You: Why Bad News Doesn’t Travel Up – Keynote Speaker, Michael B. Clegg, CEO of Q Works and Founder of Leadership Squared – Scotland Room

Every safety program depends on one thing leaders rarely measure: whether people tell the truth before it becomes a headline. Michael Clegg has spent his career studying why employees stay quiet about the problems leaders most need to hear, and what it takes to build a culture where bad news travels up instead of getting buried, blamed, or ignored.

Drawing on behavioral science, real client stories, and his own experience leading teams under pressure, Clegg will show safety leaders how to diagnose their culture with a single question, why “nice” is quietly working against every safety initiative they’ve built, and what it takes to get a frontline worker to raise their hand before an incident instead of after one. This is not a compliance talk. It’s a leadership talk for people whose job depends on knowing what they don’t yet know.

Attendees will leave with a practical framework for building psychological safety on their teams, specific language for turning near-misses into learning instead of liability, and a clear-eyed look at why most safety cultures fail quietly long before they fail publicly.

10:00am – Coffee Break – Safety Pavillion/Visit Exhibitors-Myers Park Ballroom

10:30am – Checked the Box, Missed the Lesson:  When Online Training Isn’t Enough – Norberto Cabrera, NC Health & Safety Excellence – Colville Room

As more organizations rely on online safety training for convenience, scheduling, and recordkeeping, this innovative session explores an essential question: Does completing an online course truly demonstrate that an employee understands the material and can perform the work safely?

The discussion will focus on when online training is appropriate and when instructor-led classes, hands on exercises, site specific instruction, or practical evaluations are necessary.

Attendees will learn:

• Identifying which topics can be effectively delivered online
• Recognizing when instructor-led and hands-on practice are necessary
• Balancing online and instructor-led training and practices
• Recognizing weaknesses in current training programs

It’s time this subject is discussed. Be sure to attend.

10:30am – The Big 4 in Construction Safety and Compliance – Andy Sterlen, Health and Safety Education Specialist, NC Department of Labor – Cherokee Room

Here’s your chance to learn from a North Carolina Department of Labor expert the four hazards in construction that cause worker deaths accounting for more than 60% of construction fatalities.

These hazards include:

• Falls
• Electrical Hazards
• Struck-By (An increasing menace)
• Caught-In/Between

The presentation will discuss why these four hazards are so prevalent and how safety personnel can protect their employees from their dangers and prevent them from happening.

Get the lates information on these “fatal-four” hazards and gain insight on how to safeguard your jobsites from them.

12:00pm – EXHIBITOR LUNCHEON – Scotland/Biltmore Rooms

1:30pm – Finding Hazards, Saving Lives – Roy Rutledge, Instructor, Safety and Health Council of North Carolina – Dilworth Room

Many times, in the workplace and even in the home, injuries and fatalities occur because hazards were either ignored or not even seen!

Here is a presentation that will emphasize the importance of detecting hazards and eliminating them.  These hazard-detecting and eliminating skills are not as common as you might think. Why?

• Too busy with other responsibilities
• Production pressures
• Misplaced management priorities
• And many other reasons

This presentation will give you skills on finding hazards and teaching how to prevent them and dispose of them.  This topic is important!  Plan to attend!

1:30pm – How to Create a Results Based Safety Program – David Onchagwa, Instructor, Safety and Health Council of North Carolina – Colville Room

There are many safety programs out there that have produced lots of words… but no results.  Of course, the optimal reason for a safety program is to produce guidelines, protocols and workable practices that supervisors and employees can use to keep the workplace as safe as possible, in other words produce safe results.

The purpose of this presentation is to give attendees clear and realistic instruction on how to transform from a document to an agent for safety results. You will benefit from attending this session and so will your employees.

1:30pm – Women Taking the Lead in Construction – Nicole Sullivan, EHS Risk Manager, Sullivan Eastern Inc. – Cherokee Room

Much is changing in the construction industry and construction safety.  One of these changes is more women taking on leadership roles in construction and bringing new ideas and new perspectives to employee safety. This important session will discuss and analyze the growing impact that women are having on construction job sites and the future of the industry. Attend this discussion and learn about the cutting-edge changes.

2:30pm – Energy Break – Safety Pavilion and Visit Exhibitors – Myers Park Ballroom

3:00pm – Mental Health in the Workplace – Erik-ka McCall, Instructor, Safety and Health Council of North Carolina – Cherokee Room

More and more safety professionals are realizing that safety in the workplace is not just about physical safety but that the emotional health of employees is very important as well. This presentation will give an in-depth explanation of why employees’ emotional health is coming more to the forefront in all industries. These reasons include:

• Family and personal pressures
• Increased job demands
• Substance misuse
• Employee economic concerns
• Changes in the work culture

Mental and emotional health in the workplace is an issue that is only going to grow in importance. This is an opportunity to get the latest information on this now essential issue.

3:00pm – Active Shooter – A Different Perspective – David Holder, Safety and Compliance Division, City of Raleigh – Transportation Maintenance – Dilworth Room

This presentation is designed to provoke your thoughts and actions, should you become involved in one of these events. This is not a “canned” presentation. This offering was born out of many years of research and study of numerous real-world events that involved people getting shot. Just because a person gets shot, it doesn’t always mean death is imminent. There are variables that come into play. The challenge comes in getting proper medical care to the wounded victims in a timely manner, so a person doesn’t “bleed out”.

Gun Shot Wound Kits – Will be presented for consideration.

Hypothetical Timeline – You will be presented with a timeline of a shooting event to drive home importance of time. In an Active Shooter Event time is your enemy.

Statistical Information – Is presented to drive home key points. Numbers don’t lie and we can learn from them.

Firearm Props – Realistic firearm props are shown and discussed during this presentation.

Upper Story Evacuation – Concepts will be presented for evacuation from an upper story office.

Run-Hide-Fight Inversion Theory will be discussed.

Please Note: There are no real firearms or live ammo used in this presentation. The firearms used are realistic training props that function like real ones; however, they are not capable of firing real ammunition.

5:00pm – Reception with Music – Madison Park Ballroom

7:00am – Coffee – Safety Pavillion

7:00am – Visit Exhibitors – Myers Park Ballroom – MUST TURN IN EXHIBITOR CARD BY 10:00AM AT SAFETY PAVILION (ALL QUESTIONS ANSWERED)

7:30am – Reasonable Suspicion Training: Why it is Essential in Today’s World – Shawn Harris, Wayne County Sheriff’s Office, (Ret.) – Scotland Room

Reasonable suspicion refers to a belief grounded in objective evidence that an employee might be impaired while on the job.  It is not based on assumptions or rumors but on observable signs of impairment.  This vital session will give attendees key indicators to look for.  The indicators include:

• Physical signs
• Behavioral changes
• Work performance patterns

Employees who are impaired can not only endanger themselves but coworkers and the general public.  It is crucial that safety professionals know what signs to look for and the proper procedures and protocols to follow.  Impairment is a growing problem.  You will be glad you attended this session and received the information you need.

8:30am – Electrical Workshop – Andy Sterlen, Health and Safety Education Specialist, NC Department of Labor – Colville Room

Electricity has long been recognized as a serious workplace hazard.  This workshop will give the students a better understanding of the basics of how electricity works, how it is measured, and how to calculate loads as they apply to both the office and job site.  We will discuss various electrical injuries, the dangers of inadequate grounding and lack of GFCI’s, as well as the improper use of temporary electrical connections. Learn from a Department of Labor expert what you need to know to keep your employees safe from electrical hazards.

8:30am – When Wrong Becomes Right: The Hidden Risk of Normalized Workarounds – Vic Comparan, Instructor, Safety and Health Council of North Carolina – Cherokee Room

This session will explore how unsafe conditions, shortcuts, and workarounds can gradually become accepted simply because nothing bad has happened-yet. It will examine the normalization of deviance and challenge participants to consider questions such as:

• What hazards have we stopped seeing?
• Why do experienced employees sometimes become comfortable with risk?
• When does “just this once” become the normal way of doing the job?
• What are near misses and workarounds trying to tell us?
• Can zero injuries sometimes hide weaknesses in a safety program?

This presentation will be highly interactive using real cases, statistics, workplace scenarios and visual hazard exercises.  The goal is for all attendees to leave looking at their workplaces differently asking one important question: “What have we learned to accept simply because nobody has been hurt-yet?

8:30am – Safe Paths, Safe Crews: Struck-By Risks in Construction – Julie Martin, OSHA Instructional Designer/Safety Education Specialist, NC Department of Labor-OSH – Dilworth Room

Participants will learn how to spot potential struck-by situations, identify specific hazards that create those risk, and understand the types of equipment – such as vehicles, heavy machinery, and suspended loads – they are commonly involved. This session will help guide learners through evaluating practical controls to safe work practices and PPE.

8:30am – The Complacency Trap: What Are You Doing to Keep Your People Safe? Erika Hansen, Instructor, Safety and Health Council of North Carolina – Board Room

Complacency is one of the most dangerous hazards in the workplace because it rarely looks dangerous – until someone gets hurt.  When routine tasks become familiar, procedures become predictable, and employees stop recognizing the hazards around them, safety can quickly become an afterthought. This class challenges Safety Officers to take a hard look at complacency within their organizations and ask an important question: What are you doing to combat complacency?

10:00am – Coffee Break-Safety Pavillion and Turn in Exhibitor Card at Safety Pavilion

10:30am – Safety Culture: How it Drives Safety Behavior – Greg Schaefer, City of Fayetteville, (Ret.) – Scotland Room

This final session of the summit addresses the vital issue of safety culture and its direct impact on safety behavior.  This presentation will show how a company’s safety culture is the foundation of safety success. Topics covered will be:

• How is a strong safety culture established?
• Who really controls safety culture?
• What is the direct connection of safety culture to a safety program?
• How can safety managers have a direct influence on safety culture?
• What direct steps can be taken to improve safety culture?

Wrap up your Summit session experience with this comprehensive, yet practical, presentation.

12:00pm – FINALE LUNCHEON – GRAND PRIZE DRAWINGS – $500 – $350 – $150 – Biltmore/Cherokee/Colville Rooms