New Operations Director in 90 Days: Build Safety Decision Rights Before the First Crisis

A new operations director can inherit excellent safety reports and still inherit an unsafe decision system. The first 90 days should not be spent collecting slogans, launching another campaign, or asking for a larger dashboard. They should establish who can make a safety decision, what evidence that decision requires, and how the operation will know whether the choice worked.

That distinction matters because senior leaders shape safety through ordinary operating decisions. A maintenance delay, a production recovery plan, a contractor mobilization, and a staffing change all reveal whether safety is treated as a fixed value or as a priority that bends under pressure. This role profile gives a new operations director a practical sequence for turning visible felt leadership into decision discipline.

What a new operations director needs to understand before starting

Operations owns the conditions in which work is planned and performed. The EHS function supplies technical judgment, assurance, and challenge, but it cannot carry operational accountability on behalf of line leadership. When the director treats safety as an EHS program, risk decisions become referrals. When the director treats safety as an operating condition, risk becomes part of the daily management system.

Andreza Araújo makes this distinction central to her leadership work. In Make The Difference: Be a Leader in Health & Safety, the leader is not defined by how often they speak about safety, but by how consistently their decisions protect people when the schedule becomes difficult. Her broader editorial position is equally direct. Across 25+ years leading EHS in multinational operations, Andreza has seen that visible intent matters only when it changes the work that people are asked to do.

The first question is therefore not, “What safety initiative should I launch?” It is, “Which decisions currently have no clear owner, no escalation rule, or no evidence standard?” That question will expose more than a new poster campaign.

First week: establish the decision rights

During the first week, build a decision map before changing procedures. Start with five decisions that can alter exposure quickly: accepting a critical risk, delaying a job, approving a temporary control, mobilizing a contractor, and restarting work after an incident or control failure.

For each decision, record the accountable role, the technical adviser, the person who can stop the work, the evidence required, and the time limit for escalation. The map should show where the decision is made, not merely where a form is stored. A signature field is not an accountability system if everyone assumes that someone else owns the consequence.

Review one recent decision in which production pressure, maintenance urgency, or staffing constraints changed the original plan. Ask what information was available, what was missing, who accepted the residual risk, and whether the field team understood the decision. A short review of real work is more useful than a general listening tour because it exposes the gap between the formal process and the operating rhythm.

Use the same method when reviewing the questions that expose unowned risk in leadership decisions. The purpose is not to assign blame. James Reason’s work on latent failures shows why a visible error often sits at the end of a longer chain of design, supervision, communication, and resource decisions.

Days 8 to 30: inspect how the operation really decides

The second phase is a structured field review. Spend time where work is planned, handed over, interrupted, and restarted. A director who stays only in the control room sees reports; a director who follows the work sees the conditions that produce those reports.

Choose three work processes that represent different forms of exposure. One might involve a critical control, one a contractor interface, and one a recurring production constraint. Follow each process from planning to execution. Compare the written risk assessment with the permit, the pre-job conversation, the field condition, and the closeout evidence.

Look for decision friction rather than isolated nonconformity. Does the supervisor know when to escalate? Can a worker challenge a plan without being labelled difficult? Does the maintenance planner understand the safety consequence of a deferral? Does the contractor receive the same risk boundary that the host operation uses? These questions reveal whether the system supports sound judgment when conditions change.

Keep a decision log with four columns: decision, exposure, owner, and evidence. Add a fifth column for the next review date. This simple record creates traceability without turning the director into the approver of every operational detail. It also gives the leadership team a common language for distinguishing a control that exists on paper from one that performs in the field.

A new director should resist the temptation to measure personal visibility by the number of site walks completed. The value of field presence comes from the quality of the questions and the decisions that follow. Andreza Araújo’s leadership framework repeatedly returns to that point: leaders ask more questions than they give answers, because questions reveal whether the organization can think safely without waiting for a senior person to arrive.

Days 31 to 60: build a weekly operating rhythm

By the second month, convert observations into a predictable management cadence. A weekly safety review should not become a longer version of the monthly dashboard. It should be a decision forum in which leaders examine a small number of material risks, confirm ownership, and remove barriers that the frontline cannot remove alone.

Use a fixed sequence. Review changes in critical exposure, examine overdue control actions, test one item of field evidence, discuss one worker concern, and confirm the decisions that require escalation. If an item has no owner or no next decision, it does not belong in the review as a passive status update.

Keep activity measures in their proper place. Training hours, inspection counts, and closed actions can show effort, but they do not prove that a barrier is available or effective. Pair them with evidence from control verification, work observations, permit quality, isolation checks, or exposure monitoring, depending on the risk.

The director can borrow the discipline used in a daily safety briefing that produces decisions in 15 minutes, then apply it at a wider operating level. The principle is the same. A meeting earns its place when it changes a decision, clarifies an owner, or removes a barrier to safe work.

Set escalation thresholds before the next difficult decision arrives. For example, define when a repeated control failure triggers a senior review, when a temporary measure expires, and when a production plan must be redesigned rather than accepted with another action item. Clear thresholds reduce the pressure on individual supervisors, whose choices become harder when every escalation is treated as a personal failure.

Days 61 to 90: prove that decisions changed the work

The third phase is a proof review. Select the highest-consequence decisions recorded during the first two months and trace what changed afterward. Did the work plan change? Did the control owner receive resources? Did the field verification find the expected condition? Did the team understand why the decision mattered?

Do not accept closure based on a completed form. A closed action is administrative evidence. A safer condition is operational evidence. The director should ask which of the two the review is actually showing.

At day 90, present a short decision-quality review to the leadership team. Include the most important unresolved risks, decisions made, decisions delayed, controls that failed verification, and barriers that require cross-functional action. The review should also identify one process that became clearer because of the new rhythm and one process that still depends too heavily on individual effort.

This is where the director’s authority becomes visible. A leader does not demonstrate commitment by promising that every risk will disappear. The leader demonstrates commitment by making material risk visible, assigning it to the right level, and refusing to let unresolved exposure hide inside a polished report.

Common mistakes that weaken the first 90 days

The first mistake is to launch a new safety theme before understanding the decisions that already govern the operation. New language cannot repair unclear authority.

The second mistake is to centralize every safety decision in the director’s office. That approach looks controlled, but it slows escalation and teaches supervisors to wait. The director should define boundaries, support challenge, and hold owners accountable without becoming the bottleneck.

The third mistake is to accept a clean dashboard as proof of control. A dashboard can be accurate and still describe the wrong level of risk. Review what the indicators cause leaders to do, not only whether the numbers are complete.

The fourth mistake is to treat disagreement as a culture problem in the person who raises it. A technically grounded challenge is decision evidence. The leader who receives bad news with curiosity keeps the reporting channel open; the leader who punishes the messenger receives silence and calls it stability.

The fifth mistake is to confuse consistency with rigidity. A weekly cadence should create reliable attention, while still allowing the operation to adapt when the work, exposure, or evidence changes. Antifragile Leadership expresses this as a practical leadership test: pressure should reveal what the system needs to adjust, not provide an excuse to abandon its values.

Resources to deepen the role

Start with Make The Difference: Be a Leader in Health & Safety when the main challenge is operational leadership and the translation of intent into daily action. Use Safety Culture: From Theory to Practice when the challenge is the gap between declared values and routine behavior. For a diagnostic lens, Safety Culture Diagnosis: Learn how to do your own helps the leadership team examine perception, maturity, and the evidence behind its conclusions.

Andreza Araújo’s books are useful here because they keep the conversation close to decisions and people. Her work does not treat culture as a poster or a department. It treats culture as what leaders make normal through repeated choices, especially when output pressure is real.

A director can also compare the first 90-day decision map with the questions that keep safety decisions owned at board level. The levels are different, but the test is similar. The organization must know who owns the decision, what evidence supports it, and what happens when the expected control does not hold.

The operating promise for day 91

By the end of 90 days, a new operations director should be able to answer five questions without opening a presentation. Which risks can stop the operation? Who owns each decision? What evidence does the owner need? When does the issue escalate? How will the team know that the response worked?

If those answers are clear, safety has moved closer to the work. If they are not, the next initiative should wait. The most valuable early contribution of an operations director is not a new campaign. It is a decision system that makes it harder for serious risk to remain unowned.

For leaders who want to turn that system into a wider cultural transformation, explore Andreza Araújo’s work through ACS Global Ventures and the book Make The Difference: Be a Leader in Health & Safety.