Exploring the themes impacting EHS governance and leadership

This chapter goes through research that was conducted on more than 20 organizations in the Middle East and in which certain themes have been explored further through many interviews. Leaders were asked about the areas of the development for an effective safety and EHS culture in their organization and the significance of communications within their organizations. The common theme-related questions most leaders disagreed with or least agreed with is related to risk management. As such they developed their own internal risk management systems and were more comfortable with managing risk in the context of the board and executive management through high level enterprise risk management strategies and processes. Regardless of which industry one belongs to, senior leaders recognize the significance of the legal imperatives for safety and EHS. Legal compliance was related in the interviews to business conduct. The leader's moral duty to protect company employees was something that was a given from the responses of many leaders.