Rod Maule
Principal Adviser
HSE Critical Risk, Safety Culture & Organisational Performance
Rod has spent more than two decades leading safety in some of Australia's most complex operating environments — logistics, energy, transport, food manufacturing, blood services, and waste management. He now brings that experience to bear as a strategic adviser, helping organisations build the safety leadership capability, critical risk programs, and cultural foundations that actually prevent harm.
How Rod arrived at
The Strategic Step
Rod's career in safety leadership spans a range of industries and a consistent thread: the organisations that perform best are the ones where leaders at every level genuinely understand what the critical risks are, and are equipped to verify that the controls keeping people safe are actually working.
He spent more than five years as General Manager Safety and Wellbeing at Australia Post with one of Australia's largest and most complex workforces, where he developed and led a five-year safety strategy that drove significant improvement in safety performance across the business. Before that, he held senior safety leadership roles at Australian Red Cross Lifeblood, Cleanaway, Transdev, Fonterra, and BP, operating across environments that ranged from food manufacturing and passenger transport to petroleum and donor services.
That breadth of experience across high-risk, high-complexity organisations shapes how Rod approaches advisory work. He has seen what good looks like from the inside, and what happens when critical risk programs become compliance exercises rather than genuine tools for understanding how work is actually being done.
Rod is also a board member of the Australian Institute of Health and Safety, where he has been an active contributor to the profession's direction since 2022, and an independent member on Ambulance Victoria's board People and Culture Committee since 2024.
Rod is an inaugural member of the HSE GM Forum, which is a cross-industry group with over 50 heads of safety from some of Australia's largest organisations. The forum meets regularly to share learnings and provide thought leadership on safety in Australia.
Rod’s Approach
Rod's starting point is always the same: understand the risk profile, and ask whether the organisation is focused on the right things.
In his experience, one of the most common failure modes in critical risk programs is not a lack of effort — it's a misalignment between where attention is directed and where the real risk lives. He has seen organisations where the majority of senior leader observations were focused on issues far removed from the controls that actually prevent fatalities. The intent was there; the focus wasn't.
His advisory work is built around helping organisations make that shift — from compliance-led verification to curious, purposeful leadership of critical controls. That means educating leaders on what the critical controls actually are, building their capability to have genuine conversations about whether those controls are in place, and designing verification processes that give senior leaders real insight into work as it's done, not just work as it's planned.
Rod focuses on both how culture at all levels of an organisation influence outcomes and how a focus on what matters in critical risk shapes a company’s culture and helps turn ‘good will’ into practical outcomes that make a difference.
"If you look at everything, you look at nothing. There are lots of things you have to do in a day, but there are only a few things that really make a difference. A laser-like focus on those is what changes outcomes."
What motivates Rod
Rod's career has been shaped by a straightforward belief: people go to work and they should come home. In 2024, 188 Australian workers lost their lives to traumatic workplace injuries. Behind every one of those numbers is a family, a team, a community. The work of getting critical risk management right matters in the most direct sense possible.
What keeps him engaged is the point in an engagement where something shifts — where a leadership team moves from ticking controls off a list to genuinely asking why a control might not be working, and what they can do about it. That shift, when it happens, sticks.
Rod is based in Melbourne and works with clients across high-risk industries including utilities, transport, logistics, emergency services, and manufacturing.
Connect with Rod on LinkedIn or book a meeting below.