From Concrete Work to Corporate Safety Leadership with Zac Elliott

Episode notes

In this episode of The Canary Report: Safety & Risk Management , I sit down with Zac Elliott , Safety Director at Mead & Hunt, to explore what modern safety leadership looks like across a diverse, nationwide engineering and consulting organization. Mead & Hunt operates across architecture, engineering, aviation, transportation, water infrastructure, and environmental services. With more than 1,500 employees and teams operating across the country, Zac’s role involves managing safety exposure in environments the company often doesn’t directly control like construction sites and client facilities. What makes Zac’s perspective particularly valuable is his background. Before moving into safety leadership, he spent years working in the trades, cutting his teeth in concrete work as a laborer and cement finisher. That hands-on experience continues to shape how he approaches safety leadership today. In our conversation, we explore why field experience can dramatically improve safety leadership credibility, how organizations can balance internal and external safety expertise, and why driving risk remains one of the biggest safety exposures for many companies.