“Safety?” Leadership

I was asked a little while ago to speak to a group about “Safety Leadership.”

Now I’ve had quite a bit of exposure to leadership. As a military veteran, I received extensive leadership training and even taught in leadership courses. The military is all about leadership.

Leadership is much different from authority. However, to understand leadership, we have to talk about authority. There are many types of authority. Leaders usually have some positional power. Their position inherently gives them some authority. That is especially true in hierarchical organizations.

Many people use the term "leadership" or put some modifier in front of it. I find that most of the time, people don’t really know what that means. I think everyone’s heard about the difference between leadership and management. Managers use their positional power to issue instructions to have people do tasks. Leadership does not operate that way. The best definition I have ever seen of leadership is the art of influencing human behavior. Leaders influence. Leaders accomplish things by getting people to cooperate and become engaged. Engagement does not happen just by managing.

It has often been said that health and safety professionals operate through influence because they do not have real authority over management or employees. It is true, that to be a leader, you do not have to be in a specific position. Being a leader does not require positional power. It is much easier to be a leader if you have positional power or some authority. That is not because you have the power to punish, but just that these positions provide you with instant legitimacy when dealing with employees. That is why safety professionals cannot ever sustainably change the “safety culture” of a company.

Before I spoke to this group, I thought about the topic—Safety Leadership. I suppose the very first thing to realize is that this is a made-up term that means absolutely nothing. Putting safety before something doesn’t make it special or more effective. Leadership is based on a person’s ability to influence others and get them to do things they may not want to do, or would not normally do. Good leaders get the best performance out of their teams or departments because of that quality.

You can choose to be a leader. Easy to say, hard to do. A valuable piece of advice is to stop using made-up terms like “Safety Leadership.” That does not build any legitimacy. We need to think about what leaders have in common and the things we have seen in leaders.

One thing that really springs to mind when it comes to health and safety is that the health and safety function or department is often a silo within the organization. You really can’t lead from a silo. Leaders are collaborative and work well with others. They may even inspire others.

If you want to inspire others, you must have a clear sense of purpose. Think about the traditional elevator speech. Do you know exactly what your function is (according to the employer), what you’re doing, and how you’re going to accomplish that? Good leaders have a clear vision of where they want to go. They also have a clear vision for how they’ll engage people and collaborate with others to get there.

Communicating is an important skill. In health and safety, communication tends to go off the rails when people start talking about compliance or legal requirements. That’s a great way to lose your audience. Only a minority might find talking about legislation and compliance interesting. If you’ve ever heard people talking about business, they don’t talk about compliance. They talk about risk. Operational and financial risk. This is the language of business, and this is the language you must speak if you want to communicate effectively with senior management or be a leader.

While you may be the expert when it comes to health and safety, you still need to invite feedback and be collaborative. Luckily, most health and safety systems are built to facilitate collaboration and feedback. Welcoming and appreciating feedback and collaboration builds trust and credibility. The Health and Safety Committee is a great example of a feedback mechanism within a company that provides an additional channel for identifying issues as they arise and solving them collaboratively. It offers a great opportunity to engage people from all levels of the company.

There are many other opportunities as well. Conducting risk assessments for the company's activities is something the health and safety person may be good at, particularly the nuts and bolts of risk assessment. Still, you need to involve the people who actually do the work. Together, you get an effective picture of the risks those people face and can involve them in providing feedback and identifying what they need, such as equipment or training. The same can be true of incident investigations. Another great opportunity to involve workers, supervisors, and managers in a process to assess how well the safety system is functioning in mitigating incidents that have arisen. Training is always one that seems to slip under the radar. People have to endure all kinds of safety training. However, assessing that training to see if it is effective, to see if it is actually teaching the right things or providing the right knowledge or skills, means you have to collaborate with the people who are taking the training, and the people who are doing the work. So instead of being a silo, you can be open to all sorts of feedback and collaboration within the organization.

I like to say that the function of the health and safety person is to make the invisible visible. It’s great that you may identify an increased risk or a new hazard. But you need to be able to communicate that effectively to others, showing them that what they have missed or aren’t seeing is actually there and may have an effect.

Why is all this important? To be a leader, you need a magic ingredient. No one is going to give you legitimacy. You need credibility. To build credibility, you need to demonstrate value. You need to demonstrate that you are providing solutions rather than identifying problems. You need to show that you can engage people and deliver a usable output or solution. By building credibility, you can build your capacity to lead. Without credibility, you really can’t be a leader.

Doing all the things I’ve already mentioned will build your credibility within the organization. Here are a few things that can absolutely destroy your credibility. I’ve already mentioned one. Putting safety in front of something, like it makes it special, will damage your credibility. Talking about compliance and rules and what the company must do or what the company is required to do will also damage your credibility, since you have very little real authority within the organization. Making changes to the health and safety system without a clear understanding of what those changes would mean will destroy your credibility. I am talking about pulling in procedures or even entire health and safety manuals from other organizations and adopting them for your organization without even talking to anybody about what that might mean or how they’re supposed to know what’s in these new procedures or manuals. There’s a big difference between being a change agent and making changes. One of the biggest complaints I get from business owners is that they hire a health and safety advisor or a manager, and the first thing that they do is try to change a bunch of things. People automatically don’t like change—they like stability. If they get the sense that changes are being made on a whim or for no particularly good reason, that will destroy your credibility.

Another great way to blow up your credibility is by failing to deal with problems effectively. Some health and safety people identify a problem, then identify the legislation being breached and hand that to their boss, saying, "You know, you must comply, you must buy this equipment, or you must do these things." Most managers see that as particularly unhelpful. If you see a problem, you should try to identify solutions. You should cost out those solutions and include a cost-benefit analysis where possible. There must always be multiple solutions, and one of them must be doing nothing. That way, you are illuminating an issue and offering several options to assist managers in making an informed decision, rather than dictating terms. This enables managers to make a quick decision if they know how much the solutions are likely to cost.

Remember the old saying. If someone has to tell you they are important, they usually aren’t. Others will judge whether you are a leader.

While safety leadership is not an oxymoron, it is not a helpful or useful term. Listen so that you can understand. Accept feedback and invite collaboration. Strive to provide value to the organization. That is what leaders do.