5 Key Leadership Traits of a Safety Professional

How many attributes does a leader need to have to be successful? A fair assumption is that a successful leader will have many characteristics with varying degrees of understanding and execution. Often, leadership is developed over time. However, in many cases, it is due to the complexity of a rising circumstance. Many of us have heard that "leaders are not born; they are made." That is not to say we are to wait until a crisis to learn a specific leadership skill, but to be prudent in mapping out expected encounters and developing from there. 

Looking at our role as Safety Professional's, I believe there are five key attributes every practitioner needs to have in order to leverage success in their organization and career.     

• The Visionary Leader is best regarded as transformational. There is a difference between a visionary, a vision, and a visionary leader. A visionary is someone that sees the future and can articulate it with great inspiration. A vision is taking what one sees and, using those ideas, crafts a message into simple language that gives direction. A visionary leader, on the other hand, is a combination of both. It is easy to understand the role of a visionary and a vision. Still, to be successful, the visionary leader brings vision to fruition with specific strategies, achievable goals, and actions that extend far into the organization through broad participation.  Maybe the best way to describe it is that for the Safety Professional, success is best experienced as a visionary leader when we can move organizational energy to a higher level by setting a clear vision of what is possible and then transmitting that energy to the people that work in our organizations to deliver it. 
• The Supportive Leader is often discussed as leading within a situational model. This model focuses on the idea that when there are differing levels of organizational competency and capacity, some people will be unwilling to connect with the process, thus requiring our reaction. The ability of a leader to pull them back into the safety process is critical to success. Early in my career, when I was a facility-level safety leader, I noticed that my facility could usually meet safety performance expectations year after year but always seemed to fall short of step-change improvement that would take us from good to great. My conclusion was that while I had much of the employee population involved and taking part, there was a small minority of those that remained outside of active safety engagement. These workers were outliers. Author Malcolm Gladwell defined an outlier as "one that appears to deviate markedly from other members of the sample in which it occurs." With this thinking in mind, there's a significant probability that many of us have outliers existing in our organizations in two distinct positive and negative groups. A positive outlier is an employee who produces and goes above what is required. Recognizing and appreciating them is the best way to sustain a positive outlier. A negative outlier, on the other hand, is an organizational challenge. They are usually small groups of employees who work to disrupt collaboration and pay little attention to the organization's values, vision, or goals for success. The danger of allowing such negative outliers to reside in the work system is that it fosters acceptance within the organization. Over time, it will grow as much as the organization enables the behavior. As the facility Safety Leader, I took the initiative quickly to support and leverage involvement from everyone. I established a safety management process that needed every employee to own part of the safety process. Supportive leadership is gaining active involvement and participation from all members within the work system.
•  The Affiliative Leader is another attribute closely related to supportive leadership. The Safety Professional can unite groups of people when team building is essential. While I do not believe this style can be used alone, plenty of evidence supports that our ability to leverage collaboration and teamwork is a key leadership attribute to a well-balanced and sustainable safety process. It's the ability to take a management-dependent or independent workforce to one of interdependence, where employees and leaders work together to implement and promote a values-based system built on the premise that 'no one gets hurt' and that 'injuries and incidents can be prevented.' When an interdependent culture is created, employees view safety as a critical part of their role, not an adjunct to it. They see themselves as the driving force behind the safety and health process. Therefore, a crucial skill for Safety Professionals is their ability to unite people. We win or we lose, but we will do it together.
•  The Command Leader is a leadership style that, over the years, has fallen further and further out of favor within most organizational norms. Command leadership comes from an old military model. It assumes that people need to be told what to do, and if you don't tell them exactly how to do it, you'll be disappointed in the results. Granted, most of us don't like this leadership style until, as most of us also know, a crisis hits the organization. A large chemical spill, a fire, a severe injury, or another impending crisis like a global pandemic, and the Safety Professional will likely be thrust to command regardless of the incident management structure. However, there is reason to practice this leadership attribute outside a crisis. In my career, and I would venture a guess in many of yours, we've spent many hours owning our safety and health process and its strategies in front of senior leaders responsible for making correct decisions. If you are like me, simply giving away the organization's safety process was never an option because of my knowledge, skill, and experience. Though more restrained than the military view of command and control, owning and effectively communicating with confidence an effective safety management plan is paramount to long-term success. 
•  The Competent Leader is the foundation to the success you desire. Competence alone cannot make a leader, but it can undo one. Competence doesn't mean that a leader knows how to do everything but instead knows what to do and how to get it done. A competent leader will know their strengths and weaknesses and then drive forward to fill the gaps. Socrates said that "one who clearly knows best what ought to be done will most easily gain the confidence of others." Given how I think of a Safety Professional, I can't agree more.

Throughout my career and on occasion, I have been asked, "how many people does it take to lead safety?" My answer is always the same; "it is exactly the number of people that show up for work daily." The leadership and management team, production and service colleagues, and every other person that touches the organization's safety process and business results.  

Organizations are starving for effective and genuine leadership. Regardless of the Safety Professional's organizational position, we are all leaders, or at least should be. For some, the Safety Professional has position power with great authority because of their knowledge and experience on the job. However, regardless of our position or responsibility, we have a tremendous opportunity to influence the organization through effective safety leadership.