Identifying Safety Leaders In Your Organization

Many managers, supervisors and leads say that safety leaders are made, not born. Though when I think about effective safety champions I have known over the years, I realize that most started on the factory floor or in the trades and transitioned into the safety field after many years in their organization. Others were passionate about a single issue and took steps to address it and then went back to their functional job. Most become key members of a Safety Committee or Tiger Team and exercise informal leadership across their companies to improve safety and working conditions. Any way you slice it, informal safety leaders can make meaningful changes within their organizations. Let’s think about what it takes to be a leader in any line of work:

Being a People Person:

Somebody that has an interest in his or her fellow workers on a personal level, who takes the time to get to know them and who cares about their well-being.

Being Easy To Talk To:

Understanding people and their issues takes excellent communication skills. Asking questions, active listening and not interrupting are the hallmarks of good personal communication.

Likes a Challenge:

Becoming a change leader means dealing with systems and processes that have been in place for a long time. Most safety issues are complex, and may be expensive or take a long time to fix. Being the person who challenges the we’ve-always-done-it-this-way mentality takes effort.

Never Stops Learning:

Functioning as a safety leader means taking on some responsibility for promoting safe behaviors and work practices. This naturally leads to developing technical knowledge and skills that go beyond your trade or job function. Effective safety leaders are curious and hungry to learn.

Is Highly Respected:

Having credibility and respect from co-workers is necessary for informal leadership to be effective. Workers who have been there, done that tend to have an easier time influencing people to change their outlook and actions.

Many workers who possess the credibility, personality and communication skills to make a difference in safety think they may not have the technical knowledge to be taken seriously. The truth is, workers with real-world experience doing a job are the best people to point out places it could be improved because they know how the work is actually done as opposed to how it was planned or imagined. Safety managers and engineers just do not have the hard-won experience and process knowledge that the actual workers have! The best solution is found in companies where there is open communication so new ideas are shared and implemented and everybody benefits.

Most smart organizations look for potential safety leaders among the experienced workers in the skilled trades or from the shop floor because those people have the credibility to be taken seriously by the rest of the workforce. These individuals are already influencers of their fellow workers, and provide a bridge between workers and management in all areas of the work. Effective informal leaders don’t have a job title or the authority of a management position, but they influence others with their confidence, personality and credibility.

Identifying potential safety leaders by involving workers who already have the skills and traits discussed above has proven more successful than selecting employees by seniority (long term or short!) and putting them through safety training or advanced communications classes. Since much of the motivation for leadership comes from within an individual, safety leaders, like other leaders who shape organizations, are born not made.