Safety deserves a voice in the boardroom

You now sit in the boardroom yourself. What has that taught you about managers?

Early in my career, I was taught that you do not question leaders. Leaders know everything; you do as you are told. Only when I worked at that level myself did I see how untenable that image is. Managers are usually just extremely busy, and above all, they are simply human.

So they make mistakes. For me, that points to a key condition for a safer workplace: leaders must dare to be more human. If you make a mistake, you put your hand up. Not only to your boss, but also to your team. Because if you never admit a mistake, why would your team ever admit theirs to you?

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How do you approach the role of safety manager from that conviction?

Safety is not the safety manager's job. Safety belongs within the operation. My role is that of a trusted advisor: I give the best advice I can give, and it is your business, so you decide. But if I believe my advice is right and you are not listening, I will keep having that conversation until I have convinced you.

One manager used to call me his conscience. He knew that if I took the trouble to raise something with him, he needed to listen. His answer was never "no" or "I'd rather not", but always "alright, tell me how".

The danger lies with the opposite type: the leader who believes he is right by definition and structurally sets advice aside. I once had a colleague who ruled through fear like that. His team spent the first hours of each day gauging his mood, protecting themselves instead of doing their jobs. No one ever admitted a mistake. Problems were swept out of sight.

Boardroom decisions usually revolve around cost and return. How do you get safety onto the table?

By speaking the boardroom language. Some safety professionals try to convince people because safety is simply the right thing to do. True, but not everyone responds to that. If you need the lawyers and the finance department on board, speak their language.

If I can explain that a measure improves reliability, and with it uptime, productivity and ultimately profitability, I have made a connection. Then people want it themselves. And beware of a business case that is too narrow.

Present safety solely as the avoidance of cost, and you invite gambling: how likely is it, really, that things will go wrong? That happens to others, not to me. That is human nature: we take risks for the chance of gain. So tell the positive side as well: an available workforce and a plant that keeps running generate money.

Then there is the paradox of good safety policy: when we invest in safety, nothing goes wrong. So why are we paying all these people? They are let go, and things start going wrong. When the very reason nothing went wrong was that they were supporting it.

You once joined an organization where no one reported risks any more. What did you find?

A workforce that had stopped reporting, because nothing ever got fixed anyway. Silence is learned behavior. If I tell you three weeks in a row that a machine is broken and you do nothing, by week four I will think: why bother telling him? The remedy is simple: always provide feedback. If you cannot fix something, explain why not. "You said this, we did that." That simple formula prevents a great deal.

We turned that organization around in a couple of years. First, I went out onto the floor myself, to understand the business and its problems. Then I coached the top: my fellow directors and my boss, including their language, so that we would all tell the same story everywhere.

We deliberately framed it as a business initiative about safety, not a safety initiative. We opted for servant leadership: as an executive team, we cooked and served meals for the workforce, to see one another as human beings again. Trust is built by making commitments and keeping them, time after time.

I warned the general manager in advance: don't come to me in six months complaining that the number of incident reports has gone up, because it will. And sure enough, he came to complain. But look at the severity, I said. People are now telling us things they used to keep to themselves. What's more, our focus was on the risks that can kill, not on the cut finger that is easy to prevent.

Finally, what would you say to a new Chief Safety Officer, and to any other professional wanting to take this on?

Organizations are often surrounded by early warning signs. The challenge is not only recognizing them, but also ensuring they lead to meaningful action. That takes more than technology alone. It depends on people, processes and communication working together, so teams understand what is happening and respond when it matters. 

The combination of reliable alerting and effective decision-making helps organizations move beyond human error. So be curious and keep asking questions. Be humble enough to admit that when you don't know something or when you got it wrong. And don't forget to have fun. 

That is hugely underrated. We learn poorly under stress; with a smile, the brain opens up to learning and remembering. Our work is serious, and people's lives depend on it. But that is exactly why you should allow yourself to pause, breathe and laugh about something. People work best when they enjoy what they do.