Are we safety professionals/engineers or Wizards?

What management thinks we are…	Reality as to what we really are

When it comes to creating a safety culture, most management teams think the safety leader has some kind of magic wand that they can wave and create the culture they want.  When in reality, we are NOT culture builders!  Culture comes from senior leadership – safety leaders help managers create the culture they want. 

As a facility safety leader, I worked for five of the most outstanding business/team leaders one could ever ask for.  Claude, Dale, Dan, Jim, and Gordon all put their people first in their business decisions.  We did not need banners and slogans to convince the workforce that they were committed to their safety.  These men took safety very seriously, and they had very high expectations for my teams and me.  They clearly set the expectations and expected me to figure out how to get there, which I learned early on from Claude and Dale – that is, by using the experts who do the dirty and dangerous work.  But safety came easy with these men and their expectations.  If you were to ask those who worked at these facilities while these men were at the helm if they felt safety was serious business, you would get an overwhelming response of YES.  We were not perfect – hell, I made many mistakes along the way; but we just did good old fashion safety as our core effort to demonstrate we CARED, and we worked relentlessly to rid their work areas of both physical and behavioral hazards. 

We had fun!  I never got burned out and worked crazy hours, as it was fun.  In fact, in my early days, I learned more from them than they did from me.  We worked as teams with a common goal, and by that simple approach, we BUILT A CULTURE of CARING using technical tools.  Safety is the greatest means to demonstrate that management cares for their employees.  All we, safety pros/engineers, need to do is be the best safety pros/engineers we can be, sticking to the structured approach of:

Employees witness these activities first hand, and eventually, most will end up PARTICIPATING in these activities, and that is HOW WE BUILD A CULTURE of caring.  We EDUCATE and MOTIVATE along the way so that we leave knowledge and desire to continue down the path to success even after we are gone. 

There is NO magic wand!  It takes time, effort, and expertise as a safety pro/engineer and leader to make it happen; however, it starts with the senior leadership setting their expectations.  We simply build the process to meet their expectations.