The chasm between Business Leaders and Safety Professionals

We often hear about how difficult it is for Safety professionals to convince management and sensitize them on the need to drive safety from the “top”. There is also no dearth of advice that Safety professionals get on the need to “talk the language of the business” and improve their communication skills to make the business case and “sell” safety to the top management. 
​
On the other hand, we also hear Production / Operations personnel lamenting how Safety professionals are so distant from reality and have no clue how to get things done.
A social experimentOver the past 6 months or so, I have been asking my friends and business associates to participate in a social experiment. I asked them to provide their most likely response to a simple hypothetical scenario – with an up-front clarification that there are no right / wrong answers.
It is late in the night and you are driving back home and in a bit of a rush to attend to a medical emergency at home. You just reach a cross roads and blame your luck as the signal just turns Red. You know that it will take at least 3-4 minutes before the signal turns in your favour. You have clear visibility of all roads and are absolutely certain that there is no vehicle anywhere in sight. You are also aware that there are no traffic cameras keeping an eye on you. What would you do:

1. Wait for the signal to turn in your favour and then proceed.
2. Take a chance, break the signal, and proceed.
3. 
   

The responses:There were some clear patterns with the responses.

1. About 60% of the responses were in favour of following the rules. (Option 1).
2. However, amongst Safety professionals, the percentage of responses that were in favour of Option 1 was closer to 90%.
3. At the same time, amongst non-safety professionals, there was a higher likelihood of opting for Option 2 (around 80%).

By no means was this a systematic or scientific study. However the experiment, in my opinion, points to a fundamental chasm that divides business managers and safety professionals: Safety Managers have a “Compliance mentality” and Business Managers seem to be more “Risk Oriented”. This is somewhat ironic because in theory, it is Safety professionals who are primarily responsible for managing “Risks” and putting in place necessary controls.
My hypothesis is that in most cases, safety managers tend to take a safe approach (pun intended) and opt to really stay away from taking any risks. This approach of course irks the business or operations professional who sees the safety professional as anti-business.
Do we have a solution?
Clearly, a blog like this is not aimed at providing a solution to what is an existential challenge in industry but here are my quick thoughts on what we could possibly do differently:

1. It is all about deep Knowledge. In particular, Safety professionals need to develop a far deeper and practical understanding of consequences of various activities / actions in the workplace. This knowledge should extend beyond theory to specific practical examples that may have occurred elsewhere to illustrate these consequences. If Safety professionals can move beyond the “what” and articulate the “why” behind proposed risk controls, there is a far higher chance that they will be respected by other stakeholders and recognized as a valuable contributor to the growth of a business.
2. Overcome the compliance mentality: Compliance is relatively black and white and ticking an activity as being compliant or otherwise may be an easy way out. On the other hand, a “Risk Based Thinking” (also as required by recent versions of ISO 9001) requires a better understanding of not just the situational risks but the overall risks to a business. There may very well be special situations (such as the hypothetical example in this blog) where one could be non-compliant but still well in control of the risks. Under such circumstances, I would argue that Safety professionals should be open to taking risks in the overall interest of the business. This may however not be possible without a broad understanding of peripheral issues in addition to the central issue.

A sensible advice that I would pay heed to is what a wise friend and former President of a Safety NGO in Singapore told me while discussing this topic:

“Everyone takes some degree of risk with what they do. However, it is important to know the difference between taking risk and being reckless”.   

​My take: It takes a knowledgeable Safety Professional to know that difference. Keep Learning!

I welcome your perspectives on this topic.