What Makes a Good Safety Professional?

The safety industry has been in a slow transition over the last couple of decades from the heavy handed compliance “Sword of OSHA” to the more collaborative practitioner focused on building relationships.  Whereas this evolution is consistent with our changing society and social mores, the debate still rages about what makes a “good” safety professional.

Apart from the obvious need for technical skill and a commanding knowledge of the OSHA standard, as well as the various consensus standards enforced by OSHA, safety professionals must also be equipped with a variety of other skills and knowledge which may not appear at first glance to be related specifically to safety.  Depending on who you talk to, skills and knowledge may range from understanding financial strategies and business acumen to personal traits like leadership, communication and a wide variety of other people skills.  Clearly, the most successful safety professionals possess all these capabilities and more.

However, of all of the potential skills a successful safety professional must have, I believe the most important is the ability to actively listen to people’s concerns and perspectives.  Except for technical competence, virtually all other markers of success stem from a person’s ability to understand what motivates others to behave the way they do.  This is also directly relational to personal decision making and how they respond in the presence of a hazard. 

Of course, it is far more complicated than that and volumes have been written to describe all the various component parts of what it takes to be a successful safety professional.  However, the safety professional that is a good, active listener will always succeed where the one who isn’t won’t.

This begs the question, are you really listening, or just “hearing” the conversation?