Safety Leadership Subject Matter Expert

Britt Howard serves as Group Director of Assurance (HSS, Quality, and Business Risk) for Americas Business at Worley, ensuring safe, high-quality and economically disciplined work. Previously, as VP at Jacobs Engineering and Corporate HSSEQ VP at CH2M, Howard led the firm to its best-ever quality and safety performance, with a 25 percent improvement in recordable injuries from 2016-2017.

Through this article, Howard shares his insights on the concept of effective safety leadership by expanding on John Maxwell’s “Law of the Lid,” emphasizing the importance of hard skills, soft skills and dedication in safety leaders to ensure they can proficiently guide and support their teams.

One of my favorite leadership development books is John Maxwell’s 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership. My spin on John Maxwell’s “Law of the Lid” Chapter in the book is the complete leader has hard skills, soft skills, and dedication to serve others as an effective leader. A safety leader specifically who does not have hard skills, soft skills, and dedication as part of their leadership capability tool kit will be limited in how effective they are in serving their work families.

John Maxwell’s “Law of the Lid” suggests that leaders’ opportunity to excel, be promoted and serve others effectively as a leader can be limited in effectiveness and remit if they are not proficient in leadership skills and dedication. I suggest digging deep into the leadership skills category by specifically splitting out hard and soft leadership skills:

Hard Skills: Technical experience and expertise in the discipline that the leader serves.

Soft Skills: Ability to influence others through effective safety leadership communication and safe work examples.

Dedication: Being resilient to continuously serve others when things are good and challenging in the safety space.

I have experienced safety leaders who lacked hard skills several times during my career. The lack of technical experience and expertise can and has resulted in misdirection of resources and frustration in the safety services work family.

● I had a supervisor in a previous company who had a strong background in areas of the business that did not include safety. When they were challenged with creating a strategy, tactics, resolving issues or guiding their safety work family members in managing safety processes or programs they were profoundly incapable of leading which was frustrating for everyone.

Having soft skills is described as a person who can blend themselves into the work family and develop positive relationships with others in the theme of servant leadership. The combination of being an effective communicator and asserting a humble engagement approach are important components of having soft skills.

● An Effective Communicator: A person who conveys their message thoroughly and is receptive and responsive to others' thoughts and feedback. Those who are strong communicators speak in an authentic way and use easily understood language along with actively listening.

● A Humble Engagement Approach: A style of engaging work family members that puts others at ease and makes them feel comfortable. Humble people don’t seek to be understood first, they seek to understand others first. Humble leaders make others around them feel important and respected.

I have worked with leaders who chose to talk more about me and my family than themselves when they engaged me in conversation. That soft skill made me develop a positive opinion of those leaders that still resonate in my memory. I had one such leader at a previous company who spent the first few minutes of our formal meetings catching up on what my children and wife were doing. This authentic interest in my private life made me feel like my leader cared about me as a whole work family member and not just a transactional contributor of work product for the company.

Being dedicated is important in all facets of life, but it is of utmost importance when it comes to safety leadership. Safety leaders who lack the personal drive to do what is right, to serve others when it is inconvenient and to strive for perfection in safety outcomes are not dedicated.

Recently, I was helping a work family member open an electronic car key fob late in the day just as we were departing to go home. He considered using a pair of scissors (sharp edge) to pry open the seam of the case. Using scissors in this manner is unsafe and has proven to cause laceration injuries. Taking the time to find the right and safe tool to pry open the key fob was the direction we took which resulted in a safe and effective battery replacement.

Several years ago, I worked with a fellow safety leader who was about to depart back home to Denver, Colorado after completing an executive safety visit with our Prudhoe Bay, Alaska work family when he decided to stay a few extra days. He stayed behind even though he had personal plans in place for the weekend because it was identified that the documentation that supported the completion of confined space entry training was not available for our work family members. This lack of documentation was going to exclude our work family from completing scheduled confined space entry work for our client. Instead of taking the Thursday evening flight home, he stayed an extra 3 days to serve our work family in completing this necessary safety training by instructing much of it himself. His dedication to serving that group of work family members was profoundly appreciated. I still hear about that situation nine years after the occurrence.

I recently had a conversation with a group of executive safety leaders about hand injury trends going up and down throughout the years. We all agreed that our industry must remain continuously focused on making hand injury prevention a safety cultural norm rather than an initiative when there are hand injury experiences. Our work family members deserve us to stay diligent in preventing all injuries that negatively impact them at work and at home. Our role in hand injury prevention is to keep hand safety at the front of our minds and provide the necessary tools to prevent hand injuries (e.g., safe hand tools and appropriate gloves).

Taking the learning from John Maxwell’s “Law of the Lid” Chapter in the book The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership and evolving it into my perspective of what makes a complete safety leader has served me and others well over the past 33 years. Developing and continuously building on hard skills, soft skills and dedication is the foundation for serving others in the safety leadership space.