As safety professionals or those who have close proximity to the safety field, like myself, I have always been amazed that when promotions are available within organizations, individuals in safety are routinely passed over for those promotions. In fact, as I have looked over the organizational landscape of enterprises that I am familiar with, I can clearly see that the top individuals in safety are rarely those who have a safety background. Going even further, the top individuals in safety are sometimes buried under a confused conglomeration of departmental titles such as security/safety/ risk management or loss prevention.
While this is not unusual, I do think that, like human resources before it, safety has a long way to go in establishing its identity and it will be up to each safety professional to help advance this cause. Whether it is your role as a safety professional involving your careers or your personal lives, each person must take an active role in defining who they are and then demonstrating that to others versus having others express to us who they think we should be.
Regarding the issue of promotions of safety professionals, I would like to offer some reasons or perhaps, more appropriately, excuses why the phenomenon of overlooking the safety professional exists. I contend that, when senior management is looking to fill those positions for which a person with a defined safety background might qualify, they tend to select individuals whom they feel have experiences that are more relevant to them, or they select individuals that they are more comfortable with, based upon a personal knowledge perspective.
I mean, after all, when someone asks you what you do for a living and you say you are in safety, how do they look at you and what do you say in response? If we have trouble presenting who we are as safety professionals and doing so in a manner that shows our ability to impact the operations for which we are involved, can we really blame someone else for doing the same? If we do not take the time to coach others or help them to develop an appropriate perspective around the critical and essential nature of safety, then how can we expect to impact their mindsets?
For each of us, throughout our careers we have been faced with the idea that we must be aware of the competitive environment(s) in which our business or businesses operate. Often, during meetings or other types of strategic planning sessions, the conversation will invariably turn to the question of, "Where are we in this process vis-a-vis our competitors" or "what do we see happening in the marketplace?" The nature of these questions is obvious. They relate to the economic viability of the enterprise under consideration and, as I have often been taught, "if you do not know what your competitors are doing then you are probably out of the race."
