Are safety officers leaders, or managers?

What about supervisors? Managers? Are thy also leaders, or are they more managers?

Do we even dare ask about the C-suite?

We can admit it, in many ways managing is a bit easier than leading. But the latter is more needed when it comes to safety in a workplace.  But what is really the difference between being a manager and being a leader?

Eddie Greer, who wrote an article in a recent issue of Professional Safety magazine about safety leadership, discusses several definitions of leadership, but gets down to the brass tacks when he states the biggest difference between leadership and management:

You manage things, but lead people. And that makes sense when it comes to safety. Let’s walk through this for a minute.

We are not called time leaders or money leaders. We’re called time managers and money  managers. Time and money are things.

We can also be a team leader, which means we lead a team of people.

Things are inanimate, sometimes intangible and we can’t move them to doing something different than what is already there. We can’t play to their emotions, because things have none. We can’t play to their logic, because they have no brains. Therefore, we can’t lead them, we can only manage them to make sure those “things” are running and working the most efficient way possible.

That is what we do when we manage time and manage money, right? We look to have maximum efficiency.

Leadership is about playing to people and their brains and hearts. It is about finding that spark inside each one of those you lead and driving them in the same direction, toward the same goals.

In safety, there is a difference between a safety officer managing the safety protocol, and leading people into acting and behaving safely. A good safety officer will have the ability to do both, or at the very least be able to inspire and motivate the leadership team to help lead people into good safety habits and a positive culture.

Greer wrote an article that addresses the need for leadership in safety, and provides some admonitions for people to step up into a leadership role, or to encourage managers and supervisors to find the workers with the right leadership qualities and put them in position to lead people into good safety habits.

Greer encourages us to stop just being managers and to develop the good traits of an effective safety leader that can guide people into working and living safely both at work and at home. A good leader may be in a management or supervisory role, but not exclusively. This is an opportunity, Greer writes, to find those in your workforce who have followers or are popular among their peers and yet show some of these leadership traits:

  • Honesty and trustworthiness;
  • Big-picture, long-term thinking;
  • Competent at the job;
  • Inspiring to others;
  • Character and integrity that are unquestioned, especially when no one is looking;
  • Humble to understand serving others while leading;
  • Adaptable with people;
  • Responsible, not just accountable;
  • Positive in attitude and relating to others;
  • Problem-solver;
  • Learn-aholic;
  • Selfless;
  • Listens well;
  • Looks to make change for the better, not for the sake of change;
  • Has great follow-through on tasks; and
  • Gets things done well and on time.

Granted, it is very hard to find multiple people in your organization who have all of these qualities, but those who do should be in some kind of leadership position where they are able to lead people and not just manage a process or procedure. If in fact, however, there is no one who has all  of these criteria, Greer noted that the four most common traits of an effective leader (and thus the ones that are more important in a prospective leader) are with someone who is honest, inspiring, competent and a big-picture thinker.

The next post will investigate more of Greer’s article, which discusses expectations of effective leadership in safety environments.