Safety Leadership: Competence 2.0

Competence is a collective term described by the United Kingdom Health and Safety Executive as; ‘the ability to undertake responsibilities and perform activities to a recognised standard on a regular basis. It combines practical and thinking skills, knowledge and experience.’ Competence in a safety leader is critical in assuring followership.

Safety leaders who are competent gives rise to follower identification, and this follower identification builds confidence and trust in the safety leader. This duality of follower identification and trust in the safety leader is critical in gaining the commitment required to achieve our desired performance outcome of an improved workplace safety culture.

As safety professionals, we are all too aware of having to maintain our competence, however both as an industry, and individually we are now going through a period of transformation, we are no longer just safety professionals, we are now required to be safety leadership professionals. An example of this is the recent IOSH conference titled – Leadership in Action. With this transformation process in mind what new skills, and knowledge do we need to seek out and embrace to become proficient in art of safety leadership. To help understand these new competencies better and perhaps most importantly, where they align with our current professional competency requirements we need a safety leadership competency model (see the end of this post). 

Our safety leadership competency model brings together the key aspects of the International Network of Safety and Health Practitioner Organisations (INSHPO) document titled Framework for Practice, Roles, Knowledge, and Skills, and the key leadership skills identified by the leadership theorist Ronald E. Riggio.

However and quite critically the foundation of our safety leadership competence model is built on the competencies that connect both leaders and safety professionals and these are the moral competencies: courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance, adaptive capacity or mental agility, and emotional intelligence, social intelligence, and cultural intelligence or EQ, SQ, and CQ. Building on this foundation further, we then have our three pillars of leadership skills, safety professional knowledge, and safety professional skills. Finally, we have the over-arching aspect of lessons learned, and or life experiences.

This competency model indicates quite clearly that being proficient in the art of safety leadership is not just in the realms of the few, but along with the necessary traits, the skills and knowledge required to be an effective safety leadership professional can be learned by the many.