Making Safety Suck Less

In this episode, Mary Conquest speaks with Sam Goodman, safety consultant, author, podcaster and Human Organizational Performance (HOP) expert.

Sam is convinced that upfront and honest conversations are needed to cultivate safety improvement. He believes the profession has stagnanted for too long and EHS professionals are often overworked and undervalued.

After nearly walking away from safety, he realized that different approaches could make a big difference. A key starting point is redefining the role of an HSE professional and moving away from a “Safety - fix it!” mentality in the workplace.

He uses HOP principles to reassess reporting structures and create the right balance, alignment and expectations between safety practitioners and senior leaders. He also explores how seasoned pros and newbies can come together to take safety forward.

Sam shares his forthright opinions on safety education, recruitment, professional associations, conferences.and social media activity. However, he’s always constructive and remains positive about the future of safety, as encapsulated by his professional motto: “if you work hard and do right by people, the sky's the limit.”

♪ [music] ♪ - [Mary] My name is Mary Conquest. I'm your host for "Safety Labs by Slice," the podcast where we explore the human side of safety to support safety professionals. We move past regulations and reportables to talk about the core skills of safety leadership, empathy, influence, trust, rapport.

In other words, the soft skills that help you do the hard stuff. ♪ [music] ♪ Hi, there. Welcome to "Safety Labs by Slice." Whether you came to the safety profession through working your way up from the tools to management, or you're a fresh graduate from a postsecondary OHS program, there are some features of the job that might surprise you.

That was the case for our guest today. And a lot of the things he discovered through experience, well, they sucked. So much so that he was ready to leave the profession. Fast forward to today, and he's a published author, podcaster, and enthusiastic safety professional. So how did he make that shift and what did he wish he'd known before he started working in safety? I'll ask him all about it in today's episode.

A quick warning for those with delicate ears, some of the language in this interview may be a bit salty, so adjust your sets accordingly. Sam Goodman may already be known to you as "The HOP Nerd." That's the name of his podcast, where he opines on all things human and organizational performance, EHS, OHS, and whatever else is on his mind. Sam came to safety 11 years ago from a background as a firefighter.

He's worked as an HSE and safety manager, as an employee and a contractor, and for the last several years, as an independent consultant. He describes himself as a "betterment evangelist, an organizational culture geek, and a HOP nerd on a mission to make safety suck less." He's the author of several books, including memoir and fiction as well as five books about the safety profession.

Sam joins us from Phoenix. Welcome.

- [Sam] Hello, thanks for having me.

- So for listeners who aren't familiar with Sam's first book, it's called Safety Sucks!: The Bullshit in the Safety Profession They Don't Tell You About. And that pretty much sums up the contents. Now, readers could be tempted to assume that it's just a volume of complaints from a disgruntled worker, but it's actually very positive. Can you talk to me about the tension between calling out what sucks and holding hope for the future of the industry?

Were you worried about chasing good people away?

- A little bit. Yeah, I think for sure. And I kind of note that in a couple places in the book that I was really fearful with that, that I didn't want to scare away folks from the profession because God knows we need good people in the safety profession. And anyone that has ever had the pleasure of trying to hire a safety professional for your organization, you know that there's just not a ton of them out there.

Right? I think we're starting to see more and more, which is good. I think that's awesome. We're getting a lot more folks into this kind of world of occupational safety and health. To get back to that, it wasn't to scare anybody off, but I was kind of stuck in this position where I'm like, "We need to make this better." I'd gotten to a point in my career where I was just kind of tired of accepting things kind of how they were.

And I really wanted to see us kind of grow beyond maybe some of these more, I don't want to say traditional, but kind of these previously held views of the safety practitioner themselves, kind of that defined role that I'd kind of walked into as a practitioner, and then that turning out to be not exactly what I expected it to be. So I didn't want to necessarily scare people away, I wanted to make sure the folks that were coming fresh into this profession, no matter how they found their way into it, were just aware of these issues, just aware of kind of the things that you would come into contact with because nobody told me that when I first started.

Looking at it from the outside looking in, it really just seemed like sunshine and rainbows. This is just everything's awesome. This is going to be cool. I'm going to go change the world and boom. And some of that was me being naive, obviously, right? As a green, young safety professional, I think we can all say that all of us when we first started in this job are very naive.

We had this idea that we're going to go change the world and all those people that came before us, they just didn't know what they were doing. I'm going to be the one that finally does it. Right? So some of it was that, but then a lot of it was the profession that I walked into. And so I'd got to a point where I'm like, we need to air some of this stuff. We need to drag some of this stuff out into the sunshine so we can get some sunlight on it. We need to get everything on the table and have a real deal conversation about how we can leave this profession better than how we found it.

That was the point. How do we leave this profession better than how we found it?

- Right. And for those who don't know, I mean, some of the impetus for this was that you actually had a really tough time. You got to a point where you were ready to walk away. Can you just briefly tell the story of, like, what was going on then and what actually shifted that changed your mind?

- Sure. So a few different things. A few different things. And I won't go too far down the rabbit hole of HOP stuff and safety differently stuff, but that is a part of this story, for sure, with me. A lot of where I was getting to, I was just obviously the way that the profession was treated, kind of by organizations, that kind of stuff, where it's like, safety's different, right?

Or safety professionals are different. We can treat everybody else in one particular way. Safety professionals are almost othered in a sense, right? Same, but your profession safety super-duper important. So you got to be here always. You have to work overtime, unpaid always. You have to be here constantly.

You have to be everywhere all at once. When bad things happen, you're kind of going to be the punching bag for management when we don't know who else to blame. Like, that kind of stuff. There was always kind of that element of and othering happening in the profession. But more so than even that because those things you can usually overcome pretty easily. I won't say easily, but you can overcome with some effort by spending time with leaders, finding better companies, talking to your managers, and kind of better defining a role for yourself as a practitioner kind of setting better expectations.

A lot of those things come more from probably misaligned expectations and any time that you have misaligned expectations, chaos generally tends to ensue, right? So you can kind of work on that kind of stuff sometimes. But I think the part that really left me frustrated on top of all that, and I think where a lot of that was kind of born from was probably our more traditional views or more traditional approaches and tactics to safety overall, right?

The general beliefs around safety. And I really got to the point to where, you know, post-event, post something not great happening, you know, we would blame, and shame, and retrain people. We would fire people. You know, there would be people that would be injured, and we would meet hurt with more hurt and say, "You shouldn't have been so stupid. You should have paid more attention." I was really just tired and frustrated with the way that we treated the workforce. I was really just kind of over it with the way that we dehumanized the workforce, especially around safety-related things.

And I did. Kind of that built up over the course of about four or five years to where there was kind of this one kind of turning point for me. And building up to this, I'd had a friend that I'd shared a cubicle with at a location, office space was a little tight. So we were kind of shoved all into a cubicle together. And he had kind of recognized that I was having some struggles and he had been recently exposed through a workshop to Sidney Dekker.

And he had brought me a book by Sidney Dekker, and it was "Safety Differently," which is probably not the right place to start if you're not super-familiar with safety differently or kind of HOP-based stuff. I'd spent some time talking to Sidney and he said, "Well, why did you start with that book? That's dense, right?" But I'm a nerd. So I enjoyed it. But I'd kind of started to realize that there was some different approaches that we could take, that, you know, we didn't have to blame, and shame, and retrain workers, that maybe these more traditional views that, the organizations I was working for at least, were kind of holding onto, maybe there was something else out there that was better as far as the treatment of the folks that we were supposed to be caring for.

But so that's a little bit of background that was building up to this story I was going to share with you. We had had this gigantic, gigantic safety cookout. This gigantic celebration at one of the locations that I was at. And, I mean, it was a massive gathering. I mean, we had a DJ, we had, like, balloons, like, executives from all over the world had fallen in, like, people were shaking hands and kissing babies.

Like, it was, like, the whole shabang. It was just the gigantic gathering. And what we were celebrating was zero, right? We had gone a year without an OSHA recordable. And I'm sitting there and I'm still kind of stewing, and all this stuff that I was picking up from reading Sidney's work and then finding Todd Conklin's stuff and everybody else's. And I'm sitting there going, "This is insane to me. Like, this is just insane."

And so I'm sitting there in front of a banner that's like, "We finally made it to zero. We're all never going to have an accident, again," kind of thing. And everybody's, like, holding their trophy. Like, we finally cared enough to stop hurting people. And then that same day an employee suffered a life-altering injury at that site. And I was just done at that point. That was the turning point.

Building up to that moment, I was ready to leave. I was just like, "I can't do this anymore. I clearly just can't do this." I had a box packed under my desk ready to go. So whenever the BS got to a certain level, I was just going to haul butt out of there and go do something else. Maybe not safety. I mean, there was a lot of thought put into maybe just leaving the profession completely, high-risk industries completely.

But, in that moment, the reason why I share that with you is, in that moment, I realized that we needed to do things differently. And, in that moment, I committed to seeking out, trying to make things better. That was the entire point of that story is I found myself, in my head, playing this out like, "I can't leave this. This is not right, and I've got to be part of fixing this. I've got to be involved in fixing this."

And that was that shift. And I remember the thought in my head was that, "I will gladly get fired trying to do the right thing from any organization. I will gladly get fired trying to take us in a better direction from any organization." No skin off my back, gladly. Gladly jump in and get fired trying to do the right thing. So that was the turning point. That was kind of the build-up over those four, or five, or six years, however long it was to then discovering that there was a better way to seek out what we were trying to seek out and almost leaving, and then finding myself in a position of not wanting to leave anymore, of actually wanting to render things better than how I found them.

- Awesome. Well, I'm going to talk about a few of the things that you mention as big issues that you see needing to be fixed. And ironically, the first one is what you call safety, fix it. So can you describe what that phrase means to you and how you see it play out?

- Sure. I think anybody that's been around the profession for a second automatically know exactly where I'm going with that. They hear, "Safety, fix it," they know. That's that safety person there on-site, at a location, in their office. I mean, beats down the door and goes, "Oh my God, I've just walked past somebody out there about to kill themselves. You need to go do something about that."

And, of course, the first thing that pops in our head is like, "Why didn't you do something about that if they're about to die, right? Why didn't you say, "Hey, you might want to come down here? Let's figure out what's going on." It's that. It's that desire for the safety practitioner in an organization to be basically the safety Easy Button for the company. Safety, fix it, is really about the safety professional being the Easy Button and/or the kind of counterweight for incompetent leadership in the organization.

It's that, right? And we see that play out a lot of times in organizations where it's like, our leaders are not really good at dealing with people. They're really screwing things up. Let's not focus on that. Let's throw a safety professional on the other side of the scale to balance that out. So when they're out there, you know, kind of running people into the ground, we'll send out the safety professional to say, "Look, there's no such thing as time pressure."

That's part of that kind of safety fix-it mentality. It really comes back to the Easy Button thing. Is it's that organizations are looking at that going, "We're going to hire someone to manage safety for us." And we all know how that kind of works out. It ends up with crap safety management systems, crap safety programs, and it ends up with a burnout safety professional that you're going to go through at least one or two a year almost at that point.

You're just going to cycle people out. And that could be down to something as simple as, "Hey, you know, there was a trip hazard out there, you need to go do something about that. Hey, there was an event, you're the punching bag now. Hey, there's this? Hey, there's that." If there's anything that's even remotely, could even remotely be tied into being safety-related, it automatically goes to the practitioner to manage, to take care of, to own, to run to ground.

The one that sticks out to me is I was at a site years back, early on in my profession, and they're like, "Hey, listen, we need more chairs in the lunchroom. That's a safety thing. You need to figure out how to order more chairs and get more chairs in the lunchroom." It's that. Right? That's safety, fix it.

- It sounds to me it's a lot to do with reliance and responsibility. So I actually want to read a quote that you wrote about this that says, "Let's be honest, a good portion of people do not crave self-reliance. In fact, they often desire the total opposite. These people desire dependence." So that's tied in, right, with that safety, fix it?

- Right. Exactly.

- So how do you overcome that now that, you know, our newbies are listening to this? What do you do to shift that?

- So for me, it was kind of back to a point that we're just talking about is redefining the role within your organization. So if you're in an organization that's... And that's not always possible. I'll throw that in there as well. Right? That's not always possible, but I can touch on that in a second. But it's defining a role that's based on actual positive influence impact, right?

So let's probably start there is that, a role that's made up of safety, fix it, is just ineffective. It just doesn't work super good. Right? You have one person running around trying to fix all the safety problems of an organization, that just never works out. It just always ends up bad. And so it's redefining that role, starting out with a better definition of the practitioner, one that's focused on creating the most impact, the most bang for your buck that, that safety practitioner can actually focus on.

And it's back to kind of aligning those expectations in reality. I think that's, some of it is that organizations just generally don't know why they hire safety practitioners. Because you'll hear stuff that's like to manage our safety programs, to take care of our people, to keep our people safe. And what that generally translates to is we have no clue, right? It's just safety stuff.

Just to do all the safety stuff. And so what you see is without those really kind of clear, defined...that clear definition of what the practitioner should do without those clear kind of that clear role and responsibility to find we as practitioners, even some of the most seasoned ones, it has nothing to do with being green really at this point, it's like, I know as a professional what I can do.

Like, I know kind of what's in my wheelhouse to manage. I know what I can touch. I know what I can influence. I kind of know how to do that. Now, the organization in these heavy safety, fix it, kind of organizations, they have a completely different idea of what the practitioner should do. And so anytime that you're going to see that misalignment, of course, there's just going to be heartache and grief. It's just going to be horrible.

As we said earlier, it's just chaos is going to ensue in these situations because I know what I need to be doing or what I believe I need to be doing. The organization has a completely different thought on that. And then, so when I'm not meeting those expectations because I don't know that I need to meet them or they're just completely impossible to meet because they're just not based in reality, it's not going to work for us. So it's back to that point it's kind of bringing those things together and that's through conversation.

I don't mean to pull this too far down into, like, the squishy bits, but it is. It's sitting down with whoever your leader is, whatever the organization is that you're working within, and having that conversation, "Let's talk about how we can better define what my role is. Let's talk about what I can actually do, what's based in reality, where we can get the most impact out of this position. And then let's go forward with that rather than safety manages safety anything because that just doesn't work."

- I think that, that would be a good solution too for new safety professionals who maybe are, you know, you don't want to speak up, you don't want to stand out, you don't want to say, no, maybe you have a bit of imposter syndrome. Like, you know, I'm in this role and I've got all these responsibilities, but I don't think I can do it. So having that conversation is, although difficult, probably super important, right? Not just for them, but for you.

- Yeah. And it can be a little tough, you know, especially if you're coming into an organization that's not as open to maybe having some of those more difficult conversations, right? Because back to the practitioner being able to have that conversation, there has to be an environment in which that conversation can take place. Because if I go to say, "Hey, I want to talk about my job." And they say, "No, no, we've already got that figured out for you. You just go do this."

It's probably not going to work out very well. And that's where, you know, I never like to encourage folks to just leave jobs, but sometimes that is the answer. If you find yourself in an organization that just does not value you as a practitioner, that does not value your voice, your input around this, or anything else, then maybe that is the answer. You should maybe go find somewhere that values you more. They probably don't deserve you.

It's probably the nicest way to say that. If you're trying to be proactive and have that conversation about creating an impactful role for yourself and they shut you down, I don't know that they deserve you.

- So something that we haven't discussed a lot on this show, but you talked about quite a bit in the book that I found really interesting is the difference that a reporting structure can make and how reporting structures tend to be wonky. Like, just weird, nonsensical, confusing. So can you tell us a bit about that and what a bad reporting structure looks like and what a good one might look like?

- Sure. And even in the book, in any of my books that the folks out there that have read them, they know that I tend to try to not get too prescriptive, and I kind of fall more into this thought of like, whatever works best for you is what works best for you. Right? To throw some of my hillbilly twang, I'm from rural Appalachia, I always say that there's more than one way to skin a cat, right? And there's probably a million right ways to skin a cat, right? There's a million right ways to do the same thing.

So don't take anything that I say as prescriptive. I don't want you to just take it and run with it because it might not work for you. Focus on what works and works well for you. But from my experience in working in various different organizations, in various different reporting structures, one of the main things that I know I struggled with is that there was your reporting structure looked almost like a spider web, right? You're kind of here in the middle and there you report to everybody because you're the safety person, right?

The safety person has to report to everybody. So you would be reporting to a safety manager who was technically your boss, but not really, right? They basically approved your time and your PTO. And I'll just use PTO as an example. That's probably the easiest way to highlight this is I'm going to send a PTO request to my safety manager, but then I have to send that to four directors.

- That's paid time off...

- Go ahead.

- ...for those who aren't American.

- Paid time off. Apologies. Apologies.

- That's okay.

- Yeah. Paid time off, paid time off. So you're trying to take a vacation. There we go. You're trying to take a vacation and I'm going to have to send that request to 14 people and all 14 are going to have to agree that I need a vacation, right? Because, especially if you're, like, a site safety manager and you're working in some larger corporate structure, you're going to be there on-site. You might have a manager on-site.

You might be reporting into an operations manager. You might be reporting into some other manager on-site as well, and then your safety manager and then somebody in corporate, and there's all this just kind of wonky confusion that happens with that. And confusion is the best way to describe it. I think the more clarity you can provide in that role, if you can get rid of at least as many of those stupid little dotted line connections on your org chart for your safety pros, it's probably better, right?

It's just less complicated. That's just helpful. And I've seen this in multiple different ways where you'll see some that are tied into operations directly, some that are completely independent of operations, where safety has its own kind of reporting chain almost as an independent body of the organization that goes all the way up into the board, through its own VPs, and directors, and all those kind of things.

And so I've seen them all kind of work not great and good. They all kind of have pros and cons. So just as a good example of probably a con to that completely separate reporting structure is that it sometimes creates a lot of animosity between operations and safety because you're completely independent of one another. It seems to kind of drive some of that team element out when used incorrectly is probably the caveat that I would throw in there.

If you have folks in either one of those chains that really don't like the other side, then things end up devolving to not great stuff, really fast. It's just mud slinging then at that point. But then on the other side of that, if you, as a safety practitioner are reporting directly into a manager of operations, a plant, or site, or facility manager of some kind that really just doesn't understand safety that much, or you have an opinion that's counter to what their opinion is, and especially if you guys don't have that kind of relationship that we're talking a little bit about before, where you don't really have that ability to have those tough conversations, then maybe your valid input or concerns is just automatically, just override it.

You know, just overridden. You just kind of start there and you say, "Hey, look, we probably shouldn't do that because somebody's going to get hurt." And they said, "No, no, no, it's fine." That's your boss. What are you going to do at that point? Right? What are you going to do?

So I think back to kind of my beginning point of that is that there's, you can tie a safety pro into your organization, probably a million different ways based off of where your organization is currently at, based off of where your organization is at culturally, based off of the relationships that, that professional has within your organization. It's going to vary a lot what works best for you. But I think that even goes back to that point of having that conversation.

I think that's probably the biggest piece that I can share around that safety, fix it, or some of those other things is getting together at a table and talking about what's going to create the most impactful role that we possibly can because that's it. It's a matter of impact, right? It's a matter of impact.

- So clarity, clarity, clarity.

- Lots of clarity. Lots of clarity. Confusion is not fun for anybody. Right? And when we see those things, we're talking about, I used the vacation example, what's that going to do for a safety professional that, okay, I got to, number 13 approved, but number 14 said I can't go. Where does that leave that practitioner? Just feeling, right, "I'm going to not like number 14 that just denied my request to go to Hawaii. Right? I want to go to Hawaii. What the heck? I've been working 90 hours a... It's insane."

So that clarity, you just eliminate as much of that confusion as you can. That would be my end goal is trying to make it as clear as you possibly can, opening up all of those chains of communication, giving that professional the ability to skip level, right, to be able to have conversations above whoever their direct leader is, especially in those more challenging situations.

Those are all things that should be okay within an organization. Those shouldn't be things that we're going, "Oh my gosh, can you believe that they...? I'm their manager and they had a conversation with a director." Those shouldn't be concerns. Those should be positive things in a organization that should be occurring.

- So let's talk a little bit about safety professionals, newbies, and more seasoned ones. So I'd like to start by reading a quote from the book again. And that is, "Amazing people have been in the trenches fighting for betterment over the span of their careers. Do not..." Sorry. This is speaking to new professionals. "Do not be so naive as to think that they simply chose not to make things better, that they're lazy, uncaring, or unknowledgeable. Many of these practitioners have pulled organizations and industries from the dark ages."

So what would you like new safety people to understand about seasoned safety professionals?

- A good chunk of it is that, right, is that. So we were just talking about my experience, and I think it's a shared experience for many safety pros when you start into this new. You find yourself going in and going, "Well, why does everyone... Oh, I can fix this. This is easy. Easy-peasy lemon squeezy. I got this."

You're green and naive, and you're just certain that these people just aren't doing their jobs, right? You're going to walk in and you're going to just fix the world. No one's ever going to get hurt again. You're going to just make this organization the epitome of safety excellence. And then you quickly get crushed by the world. You quickly get crushed by the fact that that's just not how that works.

So for new pros, I would like for them to really understand, kind of what I was hitting on there in the book, is that these folks have been fighting these battles. These folks have been clawing trench warfare, you know, a few feet at a time. They have been clawing organizations forward for the entire course of their career. They've not just got there and sat down in the chair and gone, "Well, I've sat here for 30 years and did nothing."

That's not what happened. Those folks have been fighting through all these different evolutions of what we call safety, the safety at work, going through all that, bringing new thought into the organizations, trying to pull it forward. So what I would like for them to really focus on is to take that stuff and carry it into the future, not necessarily... And what I mean by that is not just picking up what they've done and say, "This is what we're doing," but building upon it, making things better.

You know, we're taking those lessons that we've learned as organizations. Well, we tried that for a long time, that doesn't work so we're going to leave that back there. We're going to try something a little different, but this worked really well. So I guess what I'm saying is don't go in and seek to burn everything down. Even as I kind of talk about traditional safety stuff, and just for lack of a better term, we'll say new view kind of safety stuff, the idea isn't to just burn everything out of an organization and say, "We...start from scratch."

There's so much great stuff from those traditional ideas that we need to hang onto. So I would use that as an example for new safety process, like, take what's good, carry it forward, make it better. If it sucks, work on getting rid of it. Add to make things better, but don't look back on those seasoned pros or those folks that have come before you, and just take the knowledge that you know now, that we understand better about the safety of work, and say, "Look, how stupid they were," because they were operating with the information they had at the time, and they did a pretty damn good job of it.

So there is a healthy dose of kind of paying your respect to those folks that have come before you and carrying those lessons forward. Not just living in them, but carrying them forward, making them better, and moving safety beyond, right? Moving it into kind of this next generation.

- Okay. So on the flip side, what do you think season safety pros need to know about their role in improving the profession as a whole, and how should they be sort of looking at or treating new safety pros?

- So I think probably one of the biggest things here is being willing to part with some of the old. That's where... And I'll share this, I've shared this before, where as we start talking about doing safety things differently, your toughest audience is seasoned safety professionals, right? It's not managers. It's not leaders.

Those are the folks that you think it's like, "Oh, I'm going to go in here and tell people that not all accidents are preventable." Managers are going to look at me like I have an arm growing out of my head. Like, they're not going to know what to think about this. And managers are like, "Yeah, duh, like, I know that." You tell that to a 30-year veteran of traditional safety, and they'll be like, "You're insane. Everything is preventable. We get to zero, right?" It's the safety profession, those seasoned folks that tend to want to hold onto that because we've been teaching it that way for a very, very long time.

We're the ones that were teaching organizations that, get your safety pyramid, focus completely on prevention, get to zero. All of those things, that was our baby, right? That was our baby. So when a new safety professional comes in and kind of calls your baby ugly, sometimes we tend to grab those reins harder and pull them back and say, "No, mine don't touch." Right?

So some of it is letting go, being willing to turn over those reins to that new generation of professionals because they're going to take what you've done and carry it forward kind of as we were just saying. They're going to add, to make better, grow that, evolve that more into the direction that we're trying to go now. So again, turning over the reins is a big piece of that. I think letting go and allowing those safety professionals to run a little bit because as seasoned safety professionals, we want to protect them.

That's some of it. I think it comes from a good place. We're like, "No, no, no, don't go do that. I've been there, done that. I'll take care of it." Let them go experience stuff. Let them fail. Let them fall down. Let them scrape their knee.

There's so much of this profession that you have to learn by doing. You have to earn the calluses sometimes on your hands from doing the work, sometimes on your butt from it getting chewed on, but you have to earn some of these calluses to... Because it is. A lot of it is learned by doing, right? You have to go out and actually experience some of these things because so much of this is just wacky stuff that's thrown at us from all directions that you could never in a million years imagine that situation and now you're dealing with it.

So you do have to learn your way through. So again, letting go of the reins, giving them the ability to go out and try stuff, fall down, figure stuff out on their own, you know, within a box, right? Don't let them go out and, like, burn the world down or anything, but allow them to go out and experience that kind of taste of failure. Let them go out and learn from those things. I think is really, really powerful. That's a huge part where I think that more seasoned safety professionals focusing on leaving this profession better than how they found it because they're on the tail end of their career, many of them, mentoring those folks, mentoring the next generation.

We've not done a really good job of being safety mentors for new professionals coming into this world. I, myself, I was just lucky enough to find some. I talked to a lot of other folks that seek them out and never seem to find a good mentor within this space. So I think that there is something there around mentoring that next generation and giving them the reins, allowing them to move forward and figure stuff out on their own.

- So where is the balance then between personal responsibility of the safety pro to kind of have the right mindset and organizational responsibility to, you know, create the right environment?

- Yeah. And so I think that, for sure, like, as professionals, we have to tune our mindset towards, you know, that focus on leaving the profession better than how we found it, being open to kind of those things. You know, we're talking about having the conversation earlier about sitting down with your employer and kind of having that conversation around impactful role and kind of all those bits of that.

But I think on the organization side of things is we create this environment or we have to create the environment where that's possible. Right? You have to be able to have that conversation. You have to create that environment in which a practitioner can come to leadership, come to the organization and say, "Look, I want to talk about my role. I want to talk about my responsibilities. I want to talk about how we can create the most bang for our buck out of my role." You have to focus on that.

You know, right? And so I think that so much of this is dependent upon those more historic safety management techniques or tactics. So if you have kind of that idea that the organization or that what safety is, and that starts with kind of zero, or that starts with kind of the organization's current definition of safety, and then that drives what the safety practitioner does, right? So we go from that definition to just as an example of safety being an outcome to manage, who's better to manage that outcome than the person that literally has safety in their title?

So the safety practitioner becomes a manager of safety outcomes. They become a manager of safety things. So we've got to be willing to let go of some of those ideas, a few of those being kind of the safety practitioner being the manager of safety outcomes, this idea that we do more, and more, and more safety, that's how we do safety better is just by a constant dose of more safety stuff, who better to do that than the safety practitioner?

And then, you know, this other piece of that is, or in line with that is what we do as organizations is all that safety stuff, we throw it into the practitioner's safety junk drawer as we refer to it in some other works. And what that means... I've got a junk drawer, everybody's got a junk drawer. If you're anything like me, you probably have, like, multiple junk drawers. And what happens is you end up putting, like, everything that you don't know what to do with, everything that you don't have another home for you pour into your junk drawer at home, right?

As organizations, we do that. And unfortunately, with safety stuff, the person that's left to manage that safety junk drawer, the person that has to live inside of that safety junk drawer is the safety professional. So that comes from all this idea of more, and more, and more safety is, how we do safety better? The safety practitioner is the person to manage those things. So you end up throwing a bunch of stuff that's really, really, really important into that drawer for them to deal with, you end up throwing a bunch of crap that is just crap in there for them to deal with, like focusing on chair management in the lunchrooms or the ply of TP that has to go into the Porta Johns.

And we just expect them to go forth and do that, right? So that's kind of how we end up into this safety fix-it mode. So as organizations, until we're ready to let go of some of these ideas around what a safety professional is, how they can have an impact on the organization, and kind of what our role in that is as an organization, we have to be able to let go of those things so that a new and better definition, a more impactful role for that practitioner can actually emerge.

We get to that more impactful role by having conversations with safety professionals. Right? As organizations, we've got to sit down, sit across the table as we were saying before, and figure out what that role looks like specific to our organization. So I think it is a balance right there. There's a good balance there between mindset and the organizational systems and structures that, that professional operates in.

But ultimately that system that the professional operates in is going to drive what that professional does. It's going to drive their actions. It's going to drive their behaviors. So if we do have a system that is focused on the safety practitioner being that, right, the manager of safety things, the Easy Button for the organization, you're not going to overcome it just by saying, "We're going to come up with a better role."

We have to be willing to part with those things, to part with those assumptions, and create better assumptions about what the practitioner is within our organizations.

- Okay. So this is a bit of a game that I haven't done before with a guest. But I'm going to try some rapid fire. And this is going to be super hard. I'll just say that in advance. But I'm going to list something. It's something you talk about in the book, so I know you've thought about it.

And can you tell me, like, in one sentence, what's wrong with it, and how do we improve it? Are you up for that?

- We can see what happens. If it's horrible, you can cut it out. Right?

- That's true.

- If I totally bomb, you can cut me out. Right? So I've never seen these, but I'm willing to try. Let's see what happens. And the one-sentence thing is probably the struggle. So we'll see what's going to happen. Me and one sentence, I don't know how well that works, but we'll see.

- So the first one is anyone can do safety.

- So the problem with anyone can do safety is that what we see in organizations a lot of times is that we just tend to throw people at it. And what I mean by that, if you've been around safety for just more than a second, I know I'm over one sentence on the front end of this, but if you've been around for safety for more than the second, you've seen, like the, "Don't worry about it. I just hired my cousin to do safety. Anybody can do safety."

Right? We view it as just being this super-duper easy thing. So what happens is organizations just hire anybody that kind of they want to and just kind of throw in there completely unqualified. And we see that a ton. So to go to the other side of that, to the fix it is I think you just focus on hiring actual safety people. So I've seen that a bunch with organizations where it's like their safety people aren't safety people. Like, any of them.

They just throw people at it. Doesn't work out very well, right? Having a good list of qualifications, doing really good interviews, those kind of basic things, the same way that we hire for other professional jobs, that's the fix. We hire for the safety profession. We treat it like an actual profession rather than just something anybody can do, and we just do it the same way we hire for other professions, like, focus on qualifications, good candidates, and on, and on, and on.

I don't know if that works. That was way more than one sentence, but we'll see.

- It was way more, but that's totally fine. Let's see what we can do. I've got a few more here, traditional formal safety education.

- So the problem that I have with traditional formal safety education, I'm not anti-safety education, so, please, don't take this the wrong direction. I get accused of being, like, the anti-college safety, which is not true at all. I think that there's a balance there. I think that we don't want to set the bar so high that we weed out folks that would be really, really good at this profession, but don't have a Ph.D.

We want to have various passive entry into this profession. And so the fear is that if we push that bar too far in the other direction, we're going to lose the potential for folks getting into this job and filling their way through it and kind of figuring it out, kind of getting mentored into this job. And if we go too far in the other direction, we kind of find ourselves back at this idea of just throwing safety people into the profession with little to no qualifications.

So I think it's the balance, right? It's creating a balance. How can people find their way into this profession? How can they find their way into this profession through a variety of different journeys?

- So the next one is professional associations.

- So the beef that I have with professional association, not too big of a beef. The problem that I have with a lot of professional associations is they continue to just seem to stick with what they've always taught. So what I found is that we don't see a lot of innovation coming out of our professional organizations.

I think they're a powerful resource for say to professionals, but they should also be a powerful resource in bringing about change to the profession about evolving safety. Because a lot of times, they just seem to be echo chambers. So that's the fear. That's the problem. How do we get them out of being echo chambers? And I think that's by bringing in more and more thought and being willing to kind of part with some of the old and embrace innovation and safety.

And those things have been counter for a really long time. Safety and innovation are not two words that we would normally put together, but that's what we have to put together is safety and risky innovation in a lot of ways, figuring out how to do things differently, figuring out how to grow in this space rather than doubling down in the ways that we've always done things.

- Okay. Now, this might be a very similar answer, but I'll throw it out in case there are nuances and that is safety conferences.

- Yeah. So very similar. Safety conferences, for me, the ones that I have gone to are amazing because I like to hang out with people. I've already established this fact that I'm a very peopley person. I like going. I like getting, seeing people that I know from the internet. I like seeing people that I know from organizations, from places that I've been, and just people that I know.

It's just amazing to get to spend time with them. But it's kind of the same thing, the offerings, I haven't really caught up to where the profession is at. And what I mean by that is we're teaching a lot of, kind of the old traditional things and not many folks are at least mid-level to senior level kind of safety practitioners, we don't want to go learn more about safety pyramids.

We want to go learn about how we can take something, we just want to learn something new. We want to learn something in safety innovation. We want to learn something about culture. We want to learn something that carries us forward because so many of our roles have evolved beyond being managers of safety stuff, so many of our roles have evolved beyond being the person that walks around, like, doing observations and telling people to be more safe.

The safety profession's job has evolved into being the curious learner, has evolved into being the person that the organization looks to for cultural things a lot of times, the person that we just end up with all these kind of squishier bits, but so many of the safety conferences still focus on, well, how do you manage confined spaces?

Which is great for somebody that's never done that before. If, like, you want to teach people about asbestos and lead, that's great. But most of us have been there and done that. So I'm not saying get rid of those offerings, it's offering something beyond just the technical aspect of our job, offerings beyond kind of those more traditional approaches to safety, offerings beyond those things that allow someone like myself or someone that's in a similar position as me or someone that's mid-senior, green, wherever, they can go out and learn actual new skills.

And so I think that's what's lacking and that's how you feel that void is teach us something new. We want to learn something new.

- Sounds good. Okay. So moving away from the rapid-fire quiz and away from the book even. You had a social media post recently criticizing the way some safety professionals use social media. Specifically, it was sharing videos of near misses or even horrific accidents. So what's your beef with that practice, and are there any constructive roles that social media can play in the safety profession?

- Yeah, so my beef with that is, and so we refer to it, and I say we, there's a small group of us of kind of LinkedIn rebels that don't kind of get into that groove of those things. And we refer to it as safety porn. And it kind of is. It's occupational murder porn. Like, I've seen videos on LinkedIn of people dying, like, actually getting killed on LinkedIn. And it's rampant.

Or if they're not dead, it's the kind of stuff you watch and you go, like, "They probably wish that they were." Like, just bad, gnarly stuff. Now, the problem is, first and foremost, like, that's the worst day that, that person has ever had. And now we're sharing it throughout the internet to where that person that is now dead, you want their family to stumble across a video of them dying at work. That seems like a really horrible thing to do.

Memorializing the worst day of their life. But beyond that, so often we share these things, and we use it as an opportunity to point at that person say, "Look at that stupid person that killed themselves. Look at that person. If they were more situationally aware, if they cared more about their safety, they wouldn't have got killed at work." That's horrible. That's even worse.

Right? And so we start with the video that we have zero understanding of, and then we armchair quarterback it and say, should've, would've, could've. Should have cared more, should have tried harder, should have followed the rules harder. And we use that as an opportunity to have this massive comment section. And again, I'll use it as LinkedIn because you can go find these on LinkedIn all day long and point at it and say, "My workers would never do that. Oh, I'm going to take this and I'm going to share it with my workforce and use it as an example to say, see that person, you should care more than they did so you don't die at work."

That's just dumb. It's just dumb. It doesn't really do anything. It's shock and awe. And I've never shocked and awed my workforces into not getting hurt. You just can't, right? You just can't.

So when you're taking those things and you're sharing them on social media, the other side of that is we usually snag those and we take them into our organizations and we use them in safety meetings. We use them in these kind of gatherings to talk about safety, and we point at them and say, "Don't be like that person." I think the struggle there is that you don't in the context, you don't understand that event. You don't understand what actually happened. And it's so easy to look at those things and just blame somebody for "killing themselves."

That's not what happened. There's a million other things at play there. So it belittles that person, it belittles their injury or their fatality. It's sharing something that we have no understanding of, at least... It's just horrible stuff.

- So you wrote, "We do not need to just teach safety pros what the rule book says, we need to teach them how to think." And you specifically mentioned soft skills. If you were to develop your own curriculum, what soft skills would you focus on to teach tomorrow's professionals?

- I think the biggest thing that I would push safety professionals towards is this idea of focusing on, growing, and maintaining relationships within their organization. Right? And so if you got to go out and you got to mean it. And I think that a lot of safety pros have found their way into this profession because they genuinely do care about the folks that work within these organizations.

They genuinely do care about the folks around them. They genuinely do want to make things better, to make things suck just a little bit less. They want to render their work world just a little bit better. So I think it's not hard for us as safety pros since that's where we're starting from, but you have to go out and you have to mean it because the workforce, they can see through that bullshit real fast if you don't mean it, right?

They've seen that song and dance. They've been around this. They know if you're going out there and you're trying to play with them and pretend, like, you care, pretend, like, you want a relationship with them, it's not going to work out well for you. So if there was one thing, it's that. I had an old mentor once tell me, and I'd worked for them on a project, one of my first projects ever in the safety world, they tasked me every morning to go out and spend time talking with people.

But the only rule was is I couldn't talk to them about work stuff. I couldn't talk to them about safety stuff. Couldn't be work. Couldn't be safety. Couldn't be anything. Here I am as a new safety professional and I'm like, "What do you want me to talk about?" You go out and you get to know people or you go out and you build those real and meaningful relationships with folks.

And as a people nerd, I'm a peopley person. It's awesome because you get to know, you get to know folks. You get to know that, yeah, their kid's playing a state softball championship next weekend. And, like, John, he knows how to make the best chili in the world. And you get to learn all these, like, cool little nerd facts about people and it's great. It's great from that end of things.

But then you just genuinely have good, awesome relationships with the folks that you're trying to help with those workforces, and it makes problem-solving a lot easier because they know you, you know them, you just know each other and you could have real and raw conversations about stuff and you know each other's intent. Like, I'm not trying to get you, you're not trying to get me. We're here trying to get through this thing together.

We're friends. Like, we know each other. That's the most valuable soft skill that you can have as a safety professional. It's just that continued focus on growing relationships, meaning it, meaning it. Again, meaning it. Can't fake it, got to really mean it. And just continuing on that with that.

Just relationship growing them, maintaining them, and meaning it. It goes so much farther than anything else because if you think about that, if you have a challenge that you have to get through, and I have to go talk to so-and-so about it and I don't know so-and-so. We've all been in that situation. I don't know that person, how hard is that to just, like, basically cold call somebody and be like, "Hey, listen, we got this really big challenge and you're going to help me fix it."

That usually doesn't go over very well on either end of that. But if you know that person, you go, "Hey, listen, let's do this." You're there already. It's just one less layer of crap that you have to deal with. Right? It greases those gears. And more importantly for me, as I was kind of mentioning already is it just allows me to do what I want to do anyways.

That's one of the biggest reasons why I found myself into this job is I just really love getting to know people. I just really love knowing about their lives. I just really love getting to learn about their jobs, just getting to know them on a deeper level. And that's exactly what we should be doing within our work worlds as safety professionals is getting to know the folks that are out there getting shit done day in and day out and maintaining those relationships.

- Awesome. So now, if you could travel back in time to yourself at the beginning of your safety career, I know you had work before safety, but if you could only give yourself one piece of advice, what do you think it would be? Not the whole book.

- Yeah, that's a big one. But so I think it would probably be this. It would be this idea of not accepting things how they are. Right? And what I mean by that is that as safety professionals, green safety professionals, when you find yourself into this world of the professional practice of occupational safety and health, you often find yourself immersed into a world of organizational beliefs, of rules, procedures, and they're all a little different from organization to organization.

And especially when you're new and you find yourself in you're first organization, you kind of start with this idea of like, this has to be right. Like, there's people here that have been doing this for 30 or 40 years. Like, who am I to question any of these? Who am I? I've been doing this for a month. Like, surely I can't question these things. Surely they know exactly what they're doing.

That's not always true. Right? So I think this idea of being willing to kind of let go of that fear and stepping forward and being like, "I don't know that I necessarily agree with that. I don't know that that's necessarily the best way. Do we really want to...?" When you're green, you have a really hard time doing that.

That would be the piece of advice that I would give to new, green safety Sam would be that is, like, "Don't be shy. Don't be afraid to step out and challenge. Don't be afraid to dissent. If it looks like bullshit, it smells like bullshit, it's probably bullshit. Say that it's bullshit. That's okay." And what I found is, especially as I went through my career and kind of grew in my career, what I found is that the more that you do that, you start to realize that, wait a second, like, they actually value that.

Most organizations, good organizations, they value dissent. They value those things. They want to hear...they want to hear a dissenting opinion. They want to hear that, "Hey, you might be going in the wrong direction. Let's take a look at this." A good organization will value those things. So don't be afraid to do it. Don't be shy, lean into that, but you got to be willing to let go of that fear.

Because I know when I was new and green in the profession, I didn't want to be the person that was challenging a safety practitioner that had been doing this for 100 years. You know, I didn't want to be the person that was telling an organization that had been doing this work for 100 years that I think you're doing it wrong. Like, who wants to do that?

And so I learned that there's a lot of that is in approach, right? How you bring those things forward? There's a huge piece of that. It's not just kind of ripping off your fear Band-Aid and then jumping out and going, "Everything sucks here." That's that won't work out well for you anywhere that you're at. Right? But starting from a place of genuine care, trying to render things better, and approaching it from that lens saying, "I'm not so sure that this is the best way forward. Can we talk about this? Can we have a conversation about this?"

Be willing to do that and approach it from the right direction, yeah, that would be the biggest thing I would tell myself. Because we tend to, especially when we're new, we're overly shy. We're not confident in kind of what we're thinking. We don't want to throw out half-formed ideas, even though we need to sometimes. We need to get that ball rolling on that thought, be willing to just use your voice, like, lean into what you know.

Let that stuff out and share that with the organization. And it does. It helps an absolute ton. That would be the one thing I would tell myself. I struggled with that a bit. Believe it or not, as loud and much as I talk now, I was a little quiet in the beginning of my career.

- I think that's pretty common. I think that's common. So now I'd like to ask you about practical resources. So obviously, there's your books, but are there particular books, or websites, or podcasts perhaps that you would recommend to listeners who want to learn more about anything we've talked about today?

- Yeah, for sure. So I always point people in the direction, if you want to learn more about doing safety differently, human and organizational performance, things like that, I always point people in a direction of Todd Conklin, Sidney Dekker, Bob Edwards has a great book out now on learning teams, Brent Sutton, and those guys have a great book out on learning teams and those things as well. So any of those kind of concepts there that you'd want to go out, and if you're into reading books, if you're a book nerd like I am, those are great places to start.

You know, just grab some of those books, start digging in. They're great reads. And if you're anything like me and just finding yourself kind of on this journey like I did early, early on, it set my role on fire. Like, it sent me down the rabbit hole of wanting to know everything that I could about these concepts. There's a great website, safetydifferently.com.

Tons of great articles from all of these different thought leaders and folks kind of in that space. So tons of free resources there as well. As far as podcasts go, I have to plug "The HOP Nerd." So I've got a podcast. But I will tell you that "The Safety of Work" is a excellent podcast. I will tell you that "Rebranding Safety" with James MacPherson is an excellent podcast, and there's just tons of them out there.

The Brent Sutton and the folks I was just telling you about with the learning team book, they have a podcast as well. So there's a lot of great resources out there for safety professionals. And I think that's what's amazing right now is that there's so many great safety books coming out, so many great safety podcasts coming out, so many great websites and resources that are just out there.

You just got to go dig around a little bit. So I know I named a few, but don't be... Google is your friend. Don't be afraid to just go out and start searching stuff out. Linkedin. There's so many folks publishing amazing content just on LinkedIn, right, from papers to video stuff and on, and on, and on, and on. It's great for me to see that because thinking back to my days as a green practitioner that just wasn't necessarily there.

Like, you might get a conference here or there, but nobody was really, like, giving away stuff for free on the internet and it's everywhere now. So I think we find ourselves in a great time for new safety... New and old. Not to throw the old word out there, but new and old, those folks who have been around a second too, there's just so much stuff. So I think if you just start looking, you dig just a little bit beneath the surface, you will find some great stuff out there, tons, and tons, and tons of stuff.

- I'd like to finish by getting your comments on a kind of professional motto that you've adopted. And that is if you work hard and do right by people, the sky's the limit.

- Yeah. That's it. I mean, you work hard and you do right by people and it really is the sky's the limit. You can go wherever you want to go in this profession. Something that I've heard shared a couple times from the GOAT, and I refer to him as the GOAT, Dr. Todd Conklin, is this idea of good work done for the right reasons. And that's it.

That's the working hard part is doing good work, doing it for the right reasons. If you're doing that, we've talked about focusing on relationships, we're talking about all these different things, like, focusing on taking care of people, actually caring for people. And I would tie into that, this idea of doing stuff with people, rather than to people, especially in this kind of world of safety. For a long time, we've kind of operated organizationally and as individual practitioners sometimes, like, I know what's best for people and I'm going to do it to them.

They surely don't know what's best for them, so I'm going to do this to them and make sure that they're safe. That's not it, right? That never works out well. Just think, just imagine yourself being told what to do. We don't like that as people. We're not really into that, that much, especially when somebody tells you what to do and then they're going to force you to do it. That never works out well.

So where I'm going with this is this idea of working hard and focusing on doing stuff with people, the people that you're seeking to help, the workforces that you're focusing on creating better organizations, do it with those organizations, do it with those people. And you really can take this wherever you want to. I think the results will amaze you just in that little shift of rather than trying to do stuff to people, focus on good work for the right reasons and doing it with people, and it will blow your mind.

- So now where can our listeners find you on the web?

- So you can find the podcast just about anywhere "The HOP Nerd Podcast," anywhere that you listen to podcasts. The easiest way to find me is just thehopnerd.com. You can find the podcast, you can find my books there. I have a bunch of resources there as well. If you go to the Resources page there, kind of going back to that, I'm constantly adding stuff. There's download stuff from videos to documents and things that can help you with human and organizational performance or kind of safety differently kind of things.

Linkedin is a great way to find me. The podcast is on LinkedIn under The HOP Nerd. But if you just search me, Sam Goodman, I'm constantly on there trying to share stuff and different resources there as well, and get into contact. So those are the easiest ways to find me. Or if you just want to send me an email, it's just thehopnerd@gmail.com. But, yeah, I'm out there.

I'm super easy to find.

- Awesome. Awesome. Well, I hope people take you up on that. So that's all the time we have for today. Thanks for our listeners, for supporting us and thanks to you, Sam, for sharing your thoughts today.

- Yeah, thanks for having me. This was awesome.

- And thanks to the Safety Labs team for all the things they do, finding and reaching out to guests, producing, video editing, audio editing, writing notes, and social posts, engaging with our audience, listening to my voice, ad nauseam I'm sure, and the list goes on. That's all for today folks. So bye for now. ♪ [music] ♪ Safety Labs is created by Slice.

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