The Safety Profession: Where are We and Where Do We Go From Here?

In this episode, Mary Conquest speaks with Dr Linda Martin. Linda has over 30 years of experience in occupational safety management across multiple industries and holds a Doctorate in Occupational Health and Safety. Additionally, she owns a successful consulting business, hosts a regular podcast, and is a sought-after speaker at safety industry events.

Dr Martin combines her extensive practical experience and academic knowledge to unpick the great safety theory debate. She’s not interested in which academic approach is right or wrong. Linda just wants safety professionals to focus on saving lives.

She believes that safety management has been overcomplicated by discussions about theory, with the subsequent rift between pseudo academics and boots-on-the-ground practitioners causing serious harm.

Linda urges HSE professionals from all sides of the debate to meet in the middle and take the practice of safety to a more effective level.

♪ [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, and welcome to "Safety Labs by Slice." Our guest today is no stranger to the safety podcasting world. Her name is Linda Martin, and she has opinions about safety in theory and in practice, about marginalization within the safety profession, and about what will take the practice of safety to a more effective level.

Today, we're going to have a discussion about all these topics and more to examine the safety profession, where do we go from here? Dr. Linda Martin is a sought-after speaker and thought leader in the risk, occupational health and safety, and industrial hygiene profession. She's also an influencer that sheds light on subjects ranging from safety to leadership, neurodiversity, total worker health, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and innovation.

Her technical expertise and leadership experience cover a wide range of subjects. With 30+ years in professional health safety, environmental, and quality practice, her delivery of relevant material and ideas brings with it a sound foundation of experience mixed with curiosity.

Dr. Martin's Ph.D. is in occupational health and safety. She also has two master's degrees, an MBA, and an MS in occupational safety management. Linda joins us today from outside Boston, Massachusetts. Welcome.

- [Dr. Martin] Hi. That's quite an intro. Thanks for that. Hopefully, I live up to it.

- Oh, I'm sure you will. I'm sure you will. So, to answer the question, where do we go from here in the safety profession, let's start by talking about where here is in your view. So there's been a pretty lively discussion on our LinkedIn page about new view safety and traditional safety. So, without going into where you think we need to move, how would you describe the current state of this debate or this discussion in the profession?

- I try to stay outside that debate, for the most part, okay? There are so many theories out there right now of how safety professionals should be implementing, how they should be plying their craft, what is the theory that you go by, what is the theory that I go by? And really, what we should be focusing on, which is something in between the theory and the actual application of the work, okay?

So when you said, you know, "Where do we need to get to from where we are?" I think we need to go backwards a little bit. I'm going to get a lot of crap for that, but I think safety professionals have gone into this realm of just, like, talking this stuff to death, like your LinkedIn page, and having this conversation. And what we really have gotten away from is actually being with the workers and helping them figure out what their ultimate goal is, which is to go home safe every day, right?

So I don't like any of that conversation about Safety-I, Safety-II, Safety Differently, HOP. I've always said, and I say this a lot in my own podcast, it just depends, okay? And it just depends right down to your specific company that you're working with or your specific workgroup that you're working with.

And all of those theories can apply at once, and I think we need to use a little bit of street smarts and a lot less of the book smarts and the "I'm going to invent a new theory." I think I saw somebody today on LinkedIn, and they said, "The new investigative theory of something rather," and I was just like, "I don't even know what that means." I mean, like, is that a thing?

Because the way I do safety is I get right down in there and whatever works is what works.

- So, would you say that there is...maybe it's moved too much into the too much talk, not enough walk kind of realm, too much debate about theory, I guess?

- A hundred percent. A hundred percent, right? So if we kind of take this back to a lot of things that I talk about, right, I talk about there's this divide, you know. We've got the people who think they're kind of pseudo-academics on one side. They have a degree in safety.

They're talking about all these theories. And on the other side, we have the boots on the ground, people that never talk about those things and don't have that degree in safety and are just out there working, helping keep people safe every day, right? And we need both, right, but the divide has become so great that we've got a lot of people over on the right hand over here with their degrees in safety talking about all this theory, and I never see any of them actually out there with the workers, right?

And by the same token, nobody's teaching the theory to the people who are boots on the ground and could use that help, right? And so I think the only way forward is to bring everybody together and move them forward together as a group, if that makes sense.

- Yeah, yeah, absolutely. What other issues do you see as currently problematic or at least needing improvement in the world of OHS? I know that you speak about diversity for one.

- So, I mean, I talk about diversity, I talk about intersectionality, and a bunch of different topics that come up when you're talking about how to work with somebody, okay? And when I say how to work with somebody, everybody comes to the workplace layered with all these different things, right?

They have their ethnicity. They have how they think, which brings in the neurodiversity. They have maybe the family group that they come to. They bring their issues. And so I like to talk about, like, are we dealing with the person on the person level, right, while you're thinking about that culture, right? Because, I mean, I don't know how many people have probably come on your program and talked about culture, right, safety culture.

And I'm kind of, like, you know, there is no such thing as safety culture. There's culture, and it's made up of who you have at the time at the point of task, right? So you and I might be doing a task with two or three other people, and that's the group, that's the culture that matters right there at, you know, whatever hazardous thing that we're doing. And so what you bring, what I bring, how I think, how you think, how the people who are with us think, it all matters in doing something safely.

So, you know, there's tendency, at least recently, for people to go to those theories and treat everybody as if they're the same, right? We all come from Oklahoma, or we all come from New Hampshire, or we all come from a construction background. But that's not enough.

It's not enough to treat people as some broad group. Even if it's the same company and we all have the same orientation, it's not enough to bring people in and treat them as if we're going to be some kind of homogeneous mixture that we can just put at a task and get things done the right way or the safe way or those types of things. So that's a big issue.

You said, "What other issues are there?" I think there's an issue with calculating risk, you know. I've got a couple of books back on my bookshelf, and all they talk about is ways to calculate risk, right? And here again, risk is it just depends, right, because you go into a company, and a company is going to have their idea of what kind of risk tolerance they have.

I'm, as a safety professional, going to have some type of idea of what my risk tolerance is or what the risk tolerance should be, right? Employees, they have risk tolerance. Every single one of them has a different risk tolerance, right? So when you tell me to use a risk tool, right, to calculate some type of random severity or probability, or whatever, I think that those tools need to get better and to take into account all that diversity that's in the mix at the point of operation, at the point of task, at the workgroup level.

- So it takes a little more critical thinking than just sort of the same tool for every situation?

- Yeah. I mean, you can't be those people that always rely on their books, okay? I've read a lot of books, but that doesn't mean that I've experienced all those things that they talk about in books. And it doesn't mean that I can take those books and walk out into the field and learn to interact with people in a way that I need to interact with them in order to find out what their motives are, in order to empathize, in order to make a psychologically safe practice area, I mean, that stuff that you cannot learn in books.

By the same token, you can't have people who have been boots on the ground and they don't know the theory, right? It's great to know how to interact with people, but you also have to have some smarts that either come from books or come from good mentoring, right? And so, again, it brings us right back to this...we've got this wide divide between practice and theory that is creating such a gap that I think, you know, we're putting workers at risk.

- We'll come back to that in a bit. You've done a lot of thinking about leadership in safety, and one thing I'm curious about is the question of influence. So I'm not a safety professional, and I tend to hear either that EHS is, and I'm going to throw out a quote here, "the ultimate change leadership position," that was Chris Smith, one of our earlier guests, because it's inter-departmental, or I hear that influencing change is actually really difficult for safety professionals maybe because they don't have ultimate authority over staff or maybe because safety is not a revenue-generating department, and so they struggle to get the ear of the C-suite.

Do you think that either of those is more accurate than the other, or does it really just depend on the organization?

- You know, it really just depends. You knew that was coming, right?

- Yeah, I kind of did, or I thought it might be, yeah.

- It really just depends. I mean, I think...you know, I did listen to a couple of people that you had speak on your podcast before we got on the air. Do I think they're right? Yes, I think in their microcosm of their companies that they've worked within, within their purview of experiences, they're right.

That doesn't mean the other person is wrong, okay? I think there's a lot of bad leadership out there from the safety profession. I know I'm going to get hell for that. There's a lot of bad leadership from corporate management. There's a lot of bad leadership at the line level. Leadership is not...in my mind, leadership is a very hard skill to cultivate, okay, and somebody will come back and say, "No, it's not."

But it is, okay? I think that people who inherently have the qualities of a leader, right, a good listener, they think critically. They think of the team. They're multitasking. They're doing all these things that leaders do. Their responsibility is to go out and teach other people how they do those things, right? Because you can ask 100 people, and 50 of them will say, "I'm a shitty leader."

Fifty of them will say, "I'm a great leader," right? Do I think I'm a good leader? I think I work on it consistently every day, right? I think about how I'm leading on LinkedIn. How am I critically evaluating what people are saying in the safety profession? How do I conduct myself when somebody comes to me that's in a safety position that one of your other guests have been and say, "I'm having trouble?"

What do I say? Ask 100 people, right? And if they don't get back to you, ask 100 more. Because somebody's going to have a kernel of truth that's going to help you do your job a little bit better, okay? So if you don't think you have influence right now, find somebody who does have influence or somebody who may have a piece of the puzzle that you can apply.

It does just depend. All of it just depends, and, you know, I'm kind of that wide-ranging thinker that, if I pigeonhole myself into one theory or one idea of what leadership is, then I fail to do my job, which is, ultimately, to help the worker, right, ultimately, to help the worker be safe. And so, if I'm always applying the same tools, you know, I mean, if I'm going to turn the screw with the screwdriver, and next time, I'm going to turn it with the claw of the hammer, and the next time, I'm going to, you know, try to knock it with my shoe, you know, you got to use the right tool for the right job.

And I think that's the best analogy that I could give you for that. Are they all right? Yep. Are they all wrong? Yep.

- So it sounds to me like what you're saying is it's less about being a good leader maybe in comparison with other people, and what's maybe more important is, are you a good leader in comparison with what you were last week, or...?

- Yes, yes. Are you learning? Are you professionally developing? Are you seeking out people who can help you grow? You know, are you reaching out? I mean, I get maybe 50 reach-outs a week from people, and they ask me questions, "How would you deal with this or how would you deal with that?" And I answer, right, but I always say, "But it just depends," right?

You have to critically look at where you're at, where you want to go, and then evaluate that along the way, right? If you're going to say, "I'm a leader. I'm already an executive director of safety," or a safety director, in a capacity where you are interfacing with both the line level and leadership, and you say, "I've made it," or you get your certification, right, dime a dozen, everybody's got some letters behind their name, and you get your certification, and you say, "I've arrived," then you're not a leader.

Because leaders will continually expand their skill set and expand their network and think about not so much what they're doing great but what they can work on.

- Where do you think leadership comes from or maybe can come from in the safety world?

- I mean, that's a good question. I do think that there are some people that are just inherently hardwired or softwired, right, to be in touch with people, to feel empathy, to listen, to continually seek that growth, right? Where does it come from in the safety profession?

Well, first, we have to mend that rift, okay? And I don't think there's any safety organization out there right now that's mending that rift. That rift is there, it's glaring if you look, and so you have to mend that rift. And once that rift is mended, we need to mentor each other, okay? Mentoring is a big thing that's thrown around.

And I don't know how many of your guests have talked about it, but, you know, mentor, mentor, mentor, we've got to mentor people, right? I've got a mentor, I'm being mentored, etc. But real mentoring is not going on, right, people who pick up the phone when people call, people who will share their knowledge and share it freely, and, you know, admit that they need to be mentored too, right?

So I would say an answer to your question, mentoring, okay? But is that an easy skill to master? It's not, right? The way to become a mentor is to be mentored.

- That's food for thought. And also to practice, right, to try. I mean, you might...

- And to practice.

- Do you think you could be a bad mentor to start, but as you practice, you learn, or I don't know?

- I mean, I think, yeah. I mean, if you can be hardwired to be a good leader or you could be hardwired or softwired to be a good mentor, you also can be hardwired the other way, right?

- Yeah.

- But again, if there's a rift there, then who you should be seeking out to mentor you is the person who's way not like you.

- Yeah, very different.

- Right?

- Yeah.

- You know, I tend to be very soft-hearted. I'm very, you know...like, I can feel people's emotions, and, you know, that's maybe my superpower, right, is that I feel for people. And I want to help, and, you know, I want all those things. But I'm not very good at the aspect of enforcement. And here's another whole thing that you can get into about enforcement versus, you know, leadership as, you know, within a group.

You have to have some enforcement in a safety program. You also have to have some forgiveness. And there is a balance, and it just depends. But you need to learn that. So if I'm going to seek out somebody, I'm going to seek out somebody who maybe has greater technical skills than I do, somebody who knows the balance between enforcement and forgiveness, and can help me grow in that aspect.

You know, just to kind of add to that, I think there are some people that will never be leaders. Okay, I'm going to get shit about that, too. Some people will never be leaders. Some people will never be mentors. But that doesn't mean that they can't be mentored, right? So if you're not good at helping somebody, then let somebody help you.

- Do you think that the people who aren't going to be good leaders even want to be? Like, do you think there's an overlap there? Like, if you want to be, then you can learn to be or you might already be.

- I think that there are a lot of people. Like, I just look at LinkedIn. I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, and I look at people who put things in their title, like thought leader. Okay, I'm a thought leader. I'm not a thought leader. Am I a thinker? Yes, I'm a thinker.

But am I a thought leader? No. I think that there are a lot of people that want to be leaders, but they don't want to do the work. I think there are some people who don't want to be leaders, which is fine. You don't have to be a leader, right? You know, you can be the sheep dog or the sheep, or you can be somewhere in between, right? But there are a lot of people out there that put leader on their profile, or they get a CSP or CIH, or whatever, and they define themselves as a leader.

And that, to me, is not doing the work. Doing the work is the everyday practice of getting out there, and like you said, you try, right? And if something doesn't work, you try something else. And if that doesn't work, then you try something else. You can't just stop at, "Well, I tried," right? And management is not going for it, right?

Then, A, you're not the right safety professional for that job, and there's no shame in that, right? Maybe you can't make a difference in that position, and somebody else can. Or you need to change your tactics. And this goes back to people who are like, "I'm a HOP person, or I'm a Safety-I, or Safety-II, or Safety Differently," right?

You can't be a one-trick pony, right? And if you're going to go in with that attitude, then you will fail. You may be successful in one company, but when you change and you try to be the HOP-meister, the Safety Differently person in the next community that you work in, it may not work. What then? Is it because they're bad and you're good?

Or is it just because it's not a good fit?

- Yeah. Now, I've got HOP-meister stuck in my head. I think everyone listening to this should change their LinkedIn title to HOP-meister.

- HOP-meister thought leader.

- I do hear this from a lot of people I interview where they say, you know, "Safety Differently is great," and, you know, that all of this stuff has its place, but so do things like in the example, Eliza Lynch, one of our previous guests said was, you know, confined spaces, there's no real room for touchy-feely there. You can't cheat physics.

- No, agree with her.

- Yeah. So getting back to the Safety-I and II, I find it interesting that a lot of the research foundations of what we call Safety-II are not actually all that new, but Safety Differently exists, and Safety Differently or Safety-II is relatively new. So we've known about some of these ideas since at least the '80s, I would say, but they haven't really had much traction.

So, why do you think that is, and what do you think is the best? I think you've mentioned mending the rift. How do we do that?

- So, I mean, as a person who spent some time in academia, right, I do see a lot of these theories come out in, you know, publications like "Safety Science" or "Journal of Safety Research," and they talk about Safety-I, Safety-II, Safety Differently, HOP, etc., right? But if you notice, a lot of that "research" is opinion-based, okay? Meaning there's really no research behind it.

It's just, like, "Look at this great idea I have, and I'm going to talk about it for 15 pages," and then it's going to be a thing. Or it's applied in a case study approach, okay, and by case study, I mean, "Well, we looked at this one company, and we did some analysis here, and HOP is great, or Safety-II, or Safety Differently is great." But I've also noticed, like you've said, that a lot of these "theories" are foundational to what we were doing, and I wouldn't say '80s, I would say foundational to the '90s and the early 2000s.

My personal feeling is the reason that these things aren't catching on is because we are overcomplicating what we do, okay? And we're going to get shit for that too, okay? Safety is hard. It's a hard profession to be in because you have to think. Safety can be easier if you stop putting all these labels on things and start applying your critical thinking skills as opposed to trying to come out with the next new thing that you can put your name on, which...you know, and I think that that's a rift too, right, is we've come into this era of, you know, "Who's going to come out with the next theory?"

I give no shits who's going to come out with the next theory. What I care about is who's going to save a life today, okay? Who's going to go into the workplace and think about what makes sense? That's hard, okay? Thinking about what makes sense is hard. That means that you have to apply yourself. It means that you have to be curious.

It means that you have to get your boots dirty. It means that you need to really think about how you're going to save that life, as opposed to, "Well, I mean, if I do this, it's going to be Safety Differently," or "If I do that..." You know what, we want to know forward thinking, we want to know backward thinking, and we want to know where we are right here now.

That's not new.

- The more I think of it, the more I come to the idea that critical thinking is really just all about understanding context, right? You can have 10 different theories. The critical thinking part is the context, "Okay, so, is this going to work here?" or, you know, "Which one do I pick?" I guess. So, when we spoke before, you said something that stuck with me, and that was...I'm going to quote you at you.

You don't have to be right in order to win this game. Can you elaborate on that?

- If we look at what we've been talking about so far about theories, right, that's about being right, okay? If I write a paper and I write 15 pages on why this is best, that's about being right. But if I'm in the thick of doing safety, in the thick of implementation, and I'm really thinking about all of the different avenues that this thing can take, what incidents have occurred before and what, you know, as long as you put the pieces together in such a way that the program works, it doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter what you used. You could use the Linda Martin theory, you know. I mean, call it whatever. Call it the Mary theory. I don't care. It's not about being right. It's about really trying at what you do to save lives or improve the workplace or improve somebody's ability to also think critically about the job at hand or think critically about high-hazard tasks, right?

I do agree with your other guest that there are many things, and this is not in safety, there are many things in work, okay, that it's an either/or, right, it's a "this or that." And things like confined space, it's this or that, right? It's either alive or dead.

A lot of the work that you do beforehand and around it and afterwards is the critical time to narrow that gap between the type of risk that you have and the amount of risk that you have. So, you know, how you do that, don't care. What I do care about is that you're actually thinking about getting out there. You can't do it from, you know, the rooster's perch or the crow's nest, or whatever it is on a ship, right?

You have to do it by getting out there and knowing your people. So, I mean, I don't know if that answers your question. But, I mean, I just feel like everybody nowadays needs to be right, and everybody's right. Let's make everybody right, okay? Well, not everybody, but, you know...

- Yeah, it's less about whether you're right and more about the results, right?

- Yes, yes, yeah. And sometimes the results come no matter what, right? And then you pick up the pieces and you try to get better results next time, right? You know, I said this to somebody the other day, and they got really mad at me. I said, "You know, sometimes I know you want to save everybody." That's me, right?

That's my philosophy. I want to save everybody, right? I don't believe in zero harm, but I would like zero harm. In theory, I would like zero harm. But is that possible? I don't think so, right? So you can't save everybody, but you can do your damnedest to save as many people as you can, to change as many minds as you can.

- If you're sleeping well at night, and you know that you've...meaning, like, metaphorically, meaning that you know you've done what you can.

- Yeah. If you look at this job and you think, every day, when you fall asleep and you're thinking about what you could do tomorrow to be better, then you're doing the right thing. If you can't sleep at night, sometimes, because, you know, maybe you didn't make quite the right decision today, and tomorrow, you have to change what you do, then you're doing it right.

If you're sleeping like a baby and making a million bucks and, you know, trotting around the conference and talking about your theory, but you're not really changing the paradigm of, you know, boots-on-the-ground work, then I'm not so sure this is the profession for you, right? This is not safety. Safety is not easy, right?

But it can be broken down into parts that easy to kind of piece together, you know. Like, can I see everybody, you know? Am I blind to that person over there and their needs? Or am I blind to an entire group? Or am I not thinking about how they might think about this? And if I can't figure out how they think about this, why am I not asking them?

- I'm seeing these too...I mean, for the purposes of the discussion, right, there's people who are maybe too theoretical and people who are, I don't know if you can say too boots-on-the-ground, but maybe they're, "This is the way I've done it. This is the way I've always done it. I don't need to hear any new ideas." What do you think each of those groups needs to work on?

Like, if our listener is sitting there, going, "Oh, jeez, I fall into either group A or group B," what would you recommend that they do to mend that rift?

- Oh, you know, I think as an industry, what we could do to mend that risk is throw out all the leaderships in all of the different organizations that advises on values are as safety professionals. So, you know, throw out the membership, throw out the certification, and get back to, how do we collectively solve a problem, right?

Because until...and again, I'll get crap for this too. This is going to be the whole show about... You know, you want comments on your LinkedIn page? This is going to get them for you, right? Throw out all the leadership in all those organizations, number one, okay? Because we have people who are dictating what people's value is when it comes to the conversation such that that rift can't be healed until we see each other for who we are, okay?

And I see the way far right or left, whatever side you want to say, the one-way side is the people with the degrees, all the certifications, they're in leadership positions, they clawed their way to the top, they kissed ass, and they got there, right?

And then there are people over here that refuse to kiss ass, and they will...you know, "I've done this 30 years. I've always done it this way. I'm not going to change. It's been successful. People respect me," etc., right? And until we kind of pull that down... I mean, how do you pull that down?

I mean, I guess until you pull that down, they're not going to be able to show some respect to each other in order to find a common ground. Where do I live? I think I live in both worlds. It just depends on the day, right? Sometimes I'm...I mean, I sat on a board, and I have tons of letters, but I also have some humility to know that I'm not the smartest person in the room, by any stretch of the imagination.

Maybe sometimes on some issues. And I've also been over boots on the ground early in my career, standing on the side of a drill rig and, you know, watching them drill soil samples. And so I've been in both worlds, and I just strongly feel that I can see both sides of this, and I just want everybody to come more towards the middle, right? I want them to meet in the middle and start talking about what really matters as opposed to egos, always doing it the same way.

You know, what's better, experience or book smarts? You know what, they're both important. They're both important. And so I guess I don't see why people can't see that, but that's just me.

- I think, to be fair, that there are probably very few people who are entirely on one end of that spectrum or the other. Probably, most people are somewhere in the middle. But, yeah, I heard an expression, I don't know where it's from, but, you know, you have two ears and one mouth, and you should use them in that ratio, right? More listening, less talking, I guess.

- Yeah, yeah. And have some humility, right? You don't know everything. You can't know everything, right? So instead of...and I heard this last night on a TV program, instead of, when somebody's talking, collaboratively overlapping them. Did you get that? Collaboratively overlapping them, speaking over them.

- I was going to say, isn't that interrupting?

- It's interrupting, right, instead of collaboratively overlapping them, you should really, you know, be vetting. Like, is this for me? Is this new theory for me? Is this person telling the truth? Do they have a kernel of the truth? I mean, they may think they have all the truth, but boy, I learned a little thing today, and I'm going to put that little thing in my bag.

And next time I need it, it might be one of the little pieces that I insert in order to shore up a program or to shore up a culture within an organization. And so, you know, you're right. You got two ears and one mouth, so shut the hell up and just soak it all in, right? Grow.

- So I don't know. This next question might have the same answer as the one you just gave, but what advice would you give to a new safety professional? So either this is someone who's freshly out of a diploma or a certification program, or maybe they've had another career and they're transitioning into the world of safety. What would you say that they should focus on?

- I think you need to focus on your people skills, right? Now, at the beginning of the show, you talked about soft skills, right? They're skills, okay? They're not soft skills or hard skills or any of that. They're skills, right? And one of the best ways to know how to change minds and hearts is in order to connect with the people, right?

And so you need people skills. You need that ability to listen more than you talk. You need the ability to be humble, okay? I will say, all day long, those skills are critical, and everything else you can use a book for, right? I can go to a book on confined spaces, and it's going to say the same damn thing every single time.

Now, is it always technically correct or technically complete? No, but you should have more books on your bookshelf than just one, okay? But you cannot use just book smarts in order to get your way through this career, right? You can't. You're trying to stop people from getting hurt, you're trying to save their lives, you're trying to find their motivation, and you can only do that by connecting with people.

So my advice would be connect with people who you see doing that, because those are the skills that you want to learn and to mirror. And for everything else, there's phone-a-friend or a book, right, or professional development. But if you can't relate to people, this is not the career for you.

- This is very similar too. I have some questions I ask every guest at the end of the podcast. I'll ask this even though it's pretty similar.

- Clear.

- If you were to develop your own safety certification program, what area of nontechnical training or people skills do you think is critical? So maybe I'll say just pick one because we've talked about a number of them.

- Okay. So there are a ton of safety certifications out there, and I've got a lot of them, okay? But if you're going to develop as a safety professional, the ones that really will help your practice to sing, okay, I'm not going to create any, so I'm going to go a little off road here, like, probably the whole entire program, but the things that will help you be a better safety professional and to understand the people around you in the leadership circle and in those circles that you revolve in order to get things done and get things funded, and all those different things, one is the PMP, project management.

You should know project management, okay? The other one is Lean Six Sigma, right, because that's the quality piece. And if you take both of those, you will find that the quality piece and the project management piece heavily overlaps what you do in safety, and it makes you a more defined professional because you understand the process, right?

Because everything is a process. Plan, do, check, act, right? You're always redefining what you're doing and refining the process, and you can't do that if you don't understand the other people in your circle, in your decision-making circle.

- If you could travel back in time and speak to yourself at the beginning of your career, and I'll let you decide if this is the beginning of all of your careers or just your career in safety, because I know that you had other work before, and you could only give young Linda one piece of advice, what would it be?

- Don't sweat it. Listen, you know, I have had several careers, and I'm just going to say, for any young person, right, when you get out of school, whether you come out of school with a safety degree or you come out of school with a geology degree, like I did, or physical therapy, or wherever you come from, don't pigeonhole yourself and say, "I need to be a psychologist because I got a psychology degree," or, "I need to be a geologist because I got a geology degree."

Do what feels right at the time. If you don't like what you do, change what you do. If you're not happy in a job, change the job, okay? Make a change in your life. So, I mean, I've done that, so just kind of organically done that in my life, but I think I would say to myself, "Don't sweat that," because that's part of growth.

That's part of professional development, right? I didn't find completely safety until later in my career, right? I was doing some hazardous waste safety, and I was doing chemical safety, and I was doing...you know, I've been in cranes and rigging, and I've been in... But all those things have helped me grow.

And you know what, I may decide tomorrow that I want to...I don't know. I'm trying to think of a career. Maybe I want to be a postal worker. But don't sweat it, right, because that's the natural progression of things. And it's most important that you're making a difference at what you do and that you're happy, okay? So be happy.

If you get out of school and you hate safety, don't do safety. You don't have to do safety. Nobody said just because you have a four-year degree in something, that you have to do it. Do something else.

- Yeah. I think there's a lot of...we talk about pressure on younger kids, like teenagers, but I think it's true for adults, too, that there's a lot of pressure to know what you want to do and maybe not as much emphasis on, like, maybe you don't know. Try this.

- And that's okay.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, and that's okay. Try a million things, right? I've had people say to me, you know, "What happens if your jobs in safety dry up tomorrow?" They hear this podcast, Mary, and they think, "You should be out of safety and people run you out of safety." And I said, "You know, I have done a lot of things in my life." And I'm sure, hopefully, if I live long enough, I'll do a lot more.

And I can flip burgers if I need to flip burgers, right? I can drive a tractor on a farm if I need to drive a tractor on a farm. I can do a lot of things, and I have a lot of curiosity and creativity in how I can make a living. And so I think, with anybody, right, just believe in yourself and listen to yourself, and if that career is not for you or something ends, something better is going to come along, right?

And reach out to people who probably can help you.

- So let's talk a little bit about practical resources. So maybe that's some of the books on your shelf. Maybe it's websites or ideas. What would you recommend just for people to check out?

- Oh, man. So, you know, I teach some adjunct and some college courses. And so, I guess, for online resources, okay, the one thing that I recommend is Google Scholar, okay? A lot of people can't get the PDFs that they need of papers that are up and coming or case studies or something that will help them think about the problems that they have going on in their practice, right?

If you go to Google Scholar, which is, obviously, a part of Google, right, you can search academic databases, and a lot of times, you can find the PDFs for free online. So that's one place for an academic source, okay? For current state of practice, for technical resources, things that are up and coming, right, I'm going to catch a lot of shit for this too, there are some good ones in the United States, you know, the NIOSH website and the CDC website, and whatnot.

But for great resources, WorkSafeBC. That'll be close to your heart, right? WorkSafeBC has a great... The Canadian...I think it's CCOHS, they also have great sources of information online, videos, great descriptions, etc., if you're building PowerPoints. Australia and New Zealand both are way far ahead of us in a lot of different aspects of workplace safety.

So check out their provincial and their country websites. There are some good British resources. So don't limit yourself to the U.S. When I say technical stuff, a lot of technical stuff is very much the same from country to country, and there's a lot of, you know, good things out there.

So I use the internet a lot, but just make sure if you're using the internet that you check a bunch of different sources. You make sure that you're getting the right information. But there's a lot of good...you know. Don't be afraid to use Google, right? I read a lot. I've gone from reading technical resources to more management, leadership, you know, creative thinking, those types of things that can kind of round out my practice, project management, like I said before, quality, etc.

So that's where I would kind of push people towards, and I did a live stream at one point that showed people kind of how to get around those websites. I don't know where it ended up, but I can do it again some time.

- Yeah. If we can find it, we'll link it.

- All right.

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

- So I have my own show. It's called "The Safety Struggle." You can find that where podcasts are found. I spend a great deal of time on LinkedIn. You're going to have to follow me because I'm out of links. So, you know, you can follow me on LinkedIn. I post a lot of different stuff.

If I find something interesting or current, that goes up there.

- And you have a consulting...

- I have Linda...

- I was going to say you have a consulting business, right? Yeah.

- I do. I consult, too. I mean, I like to stay busy. So my consulting firm is KLME Martin Associates, also on LinkedIn, but you can find me through lindamartin.io, which is my website. You can email me through that. Anywhere that you can find me, if you email me, generally, I get back to you.

- Great.

- Almost always.

- That's all the time we have for today. So thanks so much for joining us, Linda, and thanks to our listeners for tuning in.

- Thank you.

- So, no matter where the safety profession is going, the Safety Labs team helps lead the discussion. My thanks to all the research, outreach, and hard work behind the scenes. ♪ [music] ♪ Safety Labs is created by Slice, the only safety knife on the market with a finger-friendly blade.

Find us at sliceproducts.com. Until next time, stay safe. ♪ [music] ♪

‍