Given my own experience of how challenging progress on process safety can be in a manufacturing business, and recognising that it is difficult for organisations to be candid at external events, I decided to ‘lift the veil’ in a presentation paper at the IChemE Hazards34 Conference held in Manchester, UK, in November last year.

During 2024 I conducted a series of interviews with anonymous professionals engaged within process safety. Industries included manufacturing, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, aerospace, oil and gas, nuclear and defence. The perspective was international, with interviewees who worked, or had assets or clients, in the UK, Europe, Scandinavia, APAC, the USA and India.

These fascinating and free-ranging conversations used some thought-provoking seed questions to dig into what was at issue. Some very common themes emerged with significant relevance to leadership:

• Messages about the priority of safety which don’t ring true in practice, where money and short-term results are experienced as really driving the agenda.
• A lack of sufficient competence in senior leaders around process safety, leading to a lack of trust and candour.
• Technical professionals who are overstretched on the ground, which is intensified by a retention problem within the field along with siloed industries.
• Best practice being concentrated in highly regulated industries, with medium-sized industries subject to less scrutiny and of concern to those interviewed.

This presents some key opportunities for organisations to improve:

• For leaders to connect with their values around safety and to use this to guide their decision-making. To spend time in the service of others and achieve sufficient competency to better support the contribution of their technical professionals. This will only be enabled by spending sufficient time on safety and understanding the biggest hazards upon which to focus.
• To reimagine the role of the safety professionals, and safety leadership excellence, through the line. Senior functional leaders need to be seen as key to the success of the business, operating at the highest levels of the hierarchy and influencing decision-making. In turn these professionals must move beyond technical expert or gatekeeper roles to become intrapreneurs who can develop and ‘sell’ the vision of inherently safer, better engineered operations. It will also call for courage to challenge others and to be role models and coaches while actively participating in problem-solving and decision-making. If senior leaders are committed to such a vision, then they must recruit with these qualities in mind, and focus their attention on growing individuals in this direction, coaching them through the experiences offered by their work.

The interviewees aspired to changing the organisational perspective on safety, from seeing it as something that gets in the way of getting the ‘real job’ done, to recognising commitment to safety as best practice operation, in the long-term benefit of the business, and part of the mindset that drives quality and efficiency improvement along with it. This is consistent with Legitimate Leadership’s mindset of ‘happy discontent’ and focus on excellence in contribution.

The full paper is available on request and includes additional practical suggestions for leaders gathered from interviewees and presented through a Legitimate Leadership perspective.

• Based on previous research around safety by Legitimate Leadership, we recently introduced a new programme called Safety Leadership Excellence In Practice. The programme is based on the Legitimate Leadership premise that if you have a safety problem, you have a people problem; and If you have a people problem, you have a leadership problem. The 6-8-month intensive course focuses on leaders enacting changes in themselves.