Blog

The second instalment of our new series of Safety Innovation Videos, we speak with Ruth Denyer, Co-President IIRSM and Senior Director, Production Health and Safety at Netflix.

We explore the questions - Why are there challenges developing the next generation of safety leaders? What can we do to improve this? How can we attract the next generation of leaders to the profession? How are the IIRSM leading change?

Why are there challenges developing the next generation of safety leaders?

Leadership is a difficult role to fulfil, and if you are a technical expert, it is really vulnerable to go from a role where you know your stuff, into a leadership role where it's not as structured. You have to step away from the technical day to day that is really comfortable and have more discomfort in your work and where you, so in safety you'll learn, you can write a safety management system. People who are in senior roles in safety will know that inside and back to front. That's not necessarily a strategy. And then you have to learn a whole new set of skills that go on top that don't feel quite so linked to what you've always done in terms of your functional expertise. And I think that discomfort is a lot of reasons why people maybe aren't doing what they could be in the role. 

What could we do to improve this? 

So to improve the pool of people that are ready to take on this work of leadership and safety, I think we need to be thinking about what the work is and explaining that more to people. One of the things I'm really passionate about is taking the leadership, there's so much out there about good leadership and what good leadership looks at, take that, think about how you apply that to the work of leading a safety function team, whatever you want to call it. And I think that's where we need to get people exposed to that information. And not just in competencies and in skills matrices, but just in ourselves being curious. There is so much stuff out there. If people want to engage with it, it's there. The other thing we can do, I think, is leverage what's available to us in organisations. So if you're in a bigger organisation, like I've been lucky enough to be, there will be stuff you can learn about leadership, from either organisational courses, initiatives, people you work with will share stuff with you. So I think one of the things we need to do as safety people is stop just looking at safety people and start looking outside of safety people for our inspiration about what good leadership looks like. 

How can we attract the next generation of leaders to the profession? 

In order to attract future generations to the profession of health and safety, I think we need to get people to understand it better and understand the work that we do and how broad and varied that is, dependent on what industry you choose to go into, depending what type of role you choose to have, and actually talk about it in a way that engages people. I think it's a fascinating job that we get to have a huge impact on people every day. It's about people. I can't quite work out where the mismatch is between kind of the image, the profession, and the safety as a role has, versus actually the work of safety and how important it is. It's a fundamental right at work, a healthy and safe working environment. And yet somehow the people who are tasked with helping support businesses in upholding that, have this weird image that is about clipboards and hard hats. And so I think it's on us to talk about our roles and to make people understand what they're like, but also just make it accessible. It's really interesting what we do and it's about people. 

How are the IIRSM leading change? 

With the IIRSM, one of our really key areas of focus and we really looked at our strategy last year and really doubled down on this, is building a community. Because what we believe is by building a community of people who care about, talk about safety and risk as a profession overall, but safety as a sector within that, we will uplevel the conversations, we will uplevel the people, we will support people in having more impact. And actually, one of the things I know is I absolutely wouldn't have got the roles I've got, had the amazing insight I've had that's influenced my work, unless I was part of an amazing professional community where people share, people support each other, and leverage this incredible pool of knowledge we have together to empower each other to do even better work and have even more interesting conversations.