Critical Competencies for SH&E Managers - Implications for Educators

Background: Competencies required of effective safety professionals is a topic of concern to educators who prepare students for the safety profession. Knowledge of critical competencies required for the profession continues to evolve and educators must identify and help students develop the most important competencies. Objective: The purpose of this study is to identify and prioritize those competencies most needed for safety managers to be effective in their positions. Method: A Safety Management Competency Survey was developed from Quinn’s Becoming A Master Manager: A Competency Framework and sent to 100 safety educators and 400 randomly selected Certified Safety Professionals (CSPs). Safety Educators and Certified Safety Professionals responses agree with the major constructs from Quinn’s model. Respondents were also asked open-ended questions about the most important issues facing safety managers today. Results: Findings are consistent with Quinn’s model and imply “soft skills” such as communication skills and business acumen are perceived as important as basic skills taught in safety degree programs. Conclusion: This study demonstrates the perceived importance of including business topics, communication skills, and safety metrics as part of the curriculum for safety management studies. Impact on Industry: The short-term impact is to identify the critical competencies required in safety management. The expected long-term impact is a correlation between use of Quinn’s model applied to safety management and decreased injuries and fatalities in the workplace. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * From approximately 1976 to the present, it has become apparent to organizations that they must have the capacity to deal with conflicting role values and various management models to successfully change in a global market. Quinn developed a competency framework that integrated four existing management competency models. He notes, “By the mid-nineties it became clear that no one model was sufficient to guide a manager and it was in fact necessary to see each of the four models as elements of a larger model” (Quinn et al. 10). During the twentieth century the safety profession not only grew in size and complexity, but shifted its primary emphasis from safety engineering to safety management. Planek and Fearn (1993) noted, “Data suggest that the shift in expert opinion today has been toward a higher valuation of the safety manager’s role, motivation and communication, with less emphasis on engineering, record keeping and related activities” (p. 18). As a result, members of the safety profession often struggle to clarify the specific roles and behaviors needed to accomplish the goals of reducing injuries in the workplace. Adams notes, “Safety is a relatively new academic discipline” (2003). One problem for the safety profession is its inability to affect organizational systems from the inside (Adams 2003). Studies indicate safety professionals need to be more than just technicians – they must be good communicators who understand business language and possess good management skills (Soule 1993). The key question for safety educators is “What curriculum may best prepare students to become the competent safety managers of tomorrow? ” The challenge for safety professionals and educators is to operationalize these new management roles and competencies into action plans. If safety managers become trapped in a particular style of management, they can lose effectiveness. Overemphasis in one area often becomes a weakness. In the following explanation of Quinn’s competing values framework, an overemphasis on the producer role can lead to perpetual exertion and exhaustion. Undue emphasis on the monitor role, for example, may lead to procedural sterility and trivial rigor. For example, Safety, Health & Environmental professionals who focus most of their energy on compliance issues may have difficulty recognizing the “big picture” for an organization.