EHS Today: Leadership skills, while important to EHS professionals, are often not taught. Why has this been the case?

Oakes: Safety professionals are often technical experts. And some of us ended up in the job because we knew the rules, we passed the tests, we understood the hazards, maybe even we got hurt at work, or we were assigned this job. No matter how we got there, most of us have learned the technical side, but nobody took us aside and told us how to lead people. That gap is real, it's costly, and it is hard.

EHS is one of the few roles in which we are responsible for outcomes that we have almost no direct authority to control. We're asking people to change their behaviors, adopt new habits, trust our judgment, and often we are not the person's boss.

That requires leadership and not just expertise. Just think about the number of people that a safety professional interacts with in the course of a single day. In the morning it might be in a meeting with executives, and then in the afternoon they could be doing a toolbox talk with frontline workers, and then in the evening, before you go home, you're having a negotiation with an operations manager.

That demands leadership range.  It's not just about leading the people that might maybe report to us, but also leading everybody in a way.

As EHS professionals, we go to school, we get certifications, we take classes, maybe even go to conferences. And there's a lot of discussion about leadership development, but it's not necessarily built to scale. I found a gap there, and that's part of the reason that I wrote my book, EQ for the Safety Leader, because it is what I needed.

EHS Today: Can you talk about EQ in terms of its importance as a capability of a safety leader and offer some practical methods to develop this skill?

Oakes: I want to start with a definition of emotional intelligence or EQ.  It is the ability to recognize, understand, and manage your own emotions. It is also the ability to recognize, understand, and influence the emotions of people around you. 

For EHS folks, emotional intelligence- the power that comes from it- is the power that helps us influence our workers.

Let's take the example of wearing PPE. EQ gives us the ability to influence the executives to pay for that PPE, and also to influence HR to actually require it in a policy. And probably most importantly, it allows us the ability to influence the engineer to redesign the work, eliminate the hazard so that we don't actually have to wear the PPE.

Everything that we do involves emotion. By profession, we are the folks who have to deliver bad news after an incident. We're trying to get people to report things. We're trying to build buy-in. Let's say we're rolling out some new initiative and we've got a whole bunch of folks who are not happy with this; we are the ones who have to get them on board.

So EQ is a collection of skills. It is not a personality trait.  It is something that can be built.

Most of my work is based on this model of EQ called the EQ 2.0. And in that model, there are five overarching skills:

• Self-perception: how you understand yourself, what you believe to be true about yourself.
• Self-expression: how you communicate to others and how they might perceive you.
• Interpersonal relationships: how do I lean on people and do they lean on me? Am I somebody that they trust?
• Decision making: an incredibly necessary skill for an EHS person.
• Stress management: an essential skill.