ENHA NC E
H OW TO. . .
Wield influence in the workplace Step out of your comfort zone a little bit: get involved in projects outside of your normal day job that aren’t directly involved in safety.
1
Do a secondment to a different part of the business, even if it’s only for a day or a week. Get time out on the shop floor, do work shadowing or job sharing – really get a feel for how the different parts of your business work so you can actually understand the impact of the decisions you make.
2
Take a management training course. Management accounting or anything that is on the MBA syllabus is worthwhile.
3
If you can’t take a course, read management theory books and watch YouTube videos such as TED talks. These will help you use the language of business rather than the language of safety.
4
COM PETEN CIES
YOUR NEXT DREAM HIRE Neil Lennox, Sainsbury’s group head of safety and insurance, supplies seven tips on the skills you need, and which to look out for, when recruiting OSH influencers.
W
ith 69 competencies divided into 12 areas in technical, core and behavioural categories, the recently updated IOSH competency framework covers all the skills, knowledge and behaviours needed by OSH professionals. In the first of a series, we look at influencing, and how to attract the best influencers of the future.
1
Sales skills
I have a degree in engineering, but I started my career in sales and marketing and I see safety as an extension of that. As OSH professionals, we’re selling a concept or an idea: a way of working for people at shop floor level, or a way of risk management for people at board level. That means technical knowledge alone isn’t always enough. In our last few rounds of recruiting, I’ve taken people from inside the organisation who know it well and who have some passion for safety. They might not know
everything, but they have the right kind of skills to engage people in our business. It’s often easier to give them the underpinning knowledge through safety qualifications and training than it is to teach somebody how to coach, influence or really couch things so they fit into the business framework.
2
Look beyond the answers
By themselves, interviews can be a relatively poor indicator of people’s ability to do the job. How can you gauge somebody’s suitability for the job for the next 40 years when you interview them for just an hour? Like most businesses, we use a competencybased framework for our hiring processes. We will formulate open-ended questions such as ‘Tell me about a time when you...’ But beyond the answers that candidates give, we look at the way the answers are given, how candidates present themselves, how animated they become, and what language they use.
A B O UT O UR EX PERT NEIL LENNOX is Sainsbury’s group head of safety and insurance, and a nonexecutive director of the Parliamentary Safety Advisory Board. Neil also represents the CBI as a judge on the RoSPA Awards panel.
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