Estimated Reading Time: 11 minutes
TL;DR: The safety cop trap is the compliance-first version of safety you were handed on day one, and it works at first, which is exactly why it is so hard to see. But compliance only buys surface behavior, caps you at industry standard, and isolates you as you get better at it. The way out is treating safety as an influence problem instead of a compliance problem.
Almost everything you were taught about how to be good at this job is quietly keeping you stuck.
You were told to know the regulations cold. Enforce the rules.
Catch what people are doing wrong and fix it. And you did it, and you are probably good at it.
So why are you still buried in paperwork, still talked over in the meetings that matter, still watching people with less experience get promoted past you?
It is not because you are not trying hard enough. It is because the old way was never designed to get you what you actually want.
Key Takeaways
- The safety cop trap looks exactly like doing your job well, which is why nobody questions it.
- Compliance buys surface behavior, not buy-in. People comply while you are watching and revert the moment you leave.
- If you are correcting the same behavior over and over, you have not influenced anyone. That is the diagnostic.
- Compliance caps you at industry standard, because that is all the regulations were ever built to deliver.
- The wall is a relationship wall, not a metrics wall, and it shows up in management before it shows up in your numbers.
- Compliance is the floor. Influence is in your systems. You layer one on top of the other.
What the Safety Cop Trap Actually Is
You cannot escape the trap until you can see it. And what makes it dangerous is that everything about it looks legitimate. It sounds right, it works to a point, and it makes you look like you are doing your job well.
What You Were Handed on Day One
The very first thing most of us are given is the regulations book. Along with it comes the job description: make sure the organization meets compliance, hits the standards, does all the training, and that everybody is doing what they are supposed to be doing.
Enforce compliance. If you catch somebody violating it, write them up and hold the line.
Be the one who says no.
In my first couple of weeks in the position, I was taught how to read a regulation, walked through the Code of Federal Regulations, and shown how a regulation applies in the workplace. Then it was my job to do that with every regulation in the book.
I was also taught that my job was to walk around and watch people, and if they were doing something wrong, to write them up or bring it to their supervisor. I became a person whose role was to look for what people were doing wrong.
I used to call it witch hunting. I was out there looking for all the witches.
Why It Feels Right, and Works, For a While
It feels right because it is the way traditional safety management is taught to everybody. And it does get results. If you have a genuinely bad safety program and you focus on the regulations, you will reduce incidents, reduce insurance costs, reduce your mod rate, and meet industry standard.
I am not going to pretend otherwise. When I was running a compliance-driven program, I took an annual TCIR from around a 12 down to industry standard for my sector.
A strong foundation in the regulations genuinely matters. When people ask me how to break into safety management, the first thing I point them to is the OSHA 30-hour course.
But that is ground level. It is the foundation of the house, not the house.
The Identity It Quietly Builds
Here is the part that sneaks up on you. Even if you never write anybody up, if you are the only one walking around looking for what people do wrong, you will be seen as the safety cop. It will be implied that you are the enforcer, especially if you are the only one bringing things to a supervisor’s attention.
When I was implementing a hearing protection program at a meat processing plant, I would walk into the production room and hear banging move across the room like a wave. People were cutting steaks, so they had knives, and they banged them on the tables to warn the entire room that I was there.
I did not mind that they did it. It told me the training had landed, because they knew exactly what the rule was. They just were not complying with it.
What I minded was that they did not do the same thing when the supervisor walked in.
That is the whole diagnosis in one moment. I was the only one being seen as the enforcer, when the supervisor doing the actual write-ups should have been.
So even if you are not writing the tickets, if you are seen as the person who can cause the ticket, you are the safety cop. You are the department of no.
The way out is not enforcing harder. It is getting the crew watching out for each other, which is what peer-to-peer safety accountability is built to do.
The tell is simple. Every year your job gets harder. Every gap analysis, every hazard assessment, every continuous improvement cycle adds more to your list, and your job gets heavier instead of lighter.
Compliance and Influence Are Not the Same Thing
They feel like the same thing, which is why this is the single most expensive mistake in the profession. Once you see the difference, you cannot unsee it.
What Compliance Actually Buys You
If you are telling somebody what they need to do, that is compliance. Complying with a policy, a procedure, a training. Our jobs do need those things, and writing them is part of the work.
But compliance only buys you surface-level behavior. It does not give you buy-in.
People change their behavior while you are in front of them and while they think somebody is watching. They will not change it if they have not bought in and do not internally believe they needed to.
Here is the diagnostic: if you find yourself correcting the same behavior problems over and over, you are running a compliance-driven program and you have not influenced anyone. You have not changed their beliefs, their perceptions, or their internal thoughts about that policy.
This is the same gap that shows up when people are fully trained and still get hurt, because certification alone does not prevent accidents.
The Escalation Trap
Compliance does not just quietly stop working. It turns people against safety, and against you.
First they comply while watched and revert when not. Then they start hiding things from you.
And the human instinct at that point is to get more technical, bring down the hammer, and use fear. Three write-ups and you are suspended.
Let us really get them to change.
More enforcing makes you more the cop, which makes you more isolated, which means even less information reaches you.
The HR Manager Test
The fastest way to feel this is to put yourself on the receiving end.
Imagine you are doing your job the way you always do, and the HR manager, who you do not report to, tells you that you should be doing it differently. You disagree. You have been productive and getting results.
So you check with your boss, who says he does not care either way. Then HR comes back and says you need to do it their way.
And in your head you decide: any time the HR manager might see it or hear about it, you will do it their way. The rest of the time you will do it your way, because your way gets results and their way makes the job harder and takes longer.
That is exactly what we are asking our employees to do.
The flip also shows you the fix. If that HR manager had shown how their way also helped you, and had worked on shifting your beliefs about it, you would probably do it when they were not watching. That is influence.
Why Compliance Caps You at Industry Standard
Focusing on compliance gets you to industry standard. And it is worth asking where industry standards come from in the first place.
You Are Racing to a Mediocre Result
Industry standard is the average of everybody else doing roughly what you are doing. Chasing it means racing to a mediocre result and calling it a finish line.
What the Regulations Were Built to Do
The rules and regulations you are white-knuckling to enforce were only ever designed to reduce serious injuries and fatalities. That is it. They are also heavily lobbied, which means they get watered down before they ever reach you.
They were never built to produce an exceptional safety program, and they are never going to get you to zero. That is not a failure of your enforcement. It is the design.
The Wall I Hit
I know all of this because I lived it. The better I got at safety, the more the people around me shut down.
The Tells Showed Up in Management First
I knew the regulations cold. I was a walking encyclopedia.
I knew our security system well enough to go straight to an event, find it on video, and write that person up. And I got my injury rate down to industry standard, where it refused to budge.
Then my own team started hiding things from me.
It did not start where you would expect. It started with management.
I stopped getting invited to planning meetings. I stopped being told about process changes.
When I walked into a room, supervisors and managers went quiet, or shoved things into a desk because they did not want me to see what they were working on.
My relationships with the management team, with employees, even with vendors, were breaking down. Because I was so focused on finding what people were doing wrong, people got guarded. They stopped bringing me problems and started hiding them.
I became the person nobody wanted to see coming.
That is the wall. Doing everything right, stuck at an industry-standard rate, unable to be seen as a partner in the business. I was an annoying little pest in the room, and that is never going to get you to the executive level.
If that sounds familiar and you are carrying the whole program by yourself, the workload side of it is worth fixing too. I walked through that in how to run a one-person safety department.
The Seminar That Cracked It Open
What shifted it was a safety conference in the early 2000s, where I attended a seminar on behavior-based safety.
It pulled me into psychology so hard that when I went back to finish my degree, I took it in psychology. Because so much of this job is psychology.
Why do people do what they do? How do you grab attention, motivate a decision, get people to listen, lead people?
None of that is in the regulations.
And what I realized was that I did not have a compliance problem. I had a people problem.
I had a behavior problem. And I personally had an influence problem.
I did not have the skills to influence people, and I was influencing them the wrong way, constantly telling them what they were doing wrong.
That is not influence. That is management. Which is why I say we cannot manage safety, we can only influence it.
Getting there took getting outside my own building. If you are trying to do that, start by building a personal board of directors for your safety career.
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The Shift From Enforcer to Influencer
Once you stop trying to manage compliance and start influencing people, the whole trajectory changes. I went from being the enforcer nobody wanted in the room to being seen as a partner who helps the business grow.
Compliance Is the Floor, Influence Is in Your Systems
Here is the shift in one sentence. Compliance is your floor. Influence is in your systems.
When you make that shift, safety becomes how the job is done, not an additional something-or-other bolted onto everybody’s day. That is what takes you from safety cop to safety executive.
This is not throwing out compliance. It is layering influence on top of it.
If a regulation requires machine guarding and the supervisor says the guard slows them down, my job is to use the three pillars to influence that supervisor to see that the guard is the better, faster, easier way to do the job. Better, faster, easier.
Remember those three.
Why “Safety Is Everybody’s Job” Keeps Failing
We all say safety is everybody’s responsibility. But when push comes to shove, safety is the thing that gets pushed aside, because we built it as a separate entity.
Instead, safety needs to be seen as the fastest, most efficient way to do the job. Then of course they are going to do it that way. That is what an influence system produces, and it is the same dynamic behind being an influencer rather than a decision maker.
Remember that every action your employees take is determined by who they report to, and nobody reports to you. You are outside that line of power, which is the same dynamic behind the artificial authority trap. So the system has to equip the line of power and influence it at the same time.
From a Safety Management System to an Influencer System
The name I use for this shift is going from a safety management system to a safety management influencer system.
The cycle you already run in safety management is the engine. The three pillars layer on top of it to influence people as you go. If you only run the cycle, you are almost certainly running a compliance-driven program.
And here is why it has to live in the systems rather than in your personality. Not every safety leader has natural charisma.
Not everyone can have an organic conversation that changes somebody’s beliefs. So we build the psychological hooks into each system, and the influence happens organically, just by adding the pillars and changing the information we share.
That is how you close the authority gap without having to be a natural at it.
Frequently Asked Questions About the Safety Cop Trap
What is the safety cop trap?
It is the compliance-first version of safety most of us are taught on day one: know the regulations, enforce the rules, catch violations, and be the one who says no. It is a trap because it works at first, which makes it nearly impossible to question, but it caps your results at industry standard and builds an enforcer identity that isolates you.
What is the difference between compliance and influence in safety?
Compliance is telling people what to do and correcting them when they do not. It buys surface behavior that disappears when you are not watching.
Influence changes beliefs and perceptions, so people make the safe decision when nobody is there. Compliance is the floor; influence is what you build on top of it.
How do I know if I am running a compliance-driven program?
The clearest sign is correcting the same behaviors over and over. Others: your task list gets heavier every year instead of lighter, people go quiet when you enter a room, and you are the only person bringing violations to supervisors.
Does this mean compliance does not matter?
No. Compliance is your foundation and a strong grounding in the regulations is genuinely necessary.
The point is that it is the floor, not the goal. Regulations were designed to reduce serious injuries and fatalities, not to build an exceptional program or get you to zero.
Do I have to stop correcting unsafe behavior?
Not at all. When you see somebody not following the rules, bring it to the supervisor and let the supervisor handle it. What has to change is that correction cannot be your entire strategy, and you cannot be the only person in the building carrying it.
Now It’s Your Turn
You do not have to hit the wall like I did. You do not have to become the person everybody dreads walking in the door in order to be good at safety. You just need the right system.
Here is what to do this week:
- Find your repeat corrections. Write down every behavior you have corrected more than twice this month. That list is your influence gap, not your enforcement gap.
- Run the HR manager test on one policy. Ask honestly whether your people would follow it if nobody were watching. If not, the policy needs belief work, not more enforcement.
- Check who the room braces for. If people change behavior for you but not for their supervisor, the enforcer identity is sitting on the wrong person.
- Pick one requirement and reframe it as better, faster, easier for the person who has to do it.
Then go deeper. I put together the Safety Management Influencer System Guide, which walks through the full cycle and all three pillars step by step so you can start building this into your own program. You can download the SMIS Guide here.
You got this, Safety Friend.
Why Everything You Were Taught Keeps You Stuck
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Safety Brye: [00:00:00] If you're the person responsible for safety at your company, I need to tell you something that's gonna sting a little. Almost everything you were taught about how to be good at this job is quietly keeping you stuck. You were told that you needed to know the regulations, how to enforce the rules, to catch people doing what they were doing wrong and fix that.
Safety Brye: [00:00:26] And you did it, and you're likely good at it. So why are you still finding yourself buried in paperwork, overwhelmed with a to-do list a mile long, you're still talked over at meetings, and you're watching people with less experience get promoted past you? So I'm sorry to say it's because the old way, the compliance cop version of safety that you were handed, was never designed to get you what you actually want.
Safety Brye: [00:01:01] And in fact, it caps you. And until you see exactly how, you'll keep grinding harder at the one thing that is holding you back. So today, I am gonna show you that trap, why it backfires no matter how good you get at it, and the wall that I hit that forced me to throw that entire playbook in the trash. So stick with me, because this is the shift that everything else is built on.
Safety Brye: [00:01:33] Let's get to it. Hey there. Thank you so much for clicking on this. If you don't know me, my name is Bry. I am a certified safety professional. I've built safety programs from the ground up dozens of times, and I have spent the last decade teaching safety leads the exact systems that I use to do it. Today, what we're talking about is not a framework.
Safety Brye: [00:01:58] It's actually a belief and a mindset shift. I am going to show you the old way that traditional safety management is taught and why it backfires, and I'm gonna tell you a story of the moment that I realized I'd been doing safety completely backwards. And when I made this shift, it totally transformed my career as well as my results.
Safety Brye: [00:02:29] Now, a quick heads-up before we dive into it. The new way that I'm talking about, that I'm going to be pointing you to, I've actually mapped this out in a free guide that I call the Safety Management Influencer System Guide. It's the exact cycle and the three pillars that are built on top of it that replaces the old compliance cop approach step by step.
Safety Brye: [00:02:53] So there is a link below whenever you are ready to grab it. I will warn you ahead of time, it is a meaty guide, but it does go through all of the aspects of the influencer system. All righty, let's get into it. Let's start off with talking about the trap itself, because you can't escape it until you actually see it, right?
Safety Brye: [00:03:16] And that's what makes it so dangerous. Because the way that traditional safety management is taught, it looks legit, it sounds legit, and in fact, it works to a point, right? And it makes you look like you've been doing your job well. So what is generally taught when somebody enters into safety, the very first thing that they are told and they are handed is the regulations book, and they're like, "It's your job to make sure that the organization meets compliance, hits the standards, do all the training, make sure everybody's doing what they're supposed to be doing.
Safety Brye: [00:03:57] It's your job to enforce compliance. And if you catch anybody violating compliance, make sure that you write them up, you hold the line, you know, you be the one that tells them, 'No, you can't do it that way. You have to do it this other way.'" And that's what I was taught. When I first started, literally the very first couple of weeks in the position, I was told how to read a regulation and all about the Code of Federal Regulations, and then I was shown how that regulation applies in the workplace.
Safety Brye: [00:04:31] You know, that this is what the regulation says, this is how we're doing it. You see how they meet. It's your job to do that with every regulation in this book, right? And I was taught that it was my job to walk around and watch people, and if they were doing something wrong, to, to write them up for it or to make a note and bring it to their supervisor's attention.
Safety Brye: [00:04:53] So I became this person that my role was to be out there looking for what people were doing wrong. A lot of times I call it, like, witch hunting. Like, literally I'm out there looking for all the witches, right? So this feels right because this is the way traditional safety management is taught. In fact, when people come to me and they're like, "Hey, I want to break into safety management.
Safety Brye: [00:05:15] What should I do?" the very first thing I point them to is the OSHA 30-hour course. And I do believe that you need to have a strong foundation in the regulations, but that is just the ground level, right? The... You're, you're gonna find once you try to apply those regulations, that's when you need to really know how to influence people, and that's where it gets really difficult.
Safety Brye: [00:05:37] So safety isn't just about the regulations. It is, that is your base, right? It's like the foundation of the whole house that we're building, right? And the thing is, is that it feels right because this is the way everybody is taught, and it does get results. If you have a super bad safety program and you just focus on the regulations, you're gonna reduce incidents, you're gonna reduce insurance costs, you're gonna reduce mod rates, you're gonna meet industry standard.
Safety Brye: [00:06:06] But focusing on the regulations only gets you so far. And the way that we, the safety department, is created in a business is typically because HR is getting overloaded or operations is getting overloaded handling compliance and training and injuries, so then they hire us, and we come in and we are given all of this work to do.
Safety Brye: [00:06:32] So even if you feel like you're not a safety cop, like, that terminology came about probably, like, a decade or more ago, where we were like, "You shouldn't be the safety cop. You shouldn't be the person writing people up." For the longest time, I used to write people up, and then I realized it wasn't working.
Safety Brye: [00:06:51] And then there became this movement in our profession of, like, "No, it's not safety's job to write people up. The supervisor has to do that." And that is 100% correct. So when you do see somebody not following the rules, you really should bring it to the supervisor's attention and have the supervisor handle it.
Safety Brye: [00:07:10] But if that's all you're doing, if you are constantly just walking around looking for what people do wrong, you will automatically be seen as the safety cop. You will automatically be, uh, it will be implied that you're the enforcer, especially if you're the only one that's bringing it to the supervisor's attention.
Safety Brye: [00:07:34] So just a quick story. When I, uh, was working in a meat processing plant, I was implementing a hearing protection program where everybody had to wear hearing protection, which if you've ever had to do this, um, and it is a semi-loud environment, not super loud, but semi. We were, we were on the edge there. Um, it's hard to get people to wear their hearing protection.
Safety Brye: [00:07:58] So I would walk into the production room and you would hear this banging, uh, across the room. It was like a wave. And because it was a meat processing plant, every- a lot of people had knives 'cause they were cutting steaks. But they would bang their knives on the table to warn the entire room that I was there.
Safety Brye: [00:08:18] And I used to say like, "I don't mind that you did that," because, one, it told me that you knew what the rule was, so training was there. They just, uh, did not comply. What I minded was that they didn't do the same thing when the supervisor walked in the room. So that meant that I was the only one that was being seen as the enforcer, where the supervisor sh- who was doing the write-ups should actually be the one that is seen as the enforcer.
Safety Brye: [00:08:48] So even though you may not be the safety cop, so to say, you're not writing the tickets, but if you are seen as a person that can cause the ticket to happen, you're a safety cop, okay? You are. You're a safety cop. You're the department of no. How many times have we heard like safety gets involved and all of a sudden we can't do it, or safety comes in and our job becomes harder?
Safety Brye: [00:09:13] That is the traditional method of safety. When you focus just on compliance and your job is constantly to be that devil's advocate and what can go wrong and what are they doing wrong instead of being a partner to n- to make it appear that you're there to help them do their job better, that is the difference that we're talking about.
Safety Brye: [00:09:38] And you can tell if you're in this role because what ends up happening when you're in this enforcer role and you're the only one enforcing is that every year your job gets harder. So every year as you're doing like your gap analysis or your hazard assessment or your continuous improvement program, every single year you are getting, uh, more and more things added to your list to do, and your job gets heavier, not lighter.
Safety Brye: [00:10:07] And if your job is feeling very heavy and your task list is very long, that is because you are the one that is the enforcer. You are running this compliance-driven safety program as opposed to an influence level safety program. So the way out of this is the exact system that I map out in that free SMIS guide that you can get the link, uh, below.
Safety Brye: [00:10:35] So grab it whenever you're ready. But here's the part that I want to make sure that you understand. This doesn't just stop working, right? So, like, when I was running a compliance-driven program, I actually got results. We were at, like, a 12, uh, TCIR, annual TCIR, and I got us down to industry standard, which is, like, a 4.5 or a 5 for the industry that I was in.
Safety Brye: [00:11:02] It does work. Compliance-driven safety programs work when you are really, really bad at safety to begin with, but it only works for so long. So, and it... here's the thing, is that it doesn't just stop working. As you lean into this compliance-driven program, it actually starts to turn people against safety and against you.
Safety Brye: [00:11:30] So let me explain why that happens and how I saw that happen in my career. So compliance and influence kind of feel like the same thing, right? When you say, "Well, I do influence them because I train them on the right thing to do, and I coach them on the right thing to do," and you're basically telling them what to do, that is compliance.
Safety Brye: [00:11:57] If you're telling somebody what they need to do, that is compliance, complying with a policy, a procedure, a training. That is compliance. And I'm not saying that our jobs should not have those things, because they do need to have those things, but influence is totally different. They're not even close, and confusing the two is the single most expensive mistake that you can make in your entire profession.
Safety Brye: [00:12:24] And once you see this difference, you cannot unsee it, and it will actually shift the way that you approach safety. So if you are walking into your role thinking that it's my job to, like, read the regulations, write the policies and procedures, and tell people what to do and make sure that they enforce it, that is a compliance-driven program.
Safety Brye: [00:12:48] You are telling people what to do, making sure that they follow the policies, correcting people in the moment. And that sounds legit, and I, I do have to say that is part of our job. But compliance, it only buys you surface level behavior. It does not give you buy-in, right? They will change their behavior while you are in front of them and, and when they think people are watching.
Safety Brye: [00:13:17] But they will not change their behavior if they have not bought into it, and they don't internally believe that they needed to change their behavio- behavior. So if you find that you're constantly having to correct the same behavior problems over and over and over again, then you're running a compliance-driven program, and you have not influenced them.
Safety Brye: [00:13:43] You have not changed their beliefs. You have not changed their perceptions. You have not changed their internal thoughts about that policy or that procedure. And what ends up happening is, yeah, they'll change their behavior while they're there. "Hey, Bryce coming. Let me make sure I bend my knees while I'm lifting, make sure I put on that hearing protection, make sure that I've got my cut gloves on or all of my PPE."
Safety Brye: [00:14:09] But if, "Hey, Bryce got the day off, I don't have to worry about it. I can just relax and just make sure my job gets done because that's all my supervisor cares about, is that the job gets done," right? So what tends to happen in a compliance-driven program is eventually they start hiding things from you. And the instinct to this behavior, right, like, you're constantly doing it over and over again.
Safety Brye: [00:14:38] You find out they're hiding things from you. Your instinct, human instinct here, is to get more technical. It is to bring down the hammer. It's to, you know, use fear and say, "Hey, you're going to, uh, face these fines or face this punishment," or, "Let's..." You know, three write-ups, and they're suspended and terminated.
Safety Brye: [00:14:59] Let's, let's really get them to totally change what they're doing. And more enforcing, more being a cop, makes you more isolated. So I wanna share th- this experience with you. So unless you're driving right now, uh, I want you to kind of sit back, close your eyes. That, that always helps for me, if I close my eyes.
Safety Brye: [00:15:23] Close your eyes and imagine that you're doing your job just like you do every day, and the, uh, HR manager, who you don't report to, 'cause you, you report properly to the CEO. The HR manager comes along and tells you that you should be doing your job differently, that the, this is the right way to do your job and, you know, this aligns with our ethics policy or whatever it happens to be.
Safety Brye: [00:15:56] But you disagree because you've been doing your job just fine the way it is. You've been productive. You've been getting results, and now out of nowhere, this HR manager is telling you, the safety manager, to do things differently. So you're like, "Okay. All right." And then you go to your boss and you go, "Hey boss, HR manager told me this, but I like to do it this way.
Safety Brye: [00:16:20] Do you care either way?" And the boss is like, "No, I don't care either way." Um, and then the HR manager comes back over and says, "Hey, you need to do it this way." And you're like, "Okay, okay." But in your mind you're like, "My boss says he doesn't care. I don't report to this HR manager. What am I gonna do? Well, every time I see the HR manager I'm gonna make sure I'm doing it the right way.
Safety Brye: [00:16:40] If something is gonna get into that HR manager's ear, then I'm gonna do it the right way. Right? But when they're not watching, I'm gonna do my own thing because I'm getting results my way. Her way makes my job harder and takes longer." Do you see it? Do you see it? That's what we're asking our employees to do, right?
Safety Brye: [00:17:05] And that is why when you are constantly correcting them and constantly being the enforcer, they will change their behavior while you're there, but they're not going to change their behavior when you're not there. And honestly, this will only get you so far. Like, when you focus on compliance, literally gets you to industry standard.
Safety Brye: [00:17:31] Where do, where do you think industry standards come from, right? So you're racing to get this mediocre result. So you're trying to comply with the rules and regulations that honestly were never built or never created to give you an exceptional safety program. The rules and regulations that you are so hung up on and gripping white-knuckling to get them to comply with were only designed to reduce serious injuries and fatalities.
Safety Brye: [00:18:05] That's it. They weren't designed... And they're, they're so heavily lobbied that they get watered down, that they are never going to get you to that zero. So the way that we need to bust through this is by using an influencer system. I'm not saying not to correct people when they're not following policies and procedures, but you need to have your systems in place that are always shifting beliefs, shifting perceptions, changing their internal thoughts about what you're doing.
Safety Brye: [00:18:46] So going back to our story, if that HR manager came to me and told me that the right way to do this, in their opinion, also helped me in some way, and they actually worked on shifting my thoughts and beliefs about it, I would likely do it when they weren't watching, right? So I know all of this because I actually lived a bit of it.
Safety Brye: [00:19:13] So when I started out in safety, I was taught to be the safety cop, and I actually had higher authority. So I had some authority behind me to be that safety cop as well. But I did that for many years, and it only got me so far. And I did figure out the right method, but it took me a long time to get there, and it really took me, like, hitting a wall and recognizing what I had done to my reputation and the way that I was perceived in the workplace to truly change my approach.
Safety Brye: [00:19:53] So let me take a moment and tell you about that wall that I hit. So the better that I got at safety, the more people around me started shutting down. Like, I got really good at knowing the regulations, at knowing the policies and procedures, at knowing, you know, how to find people that were doing things wrong, how to track it down.
Safety Brye: [00:20:19] I knew our security system, you know, like the back of my hand to, to go right to, to the event and find that thing on video so I could write that person up, right? And I knew the regs cold. I was like a walking encyclopedia. But I got my injury rate down to industry standard, and then from there it wouldn't budge.
Safety Brye: [00:20:42] And then what I noticed is that my own team started hiding things from me, and this is the wall that I hit, and the day that my beliefs started shifting, because the way that it started was not where you would expect. It was actually from management. What I realized is that I was not getting invited to planning meetings.
Safety Brye: [00:21:09] I was not getting told about process changes. When I walked into a room, even the managers, the supervisors and managers would go quiet, or they would shove things into their desk and hide it, 'cause they didn't want me to see or know what they were working on. And that's what made me realize that relationships with the management team, as well as employees, and even vendors, was starting to break down, because I was so stuck on finding what people were doing wrong and being that devil's advocate, that people got guarded, and they stopped bringing problems to me, and they started hiding them.
Safety Brye: [00:22:01] And I became the person that nobody wanted to see coming. That's the wall, my friends. Doing everything right and still being stuck at an industry standard rate is never going to help you advance your career, right? I couldn't get to zero, no matter how hard I tried. I couldn't be seen as a partner in the business.
Safety Brye: [00:22:30] I was seen as somebody that was like an annoying little pest in the room, right? That is never going to get you to that executive level that I believe we all deserve to be at, right? So by the book was never built to get you there, and grinding harder like I did was getting me nowhere. So what actually shifted for me was I was at a safety conference, this was way, way back.
Safety Brye: [00:23:02] We're talking early 2000s. Um, and I attended a seminar on behavior-based safety, and that kinda cracked everything open for me, and it pulled me into psychology, so much so that when I did go to finish my degree, I got my degree in psychology. Because I believe that so much of what we do is psychology based.
Safety Brye: [00:23:31] It's all about the why. Like, why do people do what they do? How do you grab people's attention? How do you motivate people to make the right decisions? How do you get people to listen to you? How do you lead people, right? All of that is psychology. It has nothing to do with regulations. And what I realized was that I did not have a compliance problem.
Safety Brye: [00:23:59] I had a people problem. I had a behavior problem, and I personally had an influence problem. I did not have the skills to influence people to see it my way, and I was also influencing them the wrong way. I was constantly bringing down the hammer. I was constantly telling them what they were doing wrong.
Safety Brye: [00:24:24] That is not from a place of influence. That is from a place of management. This is why I say that we cannot manage safety, we can only influence it, right? No, regardless of what your title is, titles are constructs anyway. But this reframe of behavior-based safety, combined with a little bit of compliance totally s- shifted, and it stopped me from trying to manage compli- compliance to trying to influence the people within the company to make the right decisions, or to make the decisions that I agreed with, I should say.
Safety Brye: [00:25:10] Not all decisions are right decisions, but to make the decisions I wanted them to make, right? To give me the resources I needed, to do the behaviors I wanted them to do. All of this shifted, and my entire career trajectory changed because I went from being this enforcer that nobody even wanted in the room to being seen as a partner and as somebody who helps the business grow.
Safety Brye: [00:25:38] And I gained all those skills of sitting in those executives, executive meetings, of reporting to a board of directors and getting them to listen, and understanding the words I needed to use, and how to get them to change their behaviors. Everything I built after hitting that wall is exactly what I teach in my safety systems.
Safety Brye: [00:26:01] So if you like this kind of stuff, if you're like, "Yeah, I don't wanna be that compliance cop anymore," then make sure you subscribe so that way you never miss another episode. All righty, so that realization, that safety is an influence problem and not a compliance problem, is the hinge that this entire series that I'm doing right now turns on.
Safety Brye: [00:26:25] So let me show you what the new way of managing safety, having a safety influencer system, actually looks like. And here's the shift in one sentence: compliance is your floor, it's your foundation, but influence is your, is in your systems, right? Compliance is the floor, influence is in your systems. When you make that shift, safety becomes how the job is done, not an additional something or another that is bolted on to everybody's day, that is added into their work process.
Safety Brye: [00:27:04] Safety becomes how the work is done, and that is what takes you from the safety cop to the safety executive. So the old way is you walk around and you enforce the rules, and you tell everybody what they're doing wrong, and the new way is using your influence pillars, uh, making sure you have business acumen, that you're using psychology and, uh, understanding human psychology, and that you're using strategic engagement in all of your systems to influence the line of power.
Safety Brye: [00:27:43] Remember, all behaviors, all actions that your employees take are determined by who they report to. And nobody is reporting to you. You are outside this line of power, so the influence system makes sure that you equip the line of power, but then you're also influencing the line of power to make decisions that are safe ones and that follow the safe practice.
Safety Brye: [00:28:13] Now, we all say that safety is everybody's job. Like, that's kind of like a common thing. Safety is everybody's responsibility. Safety is everybody's job. But when push comes to shove, safety tends to be the thing that they push to the side, and that is because we have built it to be a separate entity.
Safety Brye: [00:28:28] Instead, we want safety to be seen as the best, fastest, most efficient way to do the job. So of course they're gonna do it that way. That is an influence system, and this is the system that actually gets you to zero. It isn't throwing out compliance, it's layering influence on top. So when I say that to, in, in order to comply with the regulations, you have to have such and such machine guarding, but then the supervisor's like, "Oh, well, putting that machine guard on actually slows us down," then it is my job to use my three pillars to really convince and influence that supervisor to see that putting that machine guard on is the better, faster, and easier way to do the job.
Safety Brye: [00:29:22] Better, faster, easier. Remember those three terms. So the name that I like to use on this shift of this mindset is going from a safety management system to a safety management influencer system, and I actually mapped that out in a previous episode for you. The cycle that we run in safety management, that's the engine, and then the three pillars are layered on top to influence everybody as you go.
Safety Brye: [00:29:51] If you just are running the safety management cycle, you're typically running a compliance-driven program until you put the right influence pillars into every system, then you end up influencing people organically. Because here's the thing that I found out as I built safety programs from the ground up dozens of times, is that not every safety leader has natural charisma.
Safety Brye: [00:30:17] Not n- every safety or safety leader is able to have organic conversations with people to change their beliefs. So we build psychological hacks into each of our systems that organically change people's mind, just by adding in those three pillars and changing the information that we share. So I promise you, you do not have to hit the wall like I did.
Safety Brye: [00:30:46] You don't have to become the person that everybody dreads walking in the door to be good at safety. All you need is the right system, and this series that I'm putting together right now, there's, like, six or seven episodes that I'm doing. This series is going to hand you this piece by piece, so make sure you subscribe and download that free SMIS guide that I linked below.
Safety Brye: [00:31:15] So if those old ways of managing safety, if that was the way you were originally taught, if that is how you are currently running your program, no worries. If that's what's been keeping you stuck, I got you, my safety friend. The next few episodes are how you are going to get unstuck, one little fix at a time.
Safety Brye: [00:31:36] So we're going to go over step by step the three things that you need to get unstuck and get through all of the issues and how to set up systems so that way you are no longer feeling overwhelmed, you are no longer feeling ignored, and you have the confidence to step into the role of that rockstar safety executive.
Safety Brye: [00:32:01] So make sure that you subscribe so you get notifications and you know when the next episode drops. So what's coming up next? This is the second in the series. In the next one, we're going to talk about how you stop being a department of one without actually hiring an assistant. Um, and in episodes four through six, we're going to go over the rest of the system, and then I'm also going to show you how you can build this for yourself.
Safety Brye: [00:32:29] So it all starts by fixing the first problem, which is overwhelm. Here is your next move. So make sure that you download that SMIS guide with the link below because seeing the steps is one thing, listening to an episode, that's one thing, but actually going through it step by step, that's a game-changer.
Safety Brye: [00:32:55] So make sure you download that. And if you're ready to work with me directly on this and stop piecing it all together alone, then I encourage you to book a safety leadership roadmap session with me, and we will walk through your current situation, what results you're getting, and what steps you need to take to improve it, and I will also show you how you can join the academy and how we can walk you through setting up those systems for you.
Safety Brye: [00:33:26] All righty, my safety friend, thank you so much for being here today, and I look forward to chatting with you in the next one. Bye for now.
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Hi, I'm Brye (rhymes with sky)! I am a self-proclaimed safety geek with two decades of general industry safety experience. Specializing in bringing safety programs to a world-class level and building a safety culture, I have trained and coached many safety managers, just like you, on how to effectively manage workplace safety in the real world. I would love to help you too.
