Safety Leadership: Insights From Military Research

The need for leader development in industry and within the safety and engineering communities in particular is the topic of many articles, presentations and conversations. This article explores the need to consider organizational research conducted by military research psychologists, sociologists and economists.Two audiences within the safety and engineering communities might best gain from military organizational research. Working safety and engineering professionals are often challenged to become leaders who can see the big picture and act as change agents. These professionals can benefit from understanding how leaders emerge and are cultivated internally in the military. In addition, many safety professionals or engineers just starting their careers have not held jobs while in school and, consequently, have missed opportunities to see how businesses operate and how authentic leaders act.Over the past few years, the author has been building an experimental graduate-level course at West Virginia University (WVU). The course is designed to offset these missed opportunities for safety and engineering students. WVU surveys indicate, for example, that only a few young people entering these professions have worked summer jobs. In addition, they have not traveled widely, do not read widely, and have not managed so much as a fast food restaurant shift or a swimming pool. On the more hopeful side of the ledger, the same surveys suggest that these future professionals are almost intuitively altruistic, have good common sense and know they are expected to be future leaders in their fields. As Winn, Williams and Heafey (2013) explain:In the pair of questions ranking at the highest affirmative response of the entire survey, our respondents indicated that learning about leadership in their career preparation was "important in a person’s career path." The same extraordinarily high proportion, 98%, suggested that to practice what they might have learned about leadership outside the classroom was "important in a person’s career path." Students know that learning about leadership and its practice is valuable to these respective career paths including safety, engineering, social and behavioral sciences, and the military, among others. [original emphasis]