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Chapter 3

The Accidental Profession

One chapter of Raise the Standard, straight out of the manuscript with no tidying up for the website.

About a 19 minute read. No email needed.

I have asked the same question on LinkedIn more than once over the years: “How did you get into health and safety?” The answers barely change. The response is immediate and overwhelming, and almost nobody describes it as a deliberate career choice. They have been handed the role, promoted sideways into it, given it “on top” of their existing responsibilities, or inherited it after someone left. Others have been assigned it because they were considered responsible, organised, or good with people.

In many cases the story followed the same pattern. An incident occurred, the organisation realised it needed someone to “look after safety,” and a capable employee was asked to step in temporarily. Temporary became permanent. Responsibility expanded. Support often did not. What struck me about the responses was the consistency, because across industries, organisations and experience levels the pattern was almost identical. Health and safety had become an accidental profession. That matters more than we often acknowledge.

Professions that emerge intentionally tend to develop clear identity, defined pathways and strong professional boundaries. Medicine, law and engineering all have structured entry points, recognised competencies and well-understood expectations. Health and safety has developed differently, because it has evolved through necessity, and that has shaped how the role is perceived, both by organisations and by the practitioners themselves.

Go back to the answers themselves and three routes appear. They run across both sides of the Tasman and more than fifty years. Some came in through an injury of their own. Some were standing nearest the paperwork on the day it needed a home. One read the legislation when it was new and could not leave it alone.

Steven Paasila took the first route. He was a building supervisor when the fire system tripped and shut the main gas valve to the building, and the plumber who normally reset it was not available that day, so he talked Steven through it over the phone.

“Long story short I caused a gas explosion and luckily only burnt my face. Afterwards I was thinking, why weren’t those valves etc numbered and on a simple procedure sheet... that started me off. Tradework to safety.”

The account he gave me afterwards is harder to read than the comment lets on.

“I luckily only suffered partial thickness burns to parts of my face and no deeper injury as I’d reflexively squeezed my eyes shut cover my face with my hands and held my breath as a fire ball swept over me. When I sensed the fireball had gone I ran to the fire extinguisher and put out a few spot fires...”

The pain started after that. He stood in a downstairs bathroom throwing water on his own face for half an hour, until the next workers turned up and called him an ambulance.

Read that for the sequence rather than the injury. A man is talked through a live gas task by somebody who cannot see him. He is burned. He fights the fire himself. He is alone for half an hour with a burnt face before anyone arrives who can call for help. And the question he carried out of it was not who was to blame. It was why the valves had no numbers and why nobody had written a procedure sheet.

Usha Sankaran came the same way and paid to stay.

“Literally ‘fell’ into health and safety. Had a workplace accident that led to months of pain and possible surgery. It got me thinking about why others hadn’t reported the risk, acted on it etc. Did a certificate through MIT in OHS back then and then took a $10k pay cut to apply for a graduate H&S role. 20 years on..still here!”

The pun is hers. The ten thousand dollars is the part I keep returning to, because if nobody chose this profession then the obvious question is why so many of us are still in it two decades later, and her answer is that entry cost her something. Notice what she wanted to know as well. Not why she had been hurt. Why nobody else had reported the risk before she was.

The second route is quieter and far more common. Juliette Thornton had been an administrator for years when somebody asked her to do the audit.

“I was an administrator of some form for years and got asked to do the WSMP audit for the company I was at, passenger rail, I LOVED it, nailed it to tertiary level first go... I have had some jobs with terrible out looks on safety and their approach and honestly its exhausting, but if you can change someone’s way of working it’ll have a flow on effect somewhere. Small steps are better then no steps!”

Two things sit inside that. The first is the archetype this profession keeps producing: a capable administrator, an audit nobody else is obviously qualified to run, and a career that starts by accident and holds because the work turns out to matter. The second is the word exhausting, written in public, unprompted, by somebody who explains in the same breath why she stays anyway. I come back to that tension later in this chapter. She named it before I did.

Kevin Jones arrived through the regulator rather than the site. He was a temporary administrator in Victoria’s Department of Labour and Industry in the 1990s, and when the two year tenure ended “it was suggested I move” to the newly created Occupational Health and Safety Authority. Geoff Brokenshire was introduced to the work in 1971, three months into his first job as a trainee lab technician, and watched it grow alongside his career as an industrial chemist until it had quietly become the whole role.

“Was it an accident that I became involved in 1971? Perhaps but it certainly became an integral part of my career until it became my primary business.”

Neither man was recruited into this work. Both were nearby when it needed doing, fifty five years apart.

Brian Martin is the exception, and the only one of the six who came in because the subject itself interested him.

“In 1985 I was a schoolteacher and shortly after the Act was proclaimed in Victoria OHS captured my curiosity, I thought, this sounds fascinating, it fascinated me then and it fascinates me even more now. It feels like home, it gives me purpose, direction and optimism about a better future for workers.”

Forty one years on he calls it home. That is the most direct statement of professional identity anybody offered me and it came from the one person who chose this on purpose.

What none of them describes is a plan. Every one of them describes a moment when the work arrived and they were the person standing there. I have come to think that is one of the profession’s real strengths rather than something to apologise for, because all six brought an operational past into the role. They knew what the work felt like before they tried to make it safer, and that is where whatever credibility we hold actually comes from.

It is also where the problem this chapter is about begins. A profession assembled almost entirely from people who were handed the role has never had to agree on what the role is.

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Searching for Identity

When I first entered the profession I was searching for clarity. What exactly is the role of a safety professional, where does responsibility begin and end, and what does excellence actually look like? Like many others, I joined professional bodies and began attending local meetings, because I wanted to understand the profession I had stepped into.

The people in those rooms were knowledgeable. Many had deep technical expertise and decades of experience, and the presentations were often detailed and informative, covering regulatory updates, case law and technical guidance. But something felt incomplete. Most meetings followed the same pattern: a presentation would be delivered, questions might be asked, and people would leave. The most valuable conversations often happened in the final few minutes in the car park, speaking informally with the person who had been sitting beside you, and those brief exchanges often provided more insight than the formal presentation. It revealed something subtle about the profession: we had knowledge, but we lacked cohesion. There was no shared narrative about what the role was evolving into.

The same feeling appeared at larger national conferences, where speaker after speaker would present information to an audience of practitioners, but engagement was limited. The structure encouraged listening rather than participation, and it sometimes felt as though safety professionals were being talked at rather than developed. Eventually I stopped attending many of those events, not because the information lacked value, but because I sensed that the profession needed something more. It needed ownership. It needed energy. It needed a clearer answer to a question that many practitioners carry: what exactly are we here to do?

If you spend time reading job advertisements for safety roles, a pattern emerges quickly. Titles vary wildly: manager, advisor, coordinator, officer, administrator, and sometimes several of those titles appear within the same job description. The responsibilities often include governance oversight, operational engagement, investigation leadership, training delivery, documentation management, contractor management, cultural transformation and regulatory liaison. All of it sits within a single role, often with limited authority and frequently with modest compensation compared with other leadership functions.

The underlying expectation is clear: you are responsible for everything. But you control very little.

That tension creates a unique form of emotional labour, because safety practitioners often absorb organisational anxiety. When something goes wrong, they feel responsible. When systems are weak, they feel obligated to fix them. When leadership capability is inconsistent, they often attempt to compensate through effort. Over time that responsibility becomes heavy. I have lost count of the number of times I have paused during a conversation with a safety professional or health and safety rep, and asked a simple question: “Do you realise this isn’t all on you?” One of those conversations stays with me.

She came into the conversation guarded, the way most solo H&S managers do. Her background wasn't safety. She'd come from people management and human resources, fallen into the role the way many of us did, and within a few years she had taken a heavy civil and construction operation, mostly engineers, mechanics, tradespeople, large project sites, through to ISO 45001 certification on her own. That certification was her work. The senior leadership above her had given it the standard nominal support, but the lift, the system, the audit preparation, the documentation, the difficult conversations on site, all of it sat with her.

We were working through her day. I was asking the usual questions: what does the week look like, where does the pressure come from, what's keeping you up at night. She walked me through it in the matter-of-fact tone that practitioners use when they've stopped noticing how much they're carrying. She listed achievements without inflection. She described conflicts with senior management as if they were weather, not decisions. Underneath every story was the same posture: I am responsible, and if something goes wrong, it is on me.

I stopped her mid-sentence. I turned in my chair and looked at her directly. I asked her, "Has anyone stopped to tell you that this is not all on your shoulders? That you are not personally responsible if something goes wrong here?"

She looked back at me. Her eyes began to brim.

When she replied, she said no one had ever put it to her that way. Not a director, not her manager, not a peer. She knew what the legislation said about officer duty and shared accountability. She could quote it. But not one person in the business above her had ever turned to her and said the words out loud. The legislative architecture was in the manual. The lived experience was an individual alone, with a cape on, trying not to drop the building.

I watched the weight come off her physically. She smiled and the room felt different.

I would like to tell you that something changed in that business afterwards. I cannot. Nothing I could put my finger on moved. She was a very capable person who would probably have been fine either way. That is the honest version, and it is this book's own argument turned back on me. Being seen is not the same as being resourced. If the structure does not change, all you have given somebody is a good afternoon.

Sitting with someone in that moment is a mix of things for me. I stopped the meeting, abandoned the agenda and poured real attention into the person across the table, because I had done it before and knew what I was looking at. There is the satisfaction of watching someone be vindicated for work they have been doing on their own for too long. And there is the real work the moment triggers: the redirection has to start there. The seed has to go in. The cape has to come off, even momentarily. The workload has to start moving where it actually belongs, some of it shared back across the team, some of it pushed up to the decision-making table where officer duty actually sits.

What I do not always say out loud is that it is heavy. I built this consultancy to interrupt that exact pattern, person by person, organisation by organisation. Most days the purpose carries the cost. Some days, after a conversation like that one, I sit in the car park afterwards and feel the weight of it land. That is not a complaint. It is the truth that anyone trying to lift the standard of this profession will eventually have to make peace with.

This is the moment that should make a board director put the book down for a minute. Not because her eyes welled. Because the entire reason she was carrying that load was a design failure that nobody in her organisation believed they had built. The senior leaders above her would have told you, sincerely, that safety was a shared responsibility and that she had their full support. They had a values statement that said so. They had a policy. They had ISO 45001 certification, which she had secured for them. And yet not one of them had ever stopped, turned to her, and said the sentence that would have changed how she carried her week.

The cape is not a personality flaw. It is a structural vacancy. When the people above the H&S role do not own their duty out loud, the practitioner picks it up by default. She did not pick it up because she was dramatic or self-sacrificing. She picked it up because somebody had to, and the silence above her told her that nobody else would.

When role clarity is weak, people often seek certainty, and in safety that certainty frequently appears as rigid enforcement. “This is non-compliant.” “You must follow the procedure.” “The rules are clear.” These responses are understandable, because they provide structure in environments where authority is ambiguous, but they can also create tension.

High-risk work rarely fits neatly into black-and-white categories, because real work involves variation, complexity and judgement. The most meaningful improvements often occur in the grey space, where operational experience intersects with regulatory intent. This is where small adjustments improve control effectiveness, where workers share insights about how tasks are actually performed, and where learning occurs. Without strong leadership alignment, however, practitioners may feel that the only tool available to them is enforcement, because without structural support from leadership, authority becomes brittle. Influence requires architecture.

There is a dimension of safety work that is rarely discussed openly: emotional labour. Safety professionals sit in investigation rooms after serious harm events, they listen to workers describe injuries that changed their lives, and they speak with supervisors who carry guilt about decisions made under pressure. They translate complex information upward to executives and downward to frontline teams, and they hold difficult conversations about failure, responsibility and prevention. They are also acutely aware that if something catastrophic occurs, their competence may be questioned, even when the structural causes lie far beyond their control.

This pressure rarely appears in job descriptions, but it is very real. Without clear boundaries and strong leadership support, practitioners begin to internalise responsibility for outcomes they cannot fully control. They start wearing the cape described in the previous chapter, until they become the safety system. And that is neither sustainable nor fair. The core issue is not competence, because most safety professionals are intelligent, committed and deeply motivated to protect people. The issue is architecture.

In many organisations safety roles have evolved reactively. A serious incident occurs, legislation changes, a regulatory investigation exposes weaknesses, or tenders demand pre-qualifications and certificates, and the organisation decides it needs a dedicated safety role. A position is created, but the role itself is rarely designed in relation to governance maturity, operational accountability and leadership capability.

As a result, practitioners often find themselves operating in ambiguous territory. They are responsible for influence but possess limited authority. They are expected to transform culture but have little control over incentives. They are accountable for outcomes but have no direct control over production decisions. In this environment it is easy to see why many professionals feel stuck between compliance and capability. The profession does not need more resilience training. It needs clearer design.

A few years ago I was attending an all-day workshop in Christchurch, and I asked a visiting keynote speaker a question that had been sitting with me for some time: what is our primary role as risk and safety managers? The speaker was Dr Nippin Anand: anthropologist, ship master and one of the most thoughtful voices globally in conversations about risk, culture and learning. The question wasn’t planned. It came from tension, because I had spent enough time in boardrooms to sense something wasn’t quite right. Safety professionals were present, but peripheral. We were accountable, but not empowered. We were consulted, but rarely central to the shaping of decisions.

Nippin gave us an answer at the workshop. He said the role of the health and safety leader was to create a safe space for challenging conversations with the CEO, and to make the CEO feel uncomfortable. It was a fine answer, but it sat with me as the beginning of something, not the end. A few weeks later I wrote about the workshop on LinkedIn. I posted his answer, agreed with it, and added my own conviction. Our role, I wrote, is to create trust founded on authenticity, an agreed understanding of intention and language, and above all else to act and behave as a human being.

Nippin commented underneath, and he pushed back. He said we often think of the CEO as the icon of power and authority, but that is not always true, because CEOs are also vulnerable, susceptible to politics and power in organisational life. He argued that instead of focusing on the CEO alone, the profession should learn to locate where power sits, what its nature is, and how to engage with those who hold it. “Go wider than just targeting the CEO.” That comment shifted something in my thinking. The question I had asked was framed around the CEO, and his answer kept moving outward.

Nearly two years later, on 13 April 2025, he published an article on LinkedIn carrying the same title as the question I had asked him. He opened by recalling the conversation in Christchurch and giving a fuller account of how he had framed his original answer.

“I often imagine people in risk and safety departments sitting outside the boardroom waiting to be invited for important meetings but no one is really interested in them. Your job is to ensure compliance with rules and regulations. Sit on the one side and do just that.”

It was an uncomfortable image because it was accurate. For years the profession has been fighting for a “seat at the table,” but very few people stop to ask what happens once that seat is offered. If the role remains defined as compliance assurance, proximity to leadership changes very little because you are still responding to decisions rather than shaping them.

What Nippin offered next reframed the question entirely. After facilitating a session on risk perception in Berlin, he had taken a small group of safety and risk managers on what he calls a semiotic walk: a slow, deliberate practice of observing how meaning is communicated through symbols, gestures, location, language and the things organisations choose to hide.

They stopped at a memorial in a Berlin park. There was a statue raised high on a pedestal, with no eye contact for the common man below, an angel beside it lifting a flame, graffiti scrawled across the tourist information board, and mess at the base of the statue itself, missed entirely by most of the group until they returned to the conference room. Everyone saw something different, and that, he wrote, is the whole point.

“Our senses were never meant to give us accuracy of the environment around us. Our senses were meant to make us feel safe through narratives and images that we are most familiar with. We mix between what we see and what we want to see. In other words, plausibility is mistaken for accuracy.”

That line stopped me when I read it, because it is the entire problem of the profession in a single sentence. We construct narratives that feel plausible and then mistake them for the truth. The audit report says the control exists, the risk register says the hazard is managed, and the dashboard says everything is green. Plausible. Comforting. Familiar. Not necessarily accurate. And then Nippin delivered the answer to the question I had asked him in Christchurch.

“Risk and safety is about understanding the sources of power, questioning the unconscious nature of decision making of those who hold the power, giving voices to the powerless and bringing their concerns to the surface. No organisation is safe if we cannot hold the tension between power and profitability.”

That is not compliance work. That is leadership work. The article closed with a line I did not expect to find.

“I wish Matt and I had gone for a semiotic walk together.”

Three years on, the invitation is still standing.

Over the past decade a number of progressive ideas have reshaped how the profession thinks about safety, and conversations around learning, human performance and operational understanding have broadened how organisations interpret risk. For many practitioners this felt like a turning point, because the narrative shifted away from blame and toward understanding systems and context, and safety professionals began to see themselves as contributors to performance rather than simply monitors of compliance.

Yet something subtle occurred. The language expanded and expectations grew, but the structural positioning of the role often did not. Practitioners were encouraged to influence culture, but not always given visibility into commercial trade-offs. They were asked to support operational performance, yet still measured primarily on lag indicators. They were invited to conversations about learning, but not consistently present when risk appetite was defined. The profession evolved conceptually. Architecture lagged behind. That gap is where frustration grows.

Organisations work the same way: they reveal what truly matters not through policy statements but through signals. The signals are what gets rewarded, what gets tolerated, who gets promoted and what gets funded. If production bonuses are highly visible while safety metrics are secondary, the signal is clear. If investigations are quietly edited before reaching governance, the signal is clear. If leaders appear only after incidents but rarely during risk design conversations, the signal is clear. Workers are not confused. They are reading the signs.

Risk is shaped as much by meaning as by mechanics, and meaning is shaped by leadership behaviour. The primary role of a safety leader, then, is not to enforce rules, not to chase documentation and not to absorb organisational anxiety. The role is to influence how risk is understood before decisions are made.

That requires proximity, but it also requires clarity of mandate. If the board sees safety as compliance assurance, that is what it will receive. If executives see safety as operational friction, that is how it will be treated. If the organisation sees safety as the department that says “no,” then “no” becomes its language. But if safety is positioned as the architect of sustainable performance, everything changes. That shift cannot be rhetorical. It must be structural, which means it shows up in roles, reporting lines, decision gates, governance rhythm and clarity of risk appetite. Without those anchors the profession oscillates between technical detail and cultural aspiration, and neither creates influence.

When I look back at the evolution of my own career, the biggest shift did not occur when I gained more knowledge. It occurred when I stopped asking how I could work harder and started asking what structural condition is creating this tension. That shift changed everything. It reframed the central question practitioners often ask. Not “How do I make them listen?” but “What needs to change structurally so listening becomes inevitable?” That is a different conversation, because it moves safety from enforcement to influence. And influence, when anchored in integrity and architecture, scales.