Why don’t more safety professionals become CEOs?

My MBA research began with a simple question. The answer proved more complicated, and more revealing, than I expected.

Health and safety professionals routinely work alongside senior leaders.

They interpret complex risks, influence important decisions, and help organisations respond when something goes wrong. Their work requires judgement, communication, problem solving and an understanding of how people and organisations behave.

Yet relatively few progress from leading the safety function to leading the organisation itself.

Why?

This question became the focus of my MBA research at Warwick Business School. I wanted to examine whether safety professionals lacked the leadership characteristics associated with senior executive roles, or whether other factors were limiting their progression.

The research was conducted in October 2023. Nearly three years later, the questions raised by its findings remain highly relevant to the profession.

What I found challenged some of my own assumptions.

Do safety professionals lack the characteristics required for executive leadership, or do professional identity, career structures and organisational expectations limit how far they progress?

Looking beyond technical competence

Safety professionals are often defined by their technical knowledge.

Qualifications, professional membership, and practical experience establish credibility. They demonstrate that someone understands risk, regulation and the principles needed to protect people from harm.

But executive leadership demands something broader.

Chief executives must work across professional and organisational boundaries. They need to understand competing priorities, influence different groups and make decisions without always having complete information.

They must be able to connect people, risk, finance, operations, customers, and long-term strategy.

Technical competence may earn someone a senior position within a specialist function. It does not automatically prepare them, or cause others to see them as ready, for responsibility across the whole organisation.

My research therefore explored whether safety professionals demonstrated a wider range of recognised leadership characteristics.

The research

In October 2023, I invited approximately 500 health, safety and environmental professionals to participate in a survey. After removing two responses that did not meet the qualifying criteria, the final sample comprised 106 participants.

The research examined 11 characteristics associated with leadership:

• Cognitive ability

• Social awareness

• Conscientiousness

• Problem solving

• Emotional intelligence

• Self-monitoring

• Openness

• Agreeableness

• Emotional stability

• Extraversion

• Motivation

Rather than asking participants simply to award themselves a numerical score, the survey presented descriptions representing five progressive response levels. It also explored management responsibilities and longer-term career aspirations.

There are limitations to this approach. The findings were self-reported, the sample was relatively modest, and leadership cannot be reduced to a checklist of personal traits.

The study was exploratory rather than a definitive assessment of the entire profession.

Nevertheless, it revealed patterns worthy of a much wider conversation.

The leadership potential is there

The results did not support a simple conclusion that safety professionals lack leadership potential.

Respondents reported strengths across several areas relevant to senior leadership.

Percentages reflect participants’ self-reported maturity levels and should be interpreted within the limitations of the study.

These results need to be interpreted carefully because they reflect participants’ perceptions of themselves. Even so, the overall picture was not of a profession lacking the capacity to lead.

It was of a profession containing a range of people. Some appeared ready for broader leadership, some had the potential to develop further, and others were more comfortable remaining within their established professional roles.

That diversity is not unusual. It exists in every profession.

The more interesting question is why the safety profession produces so few visible pathways from technical leadership into wider organisational leadership.

“The overall picture was not of a profession lacking the capacity to lead.”

Capability was only part of the answer.

The most striking finding concerned career ambition.

Of the 106 participants, 95 responded to the optional question about their career aspirations.

When these responses were grouped:

Becoming a managing director or chief executive was mentioned only four times. Leading the safety function was mentioned 29 times.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that.

Becoming a chief executive is not the only measure of a worthwhile or successful career. Many safety professionals are motivated by protecting people, improving workplaces and becoming highly capable specialists.

But the findings raise an important distinction between not wanting to progress beyond the profession and never having considered it a realistic possibility.

Are safety professionals freely choosing the limits of their ambitions?

Or are those ambitions being shaped by conventional career pathways, professional expectations and the way organisations perceive technical specialists?

A profession shaped by its own boundaries

The usual development route for a safety professional leads towards deeper technical credibility through further qualifications, chartership, specialist knowledge and progressively more senior safety appointments.

That route can lead to significant responsibility. But it normally ends at the top of the safety function.

Professional networks can reinforce the same boundary.

Safety professionals frequently learn from, attend events with and seek mentoring from other safety professionals. These relationships are valuable, but they do not necessarily provide exposure to general management, commercial decision making or leaders who have successfully crossed from a specialist discipline into executive responsibility.

Technical expertise is therefore both an asset and a possible boundary.

It enables progression while potentially narrowing how success is imagined by the individual, the profession and the organisation employing them.

A wider conversation about safety leadership

My research did not identify a single explanation for why safety professionals rarely become chief executives.

Leadership progression is influenced by personal ambition, organisational opportunity, professional identity, development, networks and the way specialist expertise is valued.

What the research did suggest is that the question cannot be answered simply by saying that safety professionals are not capable business leaders.

The profession appears to contain considerable leadership potential. The challenge is understanding how that potential is developed, demonstrated and recognised beyond the safety function.

That means examining individual leadership characteristics in greater depth. It also requires difficult conversations about professional ambition, technical identity, business credibility and whether current development pathways prepare safety leaders to influence the whole organisation.

These questions will form the next parts of this research series.

The question is not whether every safety professional should aspire to become a chief executive.

It is whether those with the capability and ambition to lead more broadly are being given the experience, encouragement and opportunity to do so.

Perhaps most importantly, are safety professionals themselves willing to imagine a career beyond the boundaries of safety?

A question for the profession

Are safety professionals freely choosing the limits of their ambitions, or are those ambitions being shaped by the pathways and expectations surrounding them?