It often is said that safety starts at the top, which can be a good thing or a bad thing. A company’s CEO can set an exemplary standard for ensuring the delicate balance between productivity and safety. Or, as sometimes happens, an organization’s top executive can create significant safety risk by focusing too much on profit and production and not enough on identifying and mitigating risks.
This dichotomy can result in a quandary for a safety manager or department faced with figuring out how to mitigate the potentially significant safety hazard associated with a CEO. One of the elements of a safety management system (SMS) is safety risk management (SRM). SRM includes the management of change (MOC), which is used to manage significant changes that might introduce new safety risks, such as new aircraft, new routes, or mergers. It also includes changes to management personnel — such as a new CEO. And this is where it gets interesting.
Let’s say you are the safety manager of …
