Personality assessments are tools that help gain insight into how people function and enhance their capability to reach their potential (optimal functioning). Personality functioning is an area of study that focuses on understanding how individuals become the best that they can be as well as how they may achieve their full potential. Every person has a certain amount of potential to do a thing, their capacity to do that thing needs to be developed to reach their full potential.
In my work, most of the safety leaders function as the Sensing Thinking (ST) type personality. I have tested over 5,000 safety leaders. It is an interesting phenomenon that so many of the same personality types are selected for safety leadership. The ST type is a very process-focused individual. They like a linear format for understanding or making sense of their information. Typically, they are incredibly detailed people finding a step-by-step procedure helpful, clarifying, and definitive to move toward a goal. They enjoy creating and following procedures and producing documentation to establish a way of doing things. STs expect others to execute best safety practices fully, and willingly. STs are very practical people and desire things to work easily and smoothly and have a critical sense of subtle differences. Sometimes they tend to see the negative side of things first, but that is not always a negative thing, in and of itself, but a critical differential from the established or defined standard of their normal functioning. It is in their nature to question things, and test things, they want to see the proof that something works. This aspect of their personality, being critical, can become dysfunctional because it becomes judgmental, and used to manipulate people or a situation to what they want. If STs are not careful they can create a reputation for only seeing the negative side of things and being excessively tough on people. It doesn’t help that they lack empathy for people. In my experience, ST safety leaders do not like the fact that some people take longer to learn how to adhere to safety behavioral expectations, or they deem some workers are too lazy to do what they’ve been trained to do, or that people do not need to be reinforced. I often hear them say, “Why can’t people just do their damn job!” The ST personality type is strong on logic (not necessarily science) and is a routine person; they are often described as robotic or cold in how they behave because they are so consistent. They can, at times, get negative about other people’s lack of consistency, and usually develop a low tolerance for this “flaw” in other people. This attitude can negatively impact a safety program by setting a tone in the safety culture that communicates to others by telling them what to do. Telling people what to do is a serious hindrance to safety performance and a significant problem. A safety culture that embraces this attitude of telling people what to do is detrimental to a healthy safety culture because it drives a results-based focus and not a behavioral-based focus. Results Based Safety (RBS) is the norm in the safety industry, and people continue to confuse it with the other side of safety-Behavioral Based Safety (BBS). Any integration of BBS into an RBS program results in an RBS program. The two programs do not mix. There is science, you cannot dilute science, or it’s not science.