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Helping women to lead safely – part 2

RoSPA and L’Oréal open the door on Leading Safely for women across the world

Helping women to lead safely part 2 as featured on RoSPA.com [1]

Developing the abilities of women as a currently underrepresented group in occupational health and safety (OSH) and enhancing their visibility in the sector is at the heart of the partnership between the two organisations.

Designed to coincide with International Women’s Day 2021, the partnership has provided six funded places on the IOSH Leading Safely course, delivered by RoSPA, which has been specially designed and developed by Louise Hosking [2] to help participants examine how their personal leadership style influences how risk is perceived by stakeholders across their business.

RoSPA are following the journeys of the six women taking part in the course. Following an initial training session, each delegate was asked to put together a statement on their motivations and hopes for the initiative.

Commenting on the Leading Safely initiative Malcolm Staves, Global Vice President, Health and Safety, at L’Oréal, said:

“I was humbled and honoured to meet all these remarkable women making a real difference to the health and safety of their colleagues and I am looking forward to meeting others and following how they develop.”

The women, who come from all over the globe, will be assigned a mentor to help them continue their development. RoSPA spoke to another two of the women who are taking part right at the start of the course:

Lauren Crawley

Health Safety and Biosafety Advisor

I applied to the Leading Safely for females programme as I have felt stuck at my level for a number of years and have always felt more capable than any of the roles I have held. I wanted to find out what was holding me back and if this was common among other women health and safety professionals. Having not had the opportunity to interact with C-suite, directors, senior leaders in any of my roles, I felt that the course would give me more visibility and confidence to show what I could do, so that I might be able to progress to that level.

The course more than exceeded my expectations and there was so much to take away that it was hard to get it down to just three things to go back and implement. Some of the most positive things to come out of it was the long list of strengths we had as leaders versus a small list of weaknesses, the gap analysis for where we were as an organisation vs where we want to be (which showed that we were on the right track!) and some of the amazing connections we made over the course of the day who I hope to collaborate with in the future.

I think a lot of my commitments were about trying to get a seat at the table where decisions are taken, trying to get more visibility, and to promote more the good work that we (as a profession/team) and I (as an individual) do. There were also some specific things that I wanted to learn regarding auditing and benchmarking, in order to measure safety performance and do more of the ‘check’ing. I hope that I can put my qualification in auditing and inspection into use this year. I also realised that it would be important to set some career goals, so that I don’t just continue to plod along, hoping for opportunities to come my way.

I thoroughly enjoyed the course and would like to thank the organisers. I am looking forward to continuing the journey through their guidance and mentorship.

Nishma Mistry

Safety Health and Environment Business Partner

Through personal experience, I have found the safety sector has been very male orientated. We are however becoming much more diverse, but progress is slow.  Females especially from ethnic backgrounds such as myself are massively underrepresented in Senior Safety Roles. I would love the opportunity to have leadership support and guidance on my path to achieve my career aspirations, to become a successful leader in Health and Safety and hopefully one day be able to help inspire other new female safety professionals to push themselves to also become great leaders.

Being new to working in safety, I really want to learn, enhance and share my knowledge. I have a great passion for safety and Vision Zero is something I want to help contribute to in whichever way I can. I really want to build my credibility in the safety world, compliment to research and education and bring individuals together to help make our world a safer place. I feel like I am not as connected as I would like to be in the Road risk space and therefore am not able to reach my potential.

 

HOW TO JOIN THE NEXT COURSE

L’Oréal [3] and RoSPA [3] have come together to offer a limited number of spaces as part of their Safe@Work-Safe@Home [4] partnership. If you would like to be considered for one of the places, please email LS@hosking-associates.com [5] and partnerships@rospa.com [6] your name, organisation, role, contact details and some information about yourself along with a 250-word personal statement explaining how this opportunity will help you and your business. For more details click here [7]