In this episode of The SAFE Leader Podcast, we explore what it truly means to lead with integrity, empathy, and long-term vision. Our guest, Dame Judith Hackitt, shares a compelling personal journey from growing up in a mining village surrounded by industrial risk to becoming a key voice in national safety reform. We discuss how core values should anchor leadership, and why embedding health and safety into culture is non-negotiable.
From challenging outdated norms to calling for inclusion that truly includes everyone, this conversation offers hard-won insights on creating safer, more compassionate workplaces. Whether you’re an engineer, a leader, or someone passionate about culture change, this episode will inspire you to speak up, stay true to your values, and lead in a way that empowers others.
Read the Transcript
Mark McBride-Wright 0:00
Mark, hello. Welcome to the next episode of the safe leader podcast. I’m your host, Mark McBride Wright, and I am honored to be joined today by Dame Judith Hackett. I’m honored to be joined today by Dame Judith Hackitt, who is a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the institution of chemical engineers. She’s the former chair of ingenuity and also former chair of the office for Nuclear Regulation. So Dame Judith Hackett is one of the UK’s most respected engineering leaders, known for her formidable contributions to safety regulation and industrial transformation. A chemical engineer by background, she has held senior roles across government, industry and professional bodies, including Chair of the Health and Safety Executive and president of the institution of chemical engineers. She’s perhaps best known for the leading for leading the independent review of building regulations and fire safety following the Grenfell tower tragedy in London, producing the landmark building a safer future report, which reshaped national policy on building safety. Her leadership emphasizes personal responsibility, systems thinking and culture change. Judith is a passionate advocate for competence, ethics and engineering education. She most recently served as Interim Chair for the office for Nuclear Regulation and Chair of ingenuity, and she remains a sought after voice on regulation, skills and safety leadership. She wrote the foreword for my book, The Safe leader. Judith, how are you? I’m good, and you. I’m nervous. Being honest, I hold you in such highest so usually when I’m doing these podcasts, I’m not nervous. But you know, you’ve been such a role model for me over the years that you know the fact that you even want to talk to me
Dame Judith Hackitt 1:56
for a few minutes, always happy to talk to you Mark really am is amazing.
Mark McBride-Wright 2:00
And there’s that kindred affinity as well that you know, chemical engineer health and safety used to run the HSE. You know, you supported me in the early days of moving into diversity, when me and the team ran the first ever diversity survey at the IChemE back in 2013 I think it was, you know, you kindly agreed. I’ve got a story about that event, actually. Do you know the, it was the panel that you did at Imperial with Jeff Maitland, and the, it was the engineering diversity survey response that we were showcasing, that we did at the London South East member group, and at the time, you were chair at the Health and Safety Executive, but we had stickers that were made for everyone coming. And on your one, it said, Chairman, no, no, where is the you know. So we had another one made for you behind the scenes, but anyway, anyway. So yes, I’m really excited to chat to you. So just in the podcast, we love understanding the person behind, the person in front of us. You know, the journey that’s been taken to get to where where you’re at today. So if we can just wind all the way back to your early years. You know, you started your career as a chemical engineer in 1975 maybe even before that. You know what drew you to engineering? Think back to the young Judith Hackett. What did you always want to be an engineer? Or was there something else on the cards for you? I
Dame Judith Hackitt 3:40
always wanted to study engineering, and that’s, that’s, there’s a subtle difference between that, and always wanted to be an engineer. So the plan when I was at school was to be a teacher, okay? And I wanted to be a science and maths teacher. And something about the different teachers I had at school told me that those who were best able to bring the subject alive were those who could put it into context. Okay, so the Master Plan was go to university, study an applied version, ie engineering, rather than pure science, go and work in industry for a couple of years and then get into teaching. So I would be able to provide that context to all of those impressionable young people and inspire them to become scientists and future engineers. I I got out there into industry. I loved it, and the plan to become a teacher is still on hold.
Mark McBride-Wright 4:46
Ah, oh, so it’s still there maybe,
Dame Judith Hackitt 4:49
Well, interestingly, isn’t it? Because I think, I think in in lots of ways, you talked about me being a role model, I do. Do a lot of mentoring for young people, and young women in particular, and so I think I’ve satisfied the inner teacher in a different way, definitely,
Mark McBride-Wright 5:11
definitely that that helping the next generation, and the wisdom that you’ve acquired through your years of experience, being able to help shape people coming through is probably just as if not more impactful than you know, going back to the traditional teacher route, looking back then, what have been some of the defining experiences that shaped your thinking on safety. And I’m really interested on safety as a culture, not just, you know, compliance,
Dame Judith Hackitt 5:49
okay. Well, I suppose it’s worth it’s worth saying you know that I was the first person in my family ever to go to university. I came from a pretty industrial background. Both of my grandfathers were coal miners. Worked worked underground, and the village I grew up in was very much a mining village, where it wasn’t unusual to hear of people suffering serious injuries or even death and not coming home from work again, you know? So. So I also had a great aunt who worked in factory making hats, and she was scalped at work. She got her hair caught in a mill. So when things like that happen around you, you notice there’s something, even in when you’re very young, that makes you think that shouldn’t be that shouldn’t be happening, that really should not be happening. And you know, her injury was long before I was born, but she suffered the rest of her life because of that. I never ever saw her without a hat on. And those images stay with you, I think, and shape you in ways that you maybe not even conscious of. Yeah. But then, when I was at University of course in the in my second year, I guess 1974 the flixbury disaster happened. So here I am studying chemical engineering, loving it. And then all of a sudden you think, wow, yeah, 30 people killed, you know, in an accident, and people living all around the site had their houses damaged, suffered injuries, and so on. And all of a sudden that wake up call that says safety is really, really important in this industry that I am about to join for however long, so that that that’s always stuck with me, that sense of this really matters. And I think the other thing I would say is that in lots of ways, because I joined Esso Exxon as the first company after I left university, committing yourself to safety was non negotiable. It was so endemic, and, you know, it simply was the case that you do you do this safely, or you don’t do it. And we were all taught that, and it truly was a core value of the organization.
Mark McBride-Wright 8:37
Do you think that’s been sustained over the years across industry, because just thinking about the the timing of it, you know, talking in my book The Safe leader, about the evolution of health and safety going way back to, you know, the 1800s and then we look at the Bradley curve and the the gradual reduction and lost time injury rates and safety really being taken seriously when it became a compliance requirement, whereas back in the day, you could just do what you wanted, you know, or people would would laugh about it, you know, well, where I often hear people say now, or even I say now, you know that where we’re at on diversity and inclusion now is where safety was pre the Health and Safety at Work Act, you know, in the 1950s the 1960s and of course, that Act came in in 1974 when you were a second year, first year, second year chemical engineer. So do you think that culture that you then moved into in Exxon a few years after that was the the roots of that starting to take shape and impact culture?
Dame Judith Hackitt 9:40
Remember what I said? I said it was a core value of the organization. I didn’t say it was a priority, yeah, and the number of times that I’ve heard people say to accept safety is our number one priority. Yeah, that’s not good enough. Yeah, it’s not a priority. It has to be properly embedded in everything you do. You and the way you think about things, priorities change, core values don’t
Mark McBride-Wright 10:10
in my recent so I’ve sort of, I was a practicing process safety engineer until 2017 before setting up eco engineers, and I’ve had a more of a squiggly career up until now, but since writing the book and coming back to safety, technical safety, I’ve seen this movement towards this idea of restorative, just culture, Total worker health, rather than LT, IRS being a metric because they drive the wrong sort of behaviors in management teams. And, yeah, I find it fascinating, because this is exactly where culture can live. You know, the people that you have around you, like, where the message that I’m trying to sort of advocate for could could list, okay, can you just talk us through your experience with the evolution of safety over the duration of your career?
Dame Judith Hackitt 11:06
Yeah, I think it is a journey. And in fact, this year, I’ve done a couple of presentations to different audiences celebrating 50 years since the Health and Safety at Work Act, yes, of course, and talking about that, that whole journey of the last 50 years. Because, of course, it didn’t happen overnight, and it kind of maps my career. So 1974 the Act was introduced when I, when I worked, went to work in industry the year after that, coupled with the aftermath of FlexPay, I meant that in a high hazard industry like I was in, it pretty much dominated everything we did and everything we thought about. And, you know, new practices were developing things like HAZOP and, you know, the whole safety committee set up with safety reps in the workplace and, and all of that, and, and it really was quite exciting, actually, to be part of setting all of that up and establishing the right culture, you know, because I can remember that some of those early safety committee meetings with safety reps with the best will in the world, you know, we would sit down and and you would be talking at odds with one another, you know, where, where the people who were management wanted to talk about this set of things, and the people from the from representing the workforce, had a very different agenda and a very different list of not trivial, because they were important things to them, but they were of a different type and on a different scale from the sort of bigger issues that we wanted to raise so finding your way through all of that. And I guess one of the things that I always remember that we did at fallley in those early days was we did joint supervisor and safety rep training, nice, yeah. And 20 years later, when I suggested that in another company, after I’d moved on from Exxon, and I went, you can and it works, and it they suddenly realize that they have a shared agenda. Yeah, yeah. This is, this is a unifying topic, not something to battle over. But getting to that point where you see it in that way takes a lot, and it takes some courage sometimes to do things like that so and there’s lots of things in what I’ve just said that resonate with with the things you say in your book about getting people to feel part of it, rather than being done to,
Mark McBride-Wright 14:03
yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s very endearing to me to hear that you believe in the the framework or the postulation of like an idea for change, because it’s still, you know, the what I lay out In the book, still feels very much like that. And, you know, it kind of came through manifestation of like, different sides of my identity, you know, being an engineer, but then wanting to be a diversity practitioner, but then never getting a diversity role because I never had CIPD after my name, or a level five HR qualification or what have you. But then I realized that my CNG became a bit of a superpower, so to speak. I could leverage affinity bias to my advantage when I’m in front of usually an all male audience, he’s one. Us, you know, he understands, he talks our language, yes. And then I can start peeling the layers back and start, you know, talking about diversity and through this lens. And and then, yeah, so the and that came from trying to run an LGBT centered organization, inter engineering, which we had some success with, and continue to do so. But it was honestly, it was when I then stepped into equal engineers and wanted to broaden and focus on more strands of diversity that I realized this pushback, or this not an active pushback, but a kind of passive nodding of heads. We agree with you, we know we’re not allowed to disagree with you, because it’s not the done thing to do. But I don’t feel included in this movement. And when you’ve got 84% of the engineering workforce being men, that doesn’t necessarily lead to a that doesn’t set you up for a very successful strategy for inclusion in diversity. And so the aha moment when I heard about these it was, it was on a panel in 2018 and it was the Office of National Statistics that presented the breakdown of death by suicide by occupation, and I remember the bucketing. It was the construction, manufacturing and process industries. It was those three classifications combined had the highest rate of loss of life due to suicide than any other sector. And you know, this was the light bulb moment for me, where I was thinking, well, we would never tolerate such a high rate of loss of life due to any sort of physical incident we would design out, eradicate it, reduce it to a LARP, you know, and then manage residual risk. Whereas this, this could be due to a lack of psychos, lack of psychosocial safety, psychological safety. Why? Why are people not being open about the root causes that might be driving this high instant rate of suicidal ideation self harm, which are the extreme end of top events. You know, the top event loss of life due to suicide. So inclusion and diversity allows this conversation about belonging, bringing your whole self to work, and that also equally applies to white, straight male engineers that maybe feel a bit ostracized. So what? What I’m really keen to get into your mind, like when you were reading the book. What? What thoughts you had on this, this framing, do you think there’s an opportunity for safety to help continue to progress the the conversation on inclusion? Absolutely,
Dame Judith Hackitt 17:37
absolutely. So in lot, lots of things I could say, let, let me start by saying, you know that that you asked me a while back about the journey in safety and and, and it was all about safety. And just about the time that I became the Chair of HSE in 2007 that was when the regulator issued its guidelines on stress, right, and, and I remember then some very difficult conversations with people that said, this is, this is not health and safety. Well, it is, you know, but, and it was clear to me back then that for, I guess by then, for 30 years, we’d been shouting about safety and whispering health, you know, and we had to get them up on a on an equal footing. And even then, people found it easier to talk about harm to health where it meant physical harm, you know, hearing loss, or COPD or whatever that side of the health thing they could get. But talking about the mental health thing was particularly difficult and and lots of people really didn’t want to go there and and it’s tough, you know, it’s tough for people to talk about it, especially in, as you said, those male dominated industries where where the whole masculinity thing is about Being tough and being macho and and admitting weakness. That’s what mental health is seen, is seen as in lots of those so so there’s so many taboos and stigmas to overcome. It’s challenging, but But having said that, I also remember conversations that I’ve had over the years where in different organizations that I’ve either been part of as an executive or more in the last 10 to 15 years as a non exec, I’ve often gotten to debates about I’ve been the diversity champion in a number of them, as well as being involved in health and safety and I. Uh, people have reeled off to me all the different groups they have, you know, in the diversity and inclusion space, you know, so there’ll be a women’s group and an ethnic minorities group and a sexual orientation group, all of the things that you would expect. And I remember on more than one occasion, and I’m going back a lot of years now, saying, Is there a white male group as well? And the answer I got back every time was, No, we don’t need one Yeah, because they’re all All right. And I went, really, I’m not so sure. And and looking back now and reading your book, that’s the bit that really gets me and really grabs me in terms of, yes, that’s what we did wrong. We alienated that majority, by the way we went about it.
Mark McBride-Wright 20:57
Well, as Amy Edmondson puts it, failure. We learn from failure. We learn from the gaps in our knowledge. And then we we take stock and try and bridge that and make amends. So, you know, in in we equal engineers have set up a men’s network. You know, it’s still, it’s like six months old. It’s really young, but I’ve basically absorbed into engineering, into equal engineers. We’ve got cross sector network groups for all the other identities, menopause, women, ethnic minority, etc. But we’ve set up a men’s network, and our co chairs are Jamie chestnut, who used to be the director of engineering at the RN Li and also Chris Hamlin, who’s a fellow at the Royal Academy engineering and I watched the webinar that they did two weeks ago. I rewatched it last night. Watched it for the first time. Sorry I didn’t watch it first time around time difference, New York makes it hard to attend lunchtime things when dropping the kids off at school, but the guys opened up, you know, they opened up some stuff that even I didn’t know about them, actually, despite recruiting them to the to the co chair roles. And so I just think it’s so powerful. It’s such a it’s probably the single biggest achievement we could do for engineering that would then have a domino effect on everything, absolutely everything, and to bring men together through kindred sharing of stories, you know, and getting them to better empathize within the needs of other groups. Because I think we’re we’re so bad as men, at processing our own baggage and own trauma that, as you say, we project this this image, and then there’s that energy gap between who we’re showing up as and what’s going on in our minds. And you know, I always say we want people not just to be physically present at work. We don’t want them to be, just be physically present but mentally absent. We want everyone to be fully there and then a high hazard industry. When you’ve got people dealing with high pressure, high temperature pipelines and crane operations and nuclear reactors and everything you you want, you don’t want a lack of psychological safety to be a reason why mistakes are made, why accidents then then happen. And so it’s a work in progress, trying to get this industrial scale conversation going, but I think if we can achieve it, it’ll have such a positive effect for women in engineering, for because disproportionately men still hold positions of power through their privilege in leadership roles. And if we can track that awareness for them to have this aha moment, and then it flows through with how they do their organizational design, culture intervention programs,
Dame Judith Hackitt 23:56
I think, I think that’s one of the reasons why I, I always when I talk about safety, I talk about how important the Health and Safety at Work Act was in the not just the standards it set, but the way it went about that. Because what it said was, this is a journey, and you never get there. Yeah, and people and so when people talk to me about, how do we know whether we’re compliant or not, wrong question, you know, there is no such thing as compliance. There is, are you doing enough? Could you do more? You know, what’s your plan for improvement? Those are the questions we should be asking ourselves, because the notion of compliance means I can tick the boxes and I can walk away saying, job done, and you’re absolutely right. This is a journey. There is more still to do, and the world is changing all the time, so we have to think of new ways of responding to new risks, new challenges. This all the time, and we have to break that mindset of, once I’m over the line of line of compliance, job done, you know, I can move on and do something else. No, that’s not possible in this space. And we’ve
Mark McBride-Wright 25:13
got a really interesting kind of five to maybe 10 year window right now where we’ve got such a diversity of generations still in active employment, in the workforce, and those older generations that are so easy to stereotype as well that they’re incapable of change, is absolutely wrong and always something that I call out as well, or call in when I’m on a panel, or I hear someone say it because I said it’s you’re doing the reverse of what you don’t like to another tranche of the workforce. And you need to think about the context within which people grew up were professionally trained. And you know, some of the stuff is soft and fluffy and not something that they were ever used to as one of the leadership paradigms, and they probably got to where they’re at based on their technical competence, and never actually had the investment in themselves to develop their leadership acumen, their people, leadership roles. So I think we’ve got a ton of that going on in the profession right now as well. So have you got any ideas on how can, can that be overcome? Like, what do we need to do?
Dame Judith Hackitt 26:29
I think, I think, I think you, you’ve got something in, in the things you talk about in the book. And I’m not just saying that because, you know, I’m talking to you. I was, I was really struck by, by some of the the examples you shared in there, of of, you know, people who have lived with impairment to their own capabilities, and they’ve managed to hide it for a very long time, and it’s Only by bringing them into the same room as people who are dealing with for example, they feel different because they are from a different ethnic background, and compare making them helping both sides to see that those two things are uniform. Unifying rather than alienating, yeah, and that they both have the same sorts of feelings about things, feelings of lack of confidence and being isolated, and it helps them to then look out for one another. Yeah, and the opportunities to do that are enormous.
Mark McBride-Wright 27:43
Well, that’s what I talk in the book about. I mean, it took a lot of work, mental process, in that extension of the Bradley curve, where I proposed that inclusive interdependence, which is a really subtle and hard to describe, sometimes reframe, but I think it fits squarely within when we talk about allyship in EDI and when it we, we’re often like to be allies when it’s easy, but when it’s hard, we we step back because, you know, it’s there’s a risk to us by being aligned with that group that’s now in distress, or the focus of the villagers with pitchforks, as I say. But then, if we pull back, then when I’m at risk or I’m exposed, who’s going to be there for me? So it’s that idea of safety, like you looking out for others is also means, by reciprocity, they’re looking out for you. I can’t remember the the story fully, but I remember, I think it was Joe amici, the former NBA basketball player. He’s now a very successful psychologist, and he shares an example about how he was in a hotel once, and someone was smoking and flicking the cigarettes, and there was, like, lots of cigarettes piling up outside the balcony on the ground, and people would walk past and say, Oh, that’s that’s really bad. That shouldn’t happen people who do that, but no one took action to solve the problem, to like to call it out, or to clean it up. And I’m not really explaining this very well, but basically it was this analogy of being the first follower, so the leader who steps out there to call something out, but then who comes with them to give it that that credibility, and that’s when you then see the ground swell, because other than others are thinking it, but then someone’s taking action on what they’re thinking. And that’s what the whole psychological safety culture is about. You might be thinking about it, but the group think means you’re going to be too at risk of saying something, so therefore you don’t say something. And that’s what we try and proclaim as our safety cultures are. Are. But are they actually that? Not so much?
Dame Judith Hackitt 30:05
Yeah, but you mentioned earlier that you have to couple this with the kind of just culture thing, because, in my experience, the thing that gets in the way of people calling out things in safety, more often than not, is that blame culture that kicks in in so many organizations. So you call something out, you say this was wrong, and whether that’s about safety or about behaviors with respect to to other people who may have felt threatened and so on. This is where your safety analogy is really, really powerful. You know, in terms of where we are on helping people to feel included, is where we used to be on safety, where you call something out, and immediately there would be a witch hunt for who got it wrong. Who are we going to discipline for this? Let’s have a, you know, let’s have an investigation and find out who, who got it wrong here, and we’ll hang them out to dry. We’ve gotten over that, and by talking about just in, in most places, we’ve got over that, not not totally, but, you know, we now talk about just culture, and we talk about learning from mistakes, like you did earlier, and how, how can we acknowledge that we need to learn from this and move on and do things differently. But think about where we are currently, and I see this a lot right now, in terms of people make a complaint about the way they’ve been treated or the way they’ve been made to feel in the workplace, the processes that kick in right now are pretty traumatic, and they’re traumatic not only for the person who makes the complaint, but the person who’s being accused, right? Because they’re immediately ostracized, they’re immediately taken out of the workplace. They’re very we, we’re being, I think, pretty clumsy, right about the way we deal with some of those behavioral issues, which are really about changing the culture, yeah? And that that acts as a real barrier to being able to have the sorts of conversations that you talk about in the book, yeah, that are ultimately going to get us to the place that we need to get to. Yeah,
Mark McBride-Wright 32:35
we’ve we’ve evolved since I wrote the book, we’ve evolved. We’ve designed a course called the safe leader training course. It’s four modules, one module per letter, share, act, feel, empower the there’s a new graphic we’ve got now as well to go along with the book, which is the letters in a circle. So it’s a bit like a plan, do, check, act type thing. The idea that you’re constantly doing it, and the idea is that what we’ve brought into it is the act of storytelling, because engineers aren’t always the best at telling their stories, so we’ve brought in some public speaking training, but what we encourage the groups to do and coach them through, is understand, what’s your story, What have you got to share with the world? And that by you being open about that and sharing that story, it’ll mean that someone else might resonate with it, and they’ll they’ll then be able to be open about that as well. And we don’t have that in men being vulnerable, sharing about things beneath their waterline. My friend gifted me this little prop, which is a lighthouse. And I love it because, you know, if you think about a ship at sea in the dark, can’t see its way forward. That’s why lighthouses were designed to help provide some guidance. If you then had lots and lots of lighthouses, you would be able to see the pathway a lot more clearly. So if one’s own story is a metaphor of a lighthouse. It means when we increase the number of stories that are available in the public domain or in the workplace, there’s then moment more moments of connection and opportunity for empathy, to relate, for interpersonal relationships and connection. And I’ve seen this. I’ve just seen this happen with so many I’ve given talks now at enough big conferences with engineers and that in the audience to when we talk about the iceberg, and people think that diversity is about women in engineering or LGBT or this, and that when you start talking about the bit of the iceberg on diversity of life experience, and saying, Look, this means you being able to be in a culture that’s about, you being able to go over get talk about the nasty divorce that you’re going through right now, or talk about, do you know what? One of the biggest things is that still doesn’t get spoken about, that is affecting loads of people fertility, trying to have a family. Struggling to conceive, IVF issues and miscarriages and all that stuff. You know that a lot of people, women and men, are just bottling up, not talking about and so the number of times I talk and share and frame things in this way, and then have people come up to me afterwards and say, Look, this really connected me, with me on this front, you’re just like, oh, how do we now transition then to more people sharing that. And the boundary doesn’t have to be that. You have to go public. You now have to start talking about all your innermost thoughts to everyone. It’s not about that, but the starting point in the safe Leader Program is at least doing that internal self exploration and then recognize that if maybe, if you were to talk about that, you might then someone else might then be able to relate with it. And then what we’re doing is we’re playing with the lived experience and learned experience, so we’re increasing the probability of more opportunities for learned experience to be acquired from one another. So, yeah, I don’t know. I’m on a on a mission, to try and scale this up, basically, and get it get embedded in engineering practice. And, you know, we’re talking to some universities just now, I’ve got plans to engage well, the engineering institutions in the UK. I’m really interested with IChemE actually, maybe what can we do through them? But it’s exciting. Yeah,
Dame Judith Hackitt 36:29
yeah. Indeed, indeed. I mean, the other book that I think it struck a chord with me, because I read a lot of books, and one of the other books that it struck a chord with me, some of the things you mentioned in your book was the culture code by Daniel Coyle. If you read that, okay, no, not yet, not yet. And it’s a it’s it’s great, because he talks in there about how some of the best leaders, particularly in the sporting world, become the best leaders, by sharing their own vulnerabilities with the team. And you know, when they admit that they feel nervous or they feel scared, it then encourages other people to do the same, yeah,
Mark McBride-Wright 37:13
absolutely. It gives that, gives that permission, doesn’t it? Okay? Well, talking about then safe leadership, and what I like to do is go through the framework and ask my guests some some questions on that. So let’s start with Share. You’ve always been clear about your views and expectations. So how do you share your insights and experiences to influence others? I
Dame Judith Hackitt 37:41
um, in a number of ways, I suppose. I certainly do it through mentorship, as I said, and and, you know, making myself available to to mentor younger people coming into engineering in particular, and also, one of the areas that I’m doing quite a lot of mentorship now through the Royal Academy of Engineering, is on systems thinking, okay, okay. Because I think it in in this last decade or so over it, I think I’ve realized how much I’ve always seen everything in front of me as being a system that needs to be addressed as such, okay, and and I kind of assumed that everybody did that, and it’s become increasingly apparent to me that that’s not the case. So helping other people to see the benefit of looking through that systems lens has become a really important part of me telling what I see and how I see the world. And in a way, that’s what the building a safer future report was all about, because I, I tackled it in the way that that seemed absolutely like the well, this is the only way I can do this, is to map out the system and think about whether the system is working or not. But it was so alien to other people, and they went, Well, this is a, this is a very different way of coming at it. That’s not I’m people normally do reviews. Well, that’s my way. Wow.
Mark McBride-Wright 39:28
Maybe we need an engineering approach for all, all reviews for for act. Then what’s one moment where you made a decisive intervention that shifted the direction of a team, program, policy.
Dame Judith Hackitt 39:47
There’s probably a lot I could I could mention, but I guess the one I mentioned so you talked about my, my kind of personal code of ethics, and you know, my, I. A really strong belief that we have to not just do what we told, in fact, not do what you told if you know it’s wrong. And I, I wrote an article for the for I Chem E, for the chemical engineer, about ethics four years ago, for which I got the Hansen medal, but it talked about ethics and the case I cited in there was a time when I was an operator, when I was the Operations Director at a chemicals facility, and someone was badly injured. I did the investigation, and it became apparent to me very quickly that the unsafe practice had been going on for quite a long time, right? And quite a few people knew about it, including the commissioning engineer, who had not told me or any or anyone in his line of chain of command that this was happening, right? And so when I wrote the report. I put all of that in there and said, you know this, this is on us. We we failed to to manage, provide a safe system of work, and this is leadership failure. My boss, at the time, told me to rewrite the report. He said, If you put that, you know, if you put that out as it is, we’re going to get prosecuted. And I said, and we should be we were wrong, and we should take the consequences of that. And he was very unhappy, you know, I mean, when he said to me, think very carefully about whether you’re going to do this or not, he meant it. But for me, there was no choice. You have to do that. You have to be true to yourself. You have to live with yourself. No cover ups,
Mark McBride-Wright 41:56
no Yeah, completely. There was a case that made the media last year about a real engineer that called out unsafe practices at Euston station. And then it transpired that someone in Parliament or the House of Lords can’t remember who you know, wasn’t happy about that. And then there was action taken against the individual by the construction company that had employed them, and they were then subsequently interviewed by the new civil engineer. And there’s a, there’s a quote that they gave in there that really made, made me like reaffirmed, I guess, my identity as an engineer, which is, you know, it’s a because the code of practice that we sign and we’re subscribed to by get becoming chartered, it’s a bit like a doctor or or legal profession taking the oath and so and people who employ engineers sometimes misconstrue that with employing consultants, and they forget About this ethical requirement that we have that’s built into our code of conduct with having the license to practice, which is exactly what you did, then, isn’t it, you were upholding your license to practice, and yeah, not not doing a cover up or not telling the truth. And I think that’s important for us, a great leadership lesson for all engineers in the field, I mentioned then, how do you stay connected to the emotional aspects of leadership, especially when working in high stake environments.
Dame Judith Hackitt 43:39
I guess it’s always been important to me to have people I can turn to for support, because we all feel vulnerable. There will there will always be days for every one of us, even you know, at my stage in my career now, there are times when you think, is it me, am I? Am I the only one does everybody else see this differently, and especially when you get knocked back, when you’ve taken a courageous stance and you get knocked back, you’ve got to have that support network to whom you can go and say, yeah, and those people who will say no, keep going, you’re on the right track.
Mark McBride-Wright 44:23
It’s the trust. It’s the trust going trust in people that will not just tell you what you want to hear, but actually say
Dame Judith Hackitt 44:31
your list of 10 people who you can trust Absolutely. Yeah, exactly.
Mark McBride-Wright 44:38
So empowerment is something many associate with you, myself included. How do you empower emerging engineers, leaders, professionals, to take ownership?
Dame Judith Hackitt 44:51
I think there’s a few things. The first is to get them to to so it goes back to my safety. A core value, not a priority, right? And if you’re not doing it for the right reasons, and it’s not coming from the heart, then stop and sort yourself out, right? Because this is not about I’m doing it because I have to, because of my job or because I’m going to go to prison. Do it because you care about the people, so get your motivation right. Is, is, is really, really an important message for me to people, I think that’s, that’s, that’s probably at the heart of it, and and everything else then follows, really,
Mark McBride-Wright 45:40
and everything else you’ve said as well about, you know, empowerment and taking it to heart, and, yeah, remembering your duty of care and your how you treat people and the culture you create around you as well. But even,
Dame Judith Hackitt 45:58
even the duty of care thing, you know, it’s a moral duty of care, not a legal one, yeah,
Mark McBride-Wright 46:02
yeah, yeah, true. That’s a term that has meaning to it. Legal meaning, yeah. I mean morally as well,
Dame Judith Hackitt 46:08
yeah, yeah, yeah. I never, I never want to be in a position where I I have to berate myself for not having done the right thing, you know, and knowing that I could have done something different,
Mark McBride-Wright 46:27
good stance, what, um, okay, future goals, then, and just thinking about legacy, you know, what? What you’ve helped shape engineerings, past and present, What? What? What’s next for you? What legacy do you hope to to leave on for the future of the profession?
Dame Judith Hackitt 46:48
Well, it’s, it’s a good question. I mean, I keep trying to retire, and every time I do something else comes up, and I continue to stay active because, because I enjoy what I do, and I do the things I care about. And one of the things I care about, particularly right now, is the work I do with the Royal Academy of Engineering. And there’s really two strands to that, one of which is the engineering X program, which is all about safer complex systems. So going back to this journey, you know, we never get to the end of this, because you never done on safety. The challenges I think now in the safety sphere are around as our world gets more and more complex and interdependent. Do we have the tools and the capabilities to manage safety in that increasingly complex world. And when you look at some of the things that happen, you know, in the cyberspace, or just the interconnectedness of systems around the world that we don’t understand until it happens. It tells me we’ve got a long way to go on that. So that’s one of my passions. And I guess the other one, in a slightly different context, is that we’re doing a lot of work in the academy around helping policy makers supporting policymakers to employ systems thinking in their approach to wicked policy problems, right? And that’s fascinating. That’s fascinating because that then takes you into just about every sphere you could imagine from you know, how can we unblock the bed blocking system in the health service through, how do you persuade people to adopt heat pumps? What are the blockers to people buying heat pumps? Because it’s not just price, it’s about a whole host of things that sit behind why people are reluctant to make that leap. And when you start applying systems thinking to some of those really quite challenging problems, it’s it gives some really different insights to people on it’s not just a case of give them a loan or give them a grant or whatever. There’s some hearts and minds willing to be done here. You know,
Mark McBride-Wright 49:20
I, I question Judith whether you will ever retire, because I bring that to myself. And I just, I just can’t imagine clocking off and that. And, you know, that’s it, you know, I don’t know. I see what some people in my family who’ve retired and what they do. And I’m just, I just, I just don’t think that’s me. I think I’m going to be I see people like yourself, Lord Brown, and others who are at the top end of their career. And I just once you get there, it just must be so difficult to or do you feel like it’s something that’s expected of you when you. Get to the latter stage of your career, like to retire? Do people ask, Is that, like a microaggression, your subject too often when you’re going to retire, when you go and retire, like, can it not just be enough that you don’t feel that pressure, that maybe you don’t want to retire?
Dame Judith Hackitt 50:12
It’s an interesting question. Yes, yes, I do feel that from people who have retired, and who say, Why haven’t you retired? And I say, because I don’t want to, yeah, whilst ever there’s things out there to do that interest me, you know, I’m not ready to check out. And we have, we have a great balance of time spent traveling, going on holiday. But when I’m here in the UK, I’m busy, and I love it good.
Mark McBride-Wright 50:43
Well, there should be no guilt in that, in any way, shape or form for you. And I’m happy because it means you get more more more time, right? Quick Fire questions. What’s the one piece of leadership advice you’ve ever received? What’s the best piece of leadership advice you’ve ever received?
Dame Judith Hackitt 51:07
I think it’s about being authentic. You know, be yourself. Don’t try to be like other people. Okay? What’s your All right? And for me, that involved going on a course on women’s leadership to learn what it meant to be a woman leader. Okay,
Mark McBride-Wright 51:26
what’s your proudest professional moment?
Dame Judith Hackitt 51:32
I think it would be both receiving my dame hood, but also last year, getting the President’s Medal from the Royal Academy of Engineering.
Mark McBride-Wright 51:41
What’s one skill you think all engineers should be taught from day one
Dame Judith Hackitt 51:48
to stop talking and listen
Mark McBride-Wright 51:51
tea or coffee? Coffee? What’s your go to? Thinking, tool or model
Dame Judith Hackitt 51:58
systems? Thinking?
Mark McBride-Wright 52:01
Who is one engineering leader, past or present? You admire
Dame Judith Hackitt 52:09
Jim McDonald, sir Jim McDonald, he I have a lot of admiration for Jim for what he has done and the achievements he’s made in his life.
Mark McBride-Wright 52:22
What’s one thing you do to reset after a long day or an intense meeting,
Dame Judith Hackitt 52:30
come home and have a glass of wine?
Mark McBride-Wright 52:34
What’s a piece of policy work you’re most proud of?
Dame Judith Hackitt 52:38
Oh, I think undoubtedly it would be the work I’ve done on building safety, because I I’ve just got sucked into it willingly, I hasten to add, you know, so what was a 12 month do this review has I’m now into my eighth year of being involved in it, and there is so much to do, And it’s become a real personal mission for me to make this change. You
Mark McBride-Wright 53:05
might want to listen to the podcast I did with Benjamin Hollis. I think his name was. He talks about your review, and that was very interesting, very positive. What book or resource would you recommend to today’s engineering leaders
Dame Judith Hackitt 53:23
in addition to yours, I think it would be the culture code, okay?
Mark McBride-Wright 53:30
And finally, what advice would you give to your younger self just starting out?
Dame Judith Hackitt 53:38
I think it’s it. It’s it. It is this, be yourself all of the time. You know, I know that my own personal journey in this male dominated world that I’ve I’ve made my way in. There were times when I thought I had to try and fit in and be like the men. Yeah, and it’s it took a long time for me to realize that the real value I brought to things was seeing things differently.
Mark McBride-Wright 54:21
You mentioned that women’s leadership course that you went on, yeah, and I wanted to just Yeah, drill into that a little bit more. Is was it that experience that made you shift your position or change your perception? Yes, yes, absolutely. And is that something I know we said we’d finish, but can you go into that a little bit more, really conscious. We never touched on that deciding of your identity being a women engineer, female engineer. So what advice would you give to listeners, and what experience did you go through in that
Dame Judith Hackitt 54:55
I think it’s probably one of the most i. Profound changes for me. You know, lots of courses teach you lots of things, but that one was a real in depth experience, and I came away from that feeling very different about myself, feeling very much more confident to be myself and stop trying to be like other people. Fabulous, and that just it makes you behave differently because you operate out of you, you’re being authentic, yeah, yeah. And so it makes such a difference, but, but you have to get I think what, what I’ve also learned is, is that it was a week course, a week long course, followed by a number of follow up sessions that got me to that place. And I think, you know, all of us act apart to some extent or another, and to be able to get in touch with that, truly being yourself at work, which you talk about, and being the same person who wherever you are, yeah, and feeling comfortable in your own skin, literally, is so important to being a Good leader, yeah, to let go of the acting
Mark McBride-Wright 56:23
brilliant. I think that’s great advice to end on. Thank you so much. Judith really enjoyed chatting to you. If people want to get in touch, find out more about your activities, what you’re involved with these days. How should they do that? They can
Dame Judith Hackitt 56:36
always send me a message on LinkedIn. I love to hear from people fabulous.
Mark McBride-Wright 56:40
We’ll put a link to your pro your profile in the transcript, in the show notes, thank you. Thank you so much. Been a pleasure. Okay, see you soon. Yeah,
E024: Shouting Safety Whispering Health
Podcast Description
Read the Transcript
Mark McBride-Wright 0:00
Mark, hello. Welcome to the next episode of the safe leader podcast. I’m your host, Mark McBride Wright, and I am honored to be joined today by Dame Judith Hackett. I’m honored to be joined today by Dame Judith Hackitt, who is a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the institution of chemical engineers. She’s the former chair of ingenuity and also former chair of the office for Nuclear Regulation. So Dame Judith Hackett is one of the UK’s most respected engineering leaders, known for her formidable contributions to safety regulation and industrial transformation. A chemical engineer by background, she has held senior roles across government, industry and professional bodies, including Chair of the Health and Safety Executive and president of the institution of chemical engineers. She’s perhaps best known for the leading for leading the independent review of building regulations and fire safety following the Grenfell tower tragedy in London, producing the landmark building a safer future report, which reshaped national policy on building safety. Her leadership emphasizes personal responsibility, systems thinking and culture change. Judith is a passionate advocate for competence, ethics and engineering education. She most recently served as Interim Chair for the office for Nuclear Regulation and Chair of ingenuity, and she remains a sought after voice on regulation, skills and safety leadership. She wrote the foreword for my book, The Safe leader. Judith, how are you? I’m good, and you. I’m nervous. Being honest, I hold you in such highest so usually when I’m doing these podcasts, I’m not nervous. But you know, you’ve been such a role model for me over the years that you know the fact that you even want to talk to me
Dame Judith Hackitt 1:56
for a few minutes, always happy to talk to you Mark really am is amazing.
Mark McBride-Wright 2:00
And there’s that kindred affinity as well that you know, chemical engineer health and safety used to run the HSE. You know, you supported me in the early days of moving into diversity, when me and the team ran the first ever diversity survey at the IChemE back in 2013 I think it was, you know, you kindly agreed. I’ve got a story about that event, actually. Do you know the, it was the panel that you did at Imperial with Jeff Maitland, and the, it was the engineering diversity survey response that we were showcasing, that we did at the London South East member group, and at the time, you were chair at the Health and Safety Executive, but we had stickers that were made for everyone coming. And on your one, it said, Chairman, no, no, where is the you know. So we had another one made for you behind the scenes, but anyway, anyway. So yes, I’m really excited to chat to you. So just in the podcast, we love understanding the person behind, the person in front of us. You know, the journey that’s been taken to get to where where you’re at today. So if we can just wind all the way back to your early years. You know, you started your career as a chemical engineer in 1975 maybe even before that. You know what drew you to engineering? Think back to the young Judith Hackett. What did you always want to be an engineer? Or was there something else on the cards for you? I
Dame Judith Hackitt 3:40
always wanted to study engineering, and that’s, that’s, there’s a subtle difference between that, and always wanted to be an engineer. So the plan when I was at school was to be a teacher, okay? And I wanted to be a science and maths teacher. And something about the different teachers I had at school told me that those who were best able to bring the subject alive were those who could put it into context. Okay, so the Master Plan was go to university, study an applied version, ie engineering, rather than pure science, go and work in industry for a couple of years and then get into teaching. So I would be able to provide that context to all of those impressionable young people and inspire them to become scientists and future engineers. I I got out there into industry. I loved it, and the plan to become a teacher is still on hold.
Mark McBride-Wright 4:46
Ah, oh, so it’s still there maybe,
Dame Judith Hackitt 4:49
Well, interestingly, isn’t it? Because I think, I think in in lots of ways, you talked about me being a role model, I do. Do a lot of mentoring for young people, and young women in particular, and so I think I’ve satisfied the inner teacher in a different way, definitely,
Mark McBride-Wright 5:11
definitely that that helping the next generation, and the wisdom that you’ve acquired through your years of experience, being able to help shape people coming through is probably just as if not more impactful than you know, going back to the traditional teacher route, looking back then, what have been some of the defining experiences that shaped your thinking on safety. And I’m really interested on safety as a culture, not just, you know, compliance,
Dame Judith Hackitt 5:49
okay. Well, I suppose it’s worth it’s worth saying you know that I was the first person in my family ever to go to university. I came from a pretty industrial background. Both of my grandfathers were coal miners. Worked worked underground, and the village I grew up in was very much a mining village, where it wasn’t unusual to hear of people suffering serious injuries or even death and not coming home from work again, you know? So. So I also had a great aunt who worked in factory making hats, and she was scalped at work. She got her hair caught in a mill. So when things like that happen around you, you notice there’s something, even in when you’re very young, that makes you think that shouldn’t be that shouldn’t be happening, that really should not be happening. And you know, her injury was long before I was born, but she suffered the rest of her life because of that. I never ever saw her without a hat on. And those images stay with you, I think, and shape you in ways that you maybe not even conscious of. Yeah. But then, when I was at University of course in the in my second year, I guess 1974 the flixbury disaster happened. So here I am studying chemical engineering, loving it. And then all of a sudden you think, wow, yeah, 30 people killed, you know, in an accident, and people living all around the site had their houses damaged, suffered injuries, and so on. And all of a sudden that wake up call that says safety is really, really important in this industry that I am about to join for however long, so that that that’s always stuck with me, that sense of this really matters. And I think the other thing I would say is that in lots of ways, because I joined Esso Exxon as the first company after I left university, committing yourself to safety was non negotiable. It was so endemic, and, you know, it simply was the case that you do you do this safely, or you don’t do it. And we were all taught that, and it truly was a core value of the organization.
Mark McBride-Wright 8:37
Do you think that’s been sustained over the years across industry, because just thinking about the the timing of it, you know, talking in my book The Safe leader, about the evolution of health and safety going way back to, you know, the 1800s and then we look at the Bradley curve and the the gradual reduction and lost time injury rates and safety really being taken seriously when it became a compliance requirement, whereas back in the day, you could just do what you wanted, you know, or people would would laugh about it, you know, well, where I often hear people say now, or even I say now, you know that where we’re at on diversity and inclusion now is where safety was pre the Health and Safety at Work Act, you know, in the 1950s the 1960s and of course, that Act came in in 1974 when you were a second year, first year, second year chemical engineer. So do you think that culture that you then moved into in Exxon a few years after that was the the roots of that starting to take shape and impact culture?
Dame Judith Hackitt 9:40
Remember what I said? I said it was a core value of the organization. I didn’t say it was a priority, yeah, and the number of times that I’ve heard people say to accept safety is our number one priority. Yeah, that’s not good enough. Yeah, it’s not a priority. It has to be properly embedded in everything you do. You and the way you think about things, priorities change, core values don’t
Mark McBride-Wright 10:10
in my recent so I’ve sort of, I was a practicing process safety engineer until 2017 before setting up eco engineers, and I’ve had a more of a squiggly career up until now, but since writing the book and coming back to safety, technical safety, I’ve seen this movement towards this idea of restorative, just culture, Total worker health, rather than LT, IRS being a metric because they drive the wrong sort of behaviors in management teams. And, yeah, I find it fascinating, because this is exactly where culture can live. You know, the people that you have around you, like, where the message that I’m trying to sort of advocate for could could list, okay, can you just talk us through your experience with the evolution of safety over the duration of your career?
Dame Judith Hackitt 11:06
Yeah, I think it is a journey. And in fact, this year, I’ve done a couple of presentations to different audiences celebrating 50 years since the Health and Safety at Work Act, yes, of course, and talking about that, that whole journey of the last 50 years. Because, of course, it didn’t happen overnight, and it kind of maps my career. So 1974 the Act was introduced when I, when I worked, went to work in industry the year after that, coupled with the aftermath of FlexPay, I meant that in a high hazard industry like I was in, it pretty much dominated everything we did and everything we thought about. And, you know, new practices were developing things like HAZOP and, you know, the whole safety committee set up with safety reps in the workplace and, and all of that, and, and it really was quite exciting, actually, to be part of setting all of that up and establishing the right culture, you know, because I can remember that some of those early safety committee meetings with safety reps with the best will in the world, you know, we would sit down and and you would be talking at odds with one another, you know, where, where the people who were management wanted to talk about this set of things, and the people from the from representing the workforce, had a very different agenda and a very different list of not trivial, because they were important things to them, but they were of a different type and on a different scale from the sort of bigger issues that we wanted to raise so finding your way through all of that. And I guess one of the things that I always remember that we did at fallley in those early days was we did joint supervisor and safety rep training, nice, yeah. And 20 years later, when I suggested that in another company, after I’d moved on from Exxon, and I went, you can and it works, and it they suddenly realize that they have a shared agenda. Yeah, yeah. This is, this is a unifying topic, not something to battle over. But getting to that point where you see it in that way takes a lot, and it takes some courage sometimes to do things like that so and there’s lots of things in what I’ve just said that resonate with with the things you say in your book about getting people to feel part of it, rather than being done to,
Mark McBride-Wright 14:03
yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s very endearing to me to hear that you believe in the the framework or the postulation of like an idea for change, because it’s still, you know, the what I lay out In the book, still feels very much like that. And, you know, it kind of came through manifestation of like, different sides of my identity, you know, being an engineer, but then wanting to be a diversity practitioner, but then never getting a diversity role because I never had CIPD after my name, or a level five HR qualification or what have you. But then I realized that my CNG became a bit of a superpower, so to speak. I could leverage affinity bias to my advantage when I’m in front of usually an all male audience, he’s one. Us, you know, he understands, he talks our language, yes. And then I can start peeling the layers back and start, you know, talking about diversity and through this lens. And and then, yeah, so the and that came from trying to run an LGBT centered organization, inter engineering, which we had some success with, and continue to do so. But it was honestly, it was when I then stepped into equal engineers and wanted to broaden and focus on more strands of diversity that I realized this pushback, or this not an active pushback, but a kind of passive nodding of heads. We agree with you, we know we’re not allowed to disagree with you, because it’s not the done thing to do. But I don’t feel included in this movement. And when you’ve got 84% of the engineering workforce being men, that doesn’t necessarily lead to a that doesn’t set you up for a very successful strategy for inclusion in diversity. And so the aha moment when I heard about these it was, it was on a panel in 2018 and it was the Office of National Statistics that presented the breakdown of death by suicide by occupation, and I remember the bucketing. It was the construction, manufacturing and process industries. It was those three classifications combined had the highest rate of loss of life due to suicide than any other sector. And you know, this was the light bulb moment for me, where I was thinking, well, we would never tolerate such a high rate of loss of life due to any sort of physical incident we would design out, eradicate it, reduce it to a LARP, you know, and then manage residual risk. Whereas this, this could be due to a lack of psychos, lack of psychosocial safety, psychological safety. Why? Why are people not being open about the root causes that might be driving this high instant rate of suicidal ideation self harm, which are the extreme end of top events. You know, the top event loss of life due to suicide. So inclusion and diversity allows this conversation about belonging, bringing your whole self to work, and that also equally applies to white, straight male engineers that maybe feel a bit ostracized. So what? What I’m really keen to get into your mind, like when you were reading the book. What? What thoughts you had on this, this framing, do you think there’s an opportunity for safety to help continue to progress the the conversation on inclusion? Absolutely,
Dame Judith Hackitt 17:37
absolutely. So in lot, lots of things I could say, let, let me start by saying, you know that that you asked me a while back about the journey in safety and and, and it was all about safety. And just about the time that I became the Chair of HSE in 2007 that was when the regulator issued its guidelines on stress, right, and, and I remember then some very difficult conversations with people that said, this is, this is not health and safety. Well, it is, you know, but, and it was clear to me back then that for, I guess by then, for 30 years, we’d been shouting about safety and whispering health, you know, and we had to get them up on a on an equal footing. And even then, people found it easier to talk about harm to health where it meant physical harm, you know, hearing loss, or COPD or whatever that side of the health thing they could get. But talking about the mental health thing was particularly difficult and and lots of people really didn’t want to go there and and it’s tough, you know, it’s tough for people to talk about it, especially in, as you said, those male dominated industries where where the whole masculinity thing is about Being tough and being macho and and admitting weakness. That’s what mental health is seen, is seen as in lots of those so so there’s so many taboos and stigmas to overcome. It’s challenging, but But having said that, I also remember conversations that I’ve had over the years where in different organizations that I’ve either been part of as an executive or more in the last 10 to 15 years as a non exec, I’ve often gotten to debates about I’ve been the diversity champion in a number of them, as well as being involved in health and safety and I. Uh, people have reeled off to me all the different groups they have, you know, in the diversity and inclusion space, you know, so there’ll be a women’s group and an ethnic minorities group and a sexual orientation group, all of the things that you would expect. And I remember on more than one occasion, and I’m going back a lot of years now, saying, Is there a white male group as well? And the answer I got back every time was, No, we don’t need one Yeah, because they’re all All right. And I went, really, I’m not so sure. And and looking back now and reading your book, that’s the bit that really gets me and really grabs me in terms of, yes, that’s what we did wrong. We alienated that majority, by the way we went about it.
Mark McBride-Wright 20:57
Well, as Amy Edmondson puts it, failure. We learn from failure. We learn from the gaps in our knowledge. And then we we take stock and try and bridge that and make amends. So, you know, in in we equal engineers have set up a men’s network. You know, it’s still, it’s like six months old. It’s really young, but I’ve basically absorbed into engineering, into equal engineers. We’ve got cross sector network groups for all the other identities, menopause, women, ethnic minority, etc. But we’ve set up a men’s network, and our co chairs are Jamie chestnut, who used to be the director of engineering at the RN Li and also Chris Hamlin, who’s a fellow at the Royal Academy engineering and I watched the webinar that they did two weeks ago. I rewatched it last night. Watched it for the first time. Sorry I didn’t watch it first time around time difference, New York makes it hard to attend lunchtime things when dropping the kids off at school, but the guys opened up, you know, they opened up some stuff that even I didn’t know about them, actually, despite recruiting them to the to the co chair roles. And so I just think it’s so powerful. It’s such a it’s probably the single biggest achievement we could do for engineering that would then have a domino effect on everything, absolutely everything, and to bring men together through kindred sharing of stories, you know, and getting them to better empathize within the needs of other groups. Because I think we’re we’re so bad as men, at processing our own baggage and own trauma that, as you say, we project this this image, and then there’s that energy gap between who we’re showing up as and what’s going on in our minds. And you know, I always say we want people not just to be physically present at work. We don’t want them to be, just be physically present but mentally absent. We want everyone to be fully there and then a high hazard industry. When you’ve got people dealing with high pressure, high temperature pipelines and crane operations and nuclear reactors and everything you you want, you don’t want a lack of psychological safety to be a reason why mistakes are made, why accidents then then happen. And so it’s a work in progress, trying to get this industrial scale conversation going, but I think if we can achieve it, it’ll have such a positive effect for women in engineering, for because disproportionately men still hold positions of power through their privilege in leadership roles. And if we can track that awareness for them to have this aha moment, and then it flows through with how they do their organizational design, culture intervention programs,
Dame Judith Hackitt 23:56
I think, I think that’s one of the reasons why I, I always when I talk about safety, I talk about how important the Health and Safety at Work Act was in the not just the standards it set, but the way it went about that. Because what it said was, this is a journey, and you never get there. Yeah, and people and so when people talk to me about, how do we know whether we’re compliant or not, wrong question, you know, there is no such thing as compliance. There is, are you doing enough? Could you do more? You know, what’s your plan for improvement? Those are the questions we should be asking ourselves, because the notion of compliance means I can tick the boxes and I can walk away saying, job done, and you’re absolutely right. This is a journey. There is more still to do, and the world is changing all the time, so we have to think of new ways of responding to new risks, new challenges. This all the time, and we have to break that mindset of, once I’m over the line of line of compliance, job done, you know, I can move on and do something else. No, that’s not possible in this space. And we’ve
Mark McBride-Wright 25:13
got a really interesting kind of five to maybe 10 year window right now where we’ve got such a diversity of generations still in active employment, in the workforce, and those older generations that are so easy to stereotype as well that they’re incapable of change, is absolutely wrong and always something that I call out as well, or call in when I’m on a panel, or I hear someone say it because I said it’s you’re doing the reverse of what you don’t like to another tranche of the workforce. And you need to think about the context within which people grew up were professionally trained. And you know, some of the stuff is soft and fluffy and not something that they were ever used to as one of the leadership paradigms, and they probably got to where they’re at based on their technical competence, and never actually had the investment in themselves to develop their leadership acumen, their people, leadership roles. So I think we’ve got a ton of that going on in the profession right now as well. So have you got any ideas on how can, can that be overcome? Like, what do we need to do?
Dame Judith Hackitt 26:29
I think, I think, I think you, you’ve got something in, in the things you talk about in the book. And I’m not just saying that because, you know, I’m talking to you. I was, I was really struck by, by some of the the examples you shared in there, of of, you know, people who have lived with impairment to their own capabilities, and they’ve managed to hide it for a very long time, and it’s Only by bringing them into the same room as people who are dealing with for example, they feel different because they are from a different ethnic background, and compare making them helping both sides to see that those two things are uniform. Unifying rather than alienating, yeah, and that they both have the same sorts of feelings about things, feelings of lack of confidence and being isolated, and it helps them to then look out for one another. Yeah, and the opportunities to do that are enormous.
Mark McBride-Wright 27:43
Well, that’s what I talk in the book about. I mean, it took a lot of work, mental process, in that extension of the Bradley curve, where I proposed that inclusive interdependence, which is a really subtle and hard to describe, sometimes reframe, but I think it fits squarely within when we talk about allyship in EDI and when it we, we’re often like to be allies when it’s easy, but when it’s hard, we we step back because, you know, it’s there’s a risk to us by being aligned with that group that’s now in distress, or the focus of the villagers with pitchforks, as I say. But then, if we pull back, then when I’m at risk or I’m exposed, who’s going to be there for me? So it’s that idea of safety, like you looking out for others is also means, by reciprocity, they’re looking out for you. I can’t remember the the story fully, but I remember, I think it was Joe amici, the former NBA basketball player. He’s now a very successful psychologist, and he shares an example about how he was in a hotel once, and someone was smoking and flicking the cigarettes, and there was, like, lots of cigarettes piling up outside the balcony on the ground, and people would walk past and say, Oh, that’s that’s really bad. That shouldn’t happen people who do that, but no one took action to solve the problem, to like to call it out, or to clean it up. And I’m not really explaining this very well, but basically it was this analogy of being the first follower, so the leader who steps out there to call something out, but then who comes with them to give it that that credibility, and that’s when you then see the ground swell, because other than others are thinking it, but then someone’s taking action on what they’re thinking. And that’s what the whole psychological safety culture is about. You might be thinking about it, but the group think means you’re going to be too at risk of saying something, so therefore you don’t say something. And that’s what we try and proclaim as our safety cultures are. Are. But are they actually that? Not so much?
Dame Judith Hackitt 30:05
Yeah, but you mentioned earlier that you have to couple this with the kind of just culture thing, because, in my experience, the thing that gets in the way of people calling out things in safety, more often than not, is that blame culture that kicks in in so many organizations. So you call something out, you say this was wrong, and whether that’s about safety or about behaviors with respect to to other people who may have felt threatened and so on. This is where your safety analogy is really, really powerful. You know, in terms of where we are on helping people to feel included, is where we used to be on safety, where you call something out, and immediately there would be a witch hunt for who got it wrong. Who are we going to discipline for this? Let’s have a, you know, let’s have an investigation and find out who, who got it wrong here, and we’ll hang them out to dry. We’ve gotten over that, and by talking about just in, in most places, we’ve got over that, not not totally, but, you know, we now talk about just culture, and we talk about learning from mistakes, like you did earlier, and how, how can we acknowledge that we need to learn from this and move on and do things differently. But think about where we are currently, and I see this a lot right now, in terms of people make a complaint about the way they’ve been treated or the way they’ve been made to feel in the workplace, the processes that kick in right now are pretty traumatic, and they’re traumatic not only for the person who makes the complaint, but the person who’s being accused, right? Because they’re immediately ostracized, they’re immediately taken out of the workplace. They’re very we, we’re being, I think, pretty clumsy, right about the way we deal with some of those behavioral issues, which are really about changing the culture, yeah? And that that acts as a real barrier to being able to have the sorts of conversations that you talk about in the book, yeah, that are ultimately going to get us to the place that we need to get to. Yeah,
Mark McBride-Wright 32:35
we’ve we’ve evolved since I wrote the book, we’ve evolved. We’ve designed a course called the safe leader training course. It’s four modules, one module per letter, share, act, feel, empower the there’s a new graphic we’ve got now as well to go along with the book, which is the letters in a circle. So it’s a bit like a plan, do, check, act type thing. The idea that you’re constantly doing it, and the idea is that what we’ve brought into it is the act of storytelling, because engineers aren’t always the best at telling their stories, so we’ve brought in some public speaking training, but what we encourage the groups to do and coach them through, is understand, what’s your story, What have you got to share with the world? And that by you being open about that and sharing that story, it’ll mean that someone else might resonate with it, and they’ll they’ll then be able to be open about that as well. And we don’t have that in men being vulnerable, sharing about things beneath their waterline. My friend gifted me this little prop, which is a lighthouse. And I love it because, you know, if you think about a ship at sea in the dark, can’t see its way forward. That’s why lighthouses were designed to help provide some guidance. If you then had lots and lots of lighthouses, you would be able to see the pathway a lot more clearly. So if one’s own story is a metaphor of a lighthouse. It means when we increase the number of stories that are available in the public domain or in the workplace, there’s then moment more moments of connection and opportunity for empathy, to relate, for interpersonal relationships and connection. And I’ve seen this. I’ve just seen this happen with so many I’ve given talks now at enough big conferences with engineers and that in the audience to when we talk about the iceberg, and people think that diversity is about women in engineering or LGBT or this, and that when you start talking about the bit of the iceberg on diversity of life experience, and saying, Look, this means you being able to be in a culture that’s about, you being able to go over get talk about the nasty divorce that you’re going through right now, or talk about, do you know what? One of the biggest things is that still doesn’t get spoken about, that is affecting loads of people fertility, trying to have a family. Struggling to conceive, IVF issues and miscarriages and all that stuff. You know that a lot of people, women and men, are just bottling up, not talking about and so the number of times I talk and share and frame things in this way, and then have people come up to me afterwards and say, Look, this really connected me, with me on this front, you’re just like, oh, how do we now transition then to more people sharing that. And the boundary doesn’t have to be that. You have to go public. You now have to start talking about all your innermost thoughts to everyone. It’s not about that, but the starting point in the safe Leader Program is at least doing that internal self exploration and then recognize that if maybe, if you were to talk about that, you might then someone else might then be able to relate with it. And then what we’re doing is we’re playing with the lived experience and learned experience, so we’re increasing the probability of more opportunities for learned experience to be acquired from one another. So, yeah, I don’t know. I’m on a on a mission, to try and scale this up, basically, and get it get embedded in engineering practice. And, you know, we’re talking to some universities just now, I’ve got plans to engage well, the engineering institutions in the UK. I’m really interested with IChemE actually, maybe what can we do through them? But it’s exciting. Yeah,
Dame Judith Hackitt 36:29
yeah. Indeed, indeed. I mean, the other book that I think it struck a chord with me, because I read a lot of books, and one of the other books that it struck a chord with me, some of the things you mentioned in your book was the culture code by Daniel Coyle. If you read that, okay, no, not yet, not yet. And it’s a it’s it’s great, because he talks in there about how some of the best leaders, particularly in the sporting world, become the best leaders, by sharing their own vulnerabilities with the team. And you know, when they admit that they feel nervous or they feel scared, it then encourages other people to do the same, yeah,
Mark McBride-Wright 37:13
absolutely. It gives that, gives that permission, doesn’t it? Okay? Well, talking about then safe leadership, and what I like to do is go through the framework and ask my guests some some questions on that. So let’s start with Share. You’ve always been clear about your views and expectations. So how do you share your insights and experiences to influence others? I
Dame Judith Hackitt 37:41
um, in a number of ways, I suppose. I certainly do it through mentorship, as I said, and and, you know, making myself available to to mentor younger people coming into engineering in particular, and also, one of the areas that I’m doing quite a lot of mentorship now through the Royal Academy of Engineering, is on systems thinking, okay, okay. Because I think it in in this last decade or so over it, I think I’ve realized how much I’ve always seen everything in front of me as being a system that needs to be addressed as such, okay, and and I kind of assumed that everybody did that, and it’s become increasingly apparent to me that that’s not the case. So helping other people to see the benefit of looking through that systems lens has become a really important part of me telling what I see and how I see the world. And in a way, that’s what the building a safer future report was all about, because I, I tackled it in the way that that seemed absolutely like the well, this is the only way I can do this, is to map out the system and think about whether the system is working or not. But it was so alien to other people, and they went, Well, this is a, this is a very different way of coming at it. That’s not I’m people normally do reviews. Well, that’s my way. Wow.
Mark McBride-Wright 39:28
Maybe we need an engineering approach for all, all reviews for for act. Then what’s one moment where you made a decisive intervention that shifted the direction of a team, program, policy.
Dame Judith Hackitt 39:47
There’s probably a lot I could I could mention, but I guess the one I mentioned so you talked about my, my kind of personal code of ethics, and you know, my, I. A really strong belief that we have to not just do what we told, in fact, not do what you told if you know it’s wrong. And I, I wrote an article for the for I Chem E, for the chemical engineer, about ethics four years ago, for which I got the Hansen medal, but it talked about ethics and the case I cited in there was a time when I was an operator, when I was the Operations Director at a chemicals facility, and someone was badly injured. I did the investigation, and it became apparent to me very quickly that the unsafe practice had been going on for quite a long time, right? And quite a few people knew about it, including the commissioning engineer, who had not told me or any or anyone in his line of chain of command that this was happening, right? And so when I wrote the report. I put all of that in there and said, you know this, this is on us. We we failed to to manage, provide a safe system of work, and this is leadership failure. My boss, at the time, told me to rewrite the report. He said, If you put that, you know, if you put that out as it is, we’re going to get prosecuted. And I said, and we should be we were wrong, and we should take the consequences of that. And he was very unhappy, you know, I mean, when he said to me, think very carefully about whether you’re going to do this or not, he meant it. But for me, there was no choice. You have to do that. You have to be true to yourself. You have to live with yourself. No cover ups,
Mark McBride-Wright 41:56
no Yeah, completely. There was a case that made the media last year about a real engineer that called out unsafe practices at Euston station. And then it transpired that someone in Parliament or the House of Lords can’t remember who you know, wasn’t happy about that. And then there was action taken against the individual by the construction company that had employed them, and they were then subsequently interviewed by the new civil engineer. And there’s a, there’s a quote that they gave in there that really made, made me like reaffirmed, I guess, my identity as an engineer, which is, you know, it’s a because the code of practice that we sign and we’re subscribed to by get becoming chartered, it’s a bit like a doctor or or legal profession taking the oath and so and people who employ engineers sometimes misconstrue that with employing consultants, and they forget About this ethical requirement that we have that’s built into our code of conduct with having the license to practice, which is exactly what you did, then, isn’t it, you were upholding your license to practice, and yeah, not not doing a cover up or not telling the truth. And I think that’s important for us, a great leadership lesson for all engineers in the field, I mentioned then, how do you stay connected to the emotional aspects of leadership, especially when working in high stake environments.
Dame Judith Hackitt 43:39
I guess it’s always been important to me to have people I can turn to for support, because we all feel vulnerable. There will there will always be days for every one of us, even you know, at my stage in my career now, there are times when you think, is it me, am I? Am I the only one does everybody else see this differently, and especially when you get knocked back, when you’ve taken a courageous stance and you get knocked back, you’ve got to have that support network to whom you can go and say, yeah, and those people who will say no, keep going, you’re on the right track.
Mark McBride-Wright 44:23
It’s the trust. It’s the trust going trust in people that will not just tell you what you want to hear, but actually say
Dame Judith Hackitt 44:31
your list of 10 people who you can trust Absolutely. Yeah, exactly.
Mark McBride-Wright 44:38
So empowerment is something many associate with you, myself included. How do you empower emerging engineers, leaders, professionals, to take ownership?
Dame Judith Hackitt 44:51
I think there’s a few things. The first is to get them to to so it goes back to my safety. A core value, not a priority, right? And if you’re not doing it for the right reasons, and it’s not coming from the heart, then stop and sort yourself out, right? Because this is not about I’m doing it because I have to, because of my job or because I’m going to go to prison. Do it because you care about the people, so get your motivation right. Is, is, is really, really an important message for me to people, I think that’s, that’s, that’s probably at the heart of it, and and everything else then follows, really,
Mark McBride-Wright 45:40
and everything else you’ve said as well about, you know, empowerment and taking it to heart, and, yeah, remembering your duty of care and your how you treat people and the culture you create around you as well. But even,
Dame Judith Hackitt 45:58
even the duty of care thing, you know, it’s a moral duty of care, not a legal one, yeah,
Mark McBride-Wright 46:02
yeah, yeah, true. That’s a term that has meaning to it. Legal meaning, yeah. I mean morally as well,
Dame Judith Hackitt 46:08
yeah, yeah, yeah. I never, I never want to be in a position where I I have to berate myself for not having done the right thing, you know, and knowing that I could have done something different,
Mark McBride-Wright 46:27
good stance, what, um, okay, future goals, then, and just thinking about legacy, you know, what? What you’ve helped shape engineerings, past and present, What? What? What’s next for you? What legacy do you hope to to leave on for the future of the profession?
Dame Judith Hackitt 46:48
Well, it’s, it’s a good question. I mean, I keep trying to retire, and every time I do something else comes up, and I continue to stay active because, because I enjoy what I do, and I do the things I care about. And one of the things I care about, particularly right now, is the work I do with the Royal Academy of Engineering. And there’s really two strands to that, one of which is the engineering X program, which is all about safer complex systems. So going back to this journey, you know, we never get to the end of this, because you never done on safety. The challenges I think now in the safety sphere are around as our world gets more and more complex and interdependent. Do we have the tools and the capabilities to manage safety in that increasingly complex world. And when you look at some of the things that happen, you know, in the cyberspace, or just the interconnectedness of systems around the world that we don’t understand until it happens. It tells me we’ve got a long way to go on that. So that’s one of my passions. And I guess the other one, in a slightly different context, is that we’re doing a lot of work in the academy around helping policy makers supporting policymakers to employ systems thinking in their approach to wicked policy problems, right? And that’s fascinating. That’s fascinating because that then takes you into just about every sphere you could imagine from you know, how can we unblock the bed blocking system in the health service through, how do you persuade people to adopt heat pumps? What are the blockers to people buying heat pumps? Because it’s not just price, it’s about a whole host of things that sit behind why people are reluctant to make that leap. And when you start applying systems thinking to some of those really quite challenging problems, it’s it gives some really different insights to people on it’s not just a case of give them a loan or give them a grant or whatever. There’s some hearts and minds willing to be done here. You know,
Mark McBride-Wright 49:20
I, I question Judith whether you will ever retire, because I bring that to myself. And I just, I just can’t imagine clocking off and that. And, you know, that’s it, you know, I don’t know. I see what some people in my family who’ve retired and what they do. And I’m just, I just, I just don’t think that’s me. I think I’m going to be I see people like yourself, Lord Brown, and others who are at the top end of their career. And I just once you get there, it just must be so difficult to or do you feel like it’s something that’s expected of you when you. Get to the latter stage of your career, like to retire? Do people ask, Is that, like a microaggression, your subject too often when you’re going to retire, when you go and retire, like, can it not just be enough that you don’t feel that pressure, that maybe you don’t want to retire?
Dame Judith Hackitt 50:12
It’s an interesting question. Yes, yes, I do feel that from people who have retired, and who say, Why haven’t you retired? And I say, because I don’t want to, yeah, whilst ever there’s things out there to do that interest me, you know, I’m not ready to check out. And we have, we have a great balance of time spent traveling, going on holiday. But when I’m here in the UK, I’m busy, and I love it good.
Mark McBride-Wright 50:43
Well, there should be no guilt in that, in any way, shape or form for you. And I’m happy because it means you get more more more time, right? Quick Fire questions. What’s the one piece of leadership advice you’ve ever received? What’s the best piece of leadership advice you’ve ever received?
Dame Judith Hackitt 51:07
I think it’s about being authentic. You know, be yourself. Don’t try to be like other people. Okay? What’s your All right? And for me, that involved going on a course on women’s leadership to learn what it meant to be a woman leader. Okay,
Mark McBride-Wright 51:26
what’s your proudest professional moment?
Dame Judith Hackitt 51:32
I think it would be both receiving my dame hood, but also last year, getting the President’s Medal from the Royal Academy of Engineering.
Mark McBride-Wright 51:41
What’s one skill you think all engineers should be taught from day one
Dame Judith Hackitt 51:48
to stop talking and listen
Mark McBride-Wright 51:51
tea or coffee? Coffee? What’s your go to? Thinking, tool or model
Dame Judith Hackitt 51:58
systems? Thinking?
Mark McBride-Wright 52:01
Who is one engineering leader, past or present? You admire
Dame Judith Hackitt 52:09
Jim McDonald, sir Jim McDonald, he I have a lot of admiration for Jim for what he has done and the achievements he’s made in his life.
Mark McBride-Wright 52:22
What’s one thing you do to reset after a long day or an intense meeting,
Dame Judith Hackitt 52:30
come home and have a glass of wine?
Mark McBride-Wright 52:34
What’s a piece of policy work you’re most proud of?
Dame Judith Hackitt 52:38
Oh, I think undoubtedly it would be the work I’ve done on building safety, because I I’ve just got sucked into it willingly, I hasten to add, you know, so what was a 12 month do this review has I’m now into my eighth year of being involved in it, and there is so much to do, And it’s become a real personal mission for me to make this change. You
Mark McBride-Wright 53:05
might want to listen to the podcast I did with Benjamin Hollis. I think his name was. He talks about your review, and that was very interesting, very positive. What book or resource would you recommend to today’s engineering leaders
Dame Judith Hackitt 53:23
in addition to yours, I think it would be the culture code, okay?
Mark McBride-Wright 53:30
And finally, what advice would you give to your younger self just starting out?
Dame Judith Hackitt 53:38
I think it’s it. It’s it. It is this, be yourself all of the time. You know, I know that my own personal journey in this male dominated world that I’ve I’ve made my way in. There were times when I thought I had to try and fit in and be like the men. Yeah, and it’s it took a long time for me to realize that the real value I brought to things was seeing things differently.
Mark McBride-Wright 54:21
You mentioned that women’s leadership course that you went on, yeah, and I wanted to just Yeah, drill into that a little bit more. Is was it that experience that made you shift your position or change your perception? Yes, yes, absolutely. And is that something I know we said we’d finish, but can you go into that a little bit more, really conscious. We never touched on that deciding of your identity being a women engineer, female engineer. So what advice would you give to listeners, and what experience did you go through in that
Dame Judith Hackitt 54:55
I think it’s probably one of the most i. Profound changes for me. You know, lots of courses teach you lots of things, but that one was a real in depth experience, and I came away from that feeling very different about myself, feeling very much more confident to be myself and stop trying to be like other people. Fabulous, and that just it makes you behave differently because you operate out of you, you’re being authentic, yeah, yeah. And so it makes such a difference, but, but you have to get I think what, what I’ve also learned is, is that it was a week course, a week long course, followed by a number of follow up sessions that got me to that place. And I think, you know, all of us act apart to some extent or another, and to be able to get in touch with that, truly being yourself at work, which you talk about, and being the same person who wherever you are, yeah, and feeling comfortable in your own skin, literally, is so important to being a Good leader, yeah, to let go of the acting
Mark McBride-Wright 56:23
brilliant. I think that’s great advice to end on. Thank you so much. Judith really enjoyed chatting to you. If people want to get in touch, find out more about your activities, what you’re involved with these days. How should they do that? They can
Dame Judith Hackitt 56:36
always send me a message on LinkedIn. I love to hear from people fabulous.
Mark McBride-Wright 56:40
We’ll put a link to your pro your profile in the transcript, in the show notes, thank you. Thank you so much. Been a pleasure. Okay, see you soon. Yeah,
Dame Judith Hackitt 56:50
take care. Bye. You.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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