Before Michael Bassey started his new role in safety, his mentor told him not to start. Spend two months visiting every facility in the business unit first. Not to learn the work. To meet the people. 

In this episode of the Safety Spotlight Podcast, we sit down with Michael Bassey, D.Eng, CSP, Asset Process Safety Advisor at Chevron and author of Beyond Blame, to talk about how safety professionals actually get built, and what most organizations get wrong about developing them. 

Michael has worked safety in Nigeria, Qatar, the UAE, Argentina and North America across two decades, on drilling operations, commissioning, turnarounds and high-consequence investigations. He came into the field from operations, holds a Doctor of Engineering from George Washington University, carries a CSP, and started his working life teaching physics and advanced mathematics. He is unusually direct about what he got wrong on the way. 

This conversation breaks down: 

– Why his mentor’s first instruction was to build a network, and why it took Michael a while to see the point 

– What “people are people everywhere” means when you are leading safety somewhere you have never worked 

– How the mindset you carry into a new country shapes whether anyone tells you anything 

– What happens to a behavior observation program once completing three of them affects your performance review 

– Why moving from observing people to coaching them changed what his organization was able to learn 

– How to choose a mentor, and the question to ask yourself before you approach anyone 

– Why becoming the SME in one specific area matters as much as who is mentoring you 

– The two things he says he would do differently if he started his career again.

Michael is candid about a program he watched lose its purpose. Observations were effective at first. Then they became a count, three per rotation, tied to performance reviews, and people adjusted. The crews being observed started performing for the clipboard. Some observers stopped leaving their offices. What his organization moved to instead was coaching on the front line, sitting with people rather than watching them, and Michael traces a straight line from that shift to what the organization was finally able to see about how work actually gets done. 

The mentorship thread runs through the whole conversation. Michael talks about the safety professionals he could call when he did not know something, and how much faster that made him. He also talks about waiting too long. He spent his first several years without seeking out a mentor, and he is blunt about what that cost. The second regret is harder to admit and he says it with a laugh at his own expense: he played it too safe. He passed on roles he assumed he would not do well in. His advice to anyone earlier in a safety career is to be more adventurous than he was. 

If you are early in a safety career, responsible for developing people who are, or trying to work out why your observation program stopped producing anything useful, this episode is worth your time. 

Michael’s book, Beyond Blame: A Human and Organizational Performance Approach to Incident Investigation, Learning, and Leadership, is available on Amazon.