Elizabeth Johnson on Evolving EHS Leadership

Episode Transcript:-

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Hilary: Good afternoon, listeners. I’m Hilary Framke, your host of the Elevate EHS podcast. I’m here back for another episode. I’ve got Elizabeth Johnson today. Hi, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth: Hi, Hilary. It’s great to be here. 

Hilary: Oh, I’m excited to have you here. We’re going to get into some fun content today. So let’s start with, how did you find EHS? Tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and your journey. What parts of being an EHS leader do you enjoy the most?

Elizabeth: Oh I don’t know if I found EHS or if EHS found me. I think like most people, I wasn’t somebody who just said, hey, I want to grow up and be an EHS professional.

I stumbled into this career and actually started my career in EHS with OSHA as an OSHA Compliance Officer, which is not how most people get into EHS, but I had an undergrad degree in geoscience, which is an earth science type degree and OSHA needed someone who could help them with trenching.

And so that was my foot in the door in my very green stage of my career. But then grew and progressed there. And now I’m the Vice President of EHS for my company and I’ve seen all levels and gamuts of it. And I think really for me, the part that I love the most, especially from a leadership standpoint, especially this stage of my career is really watching the evolution of safety and our field grow from what it was 20 some odd years ago, when I first started into what it is now, and so it’s just great to really see this next generation come in, especially post COVID how they look at the world, how they look at life and protecting people.

And it’s just to me I find it really rejuvenating. 

Hilary: Agreed. And isn’t it interesting to see the various new generations come up and then they want to do EHS differently than the previous, even just five years ago? It’s just evolving so quickly. 

Elizabeth: Yeah Absolutely. And it’s funny. One of my employees who is just, he’s an absolute rock star and he and I sat down and I was kind of like, Hey, why are you in this field? What makes you happy? You know and it’s always we want to help people and things. He goes, but I want to do safety different and it’s such a simple statement, but at the same time, it was just so profound, in the sense that, being in our field, we’ve got construction, international construction. We’ve also got office and manufacturing, so we cover the whole gamut. He grew up in a sense of what I would kind of call what crime and punishment safety, you do the crime, you got to do the time, you know, of the safety professionals that hid behind the pillars and took pictures and blasted out emails. 

And his philosophy is, I want to do it different. He wants to be much more impactful, much more purposeful with what we do and really not only just impact how people come to work every day, but really how they live their lives.

And that is something that I’m just so excited to see and it really, it goes back to human performance a little bit. It goes back into a lot more kind of philosophy of really taking full ownership of it. But I’m like, you know what, this is the type of environment that you want to really nourish and really watch it grow.

And so, it’s just exciting to see that’s what the next generation is excited about. 

Hilary: Now the question is, are they going to be able to transform their businesses? Right. And take that to the next level. I want to unpack this actually, because I think, look, we are seeing EHS leaders are getting on board with that change, right?

Evolving away from a punitive, like compliance enforcement, towards collaboration, proactive risk management, right? But how have you seen the shift impact the EHS practitioners though? Because I think it’s also a different set of talents is one consideration, but then are businesses ready to make that shift into a new way of doing EHS. 

Elizabeth: Yeah, I mean, this is hard to unpack, but I think in a lot of ways, especially the way I see it is, the higher up you get into an organization, the way you always maintain your seat. Doesn’t matter what department, what project, whatever you represent.

The way you always maintain that seat at the table is you show the value that you add to the organization.

And in some ways, EHS, we have an easy in, cause it’s like, hey we protect the people of the company, but at the same time, we have to be able to articulate that and connect that into really what’s the company about, how are we growing? What’s forward thinking, strategic thinking, how all of that sort of aspect, financial impacts, all of that. And I would say a lot of it has to do with soft skills and soft skill development. What is your presentation skills? What’s your ability to talk to the C-Suite and also talk to the brand new employee on the floor that sort of, they’d be able to do the whole gamut.

But then, at the same time, to be able to translate our EHS data that us EHS professionals geek out about; we love when we can start watching all the stuff and we can get predictive, you know, analytics almost, but translate that into what I would call the boardroom talk, how does this impact our employee retention values?

How does this reduce cost? It impacts how much the company can make. How can we continue to have those conversations? What about the reputation of the company? Does this attract more customers? How could it almost be a sales pitch in a sense to the rest of kind of the internal organization and that’s really, as for my career, the gap that I see that a lot of EHS professionals don’t necessarily can make from the field to the boardroom. And so once you really start understanding that business aspect of it you really get to see how EHS is such a vital part of a business.

And it really is key that once you get a leader, who buys into it, who understands that everybody wants their people safe, but really understands how EHS can make or break an organization, more so than just the compliance aspect. It’s really a skillset that launches per EHS professional cause we’re so integrated, we really are integrated in the company, and again it’s a great thing to have. And it’s a skill set that really the professionals that want to continue to push their career out, they need to focus on those skills. 

Hilary: Oh my gosh, couldn’t agree more. And I think the more that this old way of doing EHS and the punitive and the compliance enforcement, it does keep you at a sub function level, right?

Because it’s so linear, go do your audit, go do the things you need to do, we’ll talk about the innovative things, the strategic things over here. So as EHS leaders make that shift, and diversify the outlook, I think, of what EHS is, what it can do, how integrated it should be.

They’re almost making a business case for them to have a seat at the table. 

Elizabeth: Absolutely. And again, it’s recognizing that those audits are critical and how they have that ripple effect to the organization. But like you said it’s having that business case on why we need to be so integrated at that top level, why we needed to be a part of that and be a part of those discussions.

And it’s not made for everybody, just like you talked to some EHS professionals, you’ve got some EHS professionals that just want their little manufacturing site and they don’t want to go outside of that. Some want to do their 3 months in the field home for 2 months, 3 months in the field sort of rotation.

Not everybody is made for the kind of headquarters type leadership. 

Hilary: Let’s talk about what are some of those skills and competencies, Elizabeth, that EHS leaders who have this ambition to have a seat at the executive table, right? The large roles in their organization, what soft skills should they go work on? 

Elizabeth: Oh, the first one is always presentation, just how you talk to people, how you present presentation, your PowerPoint skills.

As much as I would love to say, we’re going to migrate away from PowerPoint, I don’t think that’s ever going to happen. But if your PowerPoint has 5000 words, your message is gone, but at the same time, if your PowerPoint has just one, like gruesome picture on it, your message is also not resonating.

So it’s really, almost, figuring out what you want to say and then finding simplistic data to support it. And talking about how that simplistic data impacts the organization and how it impacts beyond just the walls of EHS, did it impact our ability to complete training for new hires in HR?

Did it impact a sales agreement? Something along those lines that’s cross-functional. And that’s really what I’d say if from a soft skill set point, you start focusing on that aspect, everything else will come into place. But being able to articulate your thoughts and put it into writing and on paper and present it to a group of people that have really no idea how EHS does EHS, but have them understand what you’re trying to say.

You’ll be fine.

Hilary: Presenting without influencing isn’t that successful is it? So you can be a presenter but if you can’t sell a message if you can’t sell an initiative, a process that we should go pursue, an objective whatever it may be, it’s hard to move your EHS program forward so I think of influencing. That was the first thing that came to my mind when I asked that question to you. And I agree that presenting side of things, visual PowerPoint presentation, being in person, having the ability to jump on a virtual platform and still be impactful is a huge part of being a successful EHS leader. 

Elizabeth: If you think about all of the great speakers around the world, I’m not saying that EHS people have to become motivational speakers or something great like that. Not at all. But you think about meetings you’ve been in and you think about other, maybe conferences that you’ve attended, there’s always that one speaker that sticks out, whether they were a great storyteller or they were, maybe slightly more animated or something along those lines, but you could always tell that they were very knowledgeable in what they were talking about, but also passionate, and there’s a fine line between being way too knowledgeable and you put everybody to sleep and way too passionate where your message is completely lost, but the ones that can walk, they combine those too, you tend to really make an impact and that’s where, even in the boardroom, it matters. It’s not a circus, you’re not a performer, but you have to be able to quickly articulate the key contributions and then make it impactful and memorable for everybody else in the room. 

Hilary: Couldn’t agree more. I think another thing they just don’t teach is strategy. How to actually set a winning strategy in EHS

and I think the first side of that is being able to accurately analyze your business. So where are we today? How am I going to find out? What does that look like? Then see where you are and then set a pathway forward that might be multi year, right? Wow, not enough EHS leaders know how to sit and do that.

Elizabeth: No, and simultaneously, I think that’s one of the great kind of evolutions of what’s going on in EHS right now. And just talking to a lot of my peers is, post, I’d say this is probably one of the good things that’s post COVID. Post COVID, we earned our seat during COVID and post COVID, we need to maintain that seat and be a part of that strategy, part of the conversation because we proved during that timeframe that, hey, EHS needs to be at the table because we’re going to be able to talk about how this impacts the business and how this impacts the organization and the people.

But we can continue that same exact conversation, but now it’s, oh, are we investing in new products? Are we having new customers? Where are we growing? All of that. And having a leader to be able to go, okay, if we’re going to do this, we need X, Y and Z. We need to be able to do this and then start really looking at the team and how can we grow.

How can we develop? Do we need to go have protective training? Do we need develop new training? All of this is huge that you want to be as proactive as possible. So again, not to go back to 10-15 years ago where the EHS leader gets that note going, oh, yeah, we were building a new plant such and such is opening up next week.

And so that’s really to me that the evolution, especially these last several years, that’s been really exciting to see for EHS is we’re evolving to the next level as well which is great.

Hilary: Yes. And I think starting to see the differences between what gets you in the door and what earns you a seat. And I think what gets you in the door might be some interesting KPIs. What earns you a seat is strategic planning for the future. And it’s forecasting, as you said, it’s seeing those potential obstacles before they happen, right?

Knowing, having that background information and technical prowess to say, hey that’s a new region. We need to get our hands around what the compliance obligations are. We need to get some help here. That’s totally out of my purview, right? We need to get a consultant out to get our hands around that.

Or it’s looking like we’re not going to hit our sustainability goal. We’re going to have to amp it up. We’re going to have to decide either we’re going to adjust what we told the market, or go back and make an investment, but someone’s got to make this call and not in 2030, today, right?

 But it’s some of those callouts I think that gain you a seat at the table, right? That show your value and your ability to look into the future. So that’s exciting. With all these technical skills that EHS people have been earning and working towards and now, the soft skills that are being asked of us it’s not that surprising that the soft skills are still getting overlooked and underdeveloped.

Because I think there’s a couple of reasons here, but I want to hear your point of view, what do you think we can do here to bridge this gap for those who are maybe lagging behind in the soft skills, strong technical capability, but not where they need to be on the soft skill side of things. 

Elizabeth: I think it’s twofold.

I’ll answer the first part of going, hey, what can an EHS professional do today to help them out? And then I’ll tell you my big dream solution that probably will never happen. It will. We will speak it into existence. I’m going to date myself. What was that Oprah board that she made like in the 90’s where you put all of your like pictures up?

That’s what I need. But I think really for EHS professionals today, whether you’re just starting out or maybe you’re trying to get into a management position or something along those lines there’s a plethora of free things out there, there’s organizations that offer free PowerPoint skills, Excel skills, presentation skills, all those sorts of stuff but ultimately it comes down to you just have to have the mentality that you don’t know enough.

And meaning that, you’re always trying to advance your skills, and maybe that is going outside of your company and getting these free classes or maybe it’s enrolling in a night course of the community college on writing, or executive writing something along those lines to add another level.

You can also partner with people in your business. Human resources is a great one to partner with to learn some soft skills. But if you also have a continuous improvement team or some people learn what they do and how they’re connected to EHS. Cause there’s not a single department in any organization that EHS doesn’t have some sort of influence or support or we walk a line together.

I tell people, I said, call finance, figure out how finance and EHS are connected and that’s always a great way to do that. And it really helps you grow your internal network with it but ultimately always improve, always seek to improve yourself, and to learn more about it.

And again, focus on those soft skills.

Hilary: Before you go on. I want to add a tip here. This was something that was suggested to me by a leadership coach that I had never really thought of that was an impactful and really pivotal turnaround moment for me to get a 360 done. Does your business do that?

Elizabeth: Yep. We have 360s. Yeah. 

Hilary: Okay. This one was like 360 accelerated and it was done by an outside agency. I’m happy to share that for anyone who’s interested. Drop me a comment but you go out and you pick 30 family members, professional contact, right? It’s like holistic. It’s not just your professional view, but you all together should pick 30 people, and then it sends them the assessment, it asks them what they think your values are, and then you do like a self value assessment, and then it does the comparison, and I was shocked to find out what I was thinking I was selling or as my brand and what I was putting out there was not what people were seeing and it wasn’t what I was doing, it was how I was communicating, it was what I was asking about, it was the vigor in which I’m pursuing goals and expectations and you know it’s my high appetite for excellence and it wasn’t reading as empathy and compassion and care, genuine care, all these things that I would think are at the top of the list for people when they think of me.

This helped me so much to see myself from an outsider’s point of view and to work on the skills. And amping up those other soft skills to show outwardly what I was feeling inwardly, if that makes sense. 

Elizabeth: No I love those 360. I’ve taken a couple times and it’s always really interesting, especially if you get a 360 and you have your self assessment and you’re in this one like little section.

Yeah. And then you have a bunch of them that are just a little bit to the left or a little bit to the right of your little assessment, but then you have these crazy outliners. Yeah. Why do I have these crazy outliners and you start talking to those people and you realize, oh, I was working with them on this particular project and it did not go well.

So they think I’m highly critical, and I’m like, probably because I was, and then you might need to talk to another group, that it was a project or a team or something, then it went really well. And it was like a little family band and they’re like, you were so loving and you’re so caring and you’re whatever.

And I’m like I probably need to reel those two in overall but yeah, the 360s are a fantastic tool. The personality assessments I think are a fantastic tool for anyone really. So I had a colleague of mine, we took some of those personality tests where you find out like what color you are and all that sort of thing.

Yes, I like those. And they took it and their results resulted in a color that they were like I am not that person. And I’m sitting, going, oh, but you are, that kind of thing. And even mine, there’s a lot of things on that I related to, but there were some aspects of it I’m going, that’s not me.

One of those, can be stubborn and I’m like, I’m not stubborn. Like I’m very, and I’m like, I’m being stubborn about the thing telling me, being stubborn. I’m like they might be onto something. So I think it’s really when you take those assessments yeah, this might be cliche, but you have to have an open mind and you really have to hardcore look at yourself going, hey, just because you may not like it, doesn’t mean it’s not true.

Hilary: That’s right. And I would say give it some time. 

Insights Discovery is the color one I really like. For those who are interested, a great one to look into because I like the idea of, I’m not just one color. That’s what Insights Discovery says. It’s like you have every color in your backpack and at any one point in time, your color wheel has different 

percentages, for what you’re currently putting off right, where you are in your career, et cetera. And if I took the same test a year from now, I’d probably have different variation. And what I really like about that is you can bring out different parts of you. They all exist there, but there’s the ones you tend to like to lead with, right?

And I think as you said, the self awareness to know what you tend to lead with and how that impacts your collaboration, your ability to influence, going out and being the EHS leader that you want to be is, it’s so helpful to know for that self awareness piece to know your brand. And to get out there and to be the most successful that you can be.

And now I call back to it. And I think, okay, I know that I’m red, but I’m going into this meeting where it’s mostly blues. So I’ve worked to like turn down the red a little bit, turn down the volume, bring out the blue in me. Try to be a little analytical, right? Try to be softer spoken, less disruptive.

Yeah. But anyway, no, I think those are all great examples about how to go get going. So tell me what your dream is for soft skill development. 

Elizabeth: Oh, yeah. So I have this huge dream at some point and it goes back to that first question of how you got into EHS and there’s not a clear pathway for our field, for, like high school, as you go, you talk about, career day in high school and very rarely is there an EHS professional there going, hey, I know you’re going my kid’s high school has one cause you know, her mother is an EHS professional.

 I get to go, I’m always the only one where there’s always three or four real estate people or medical fields or whatever, all these other options and stuff like that for career day. And very rarely kids are like, hey Jess, what’s that, sort of stuff. And so you don’t have that clear career path. The second portion is for undergrad studies. There’s just a small handful of schools in the US that offer degrees in occupational health and safety. Several that do industrial hygiene because it’s a little bit more science. Again, it connects more the health side of things, but very few with occupational health and safety.

And once you get up to Master’s or PhDs, that even gets even smaller. And so I would love one, my dream is to actually make it a little bit more robust, and connected in with organizations from a business standpoint, from an engineering standpoint, from all of this, not only to have those career fields be required to take a occupational and health course.

Understand EHS a little bit more, but also make it a little bit more robust for EHS professionals. And then two in those career path and fields, for up and coming EHS professionals have those soft skill classes, have them take a business course, have them take engineering course, things like that.

So they can learn the basics of all of this, because it would just make them more rounded when they come into the workforce. And I would love to be able to partner with the school. And maybe one day department education to really build what this would look like, knowing that not every university in the US is going to pick this up, but really see if there’s some universities that could, because I really think that the growing need of where we are to have highly skilled EHS professionals that are trained, that we have the standard certification but is really critical to take us as a nation to that next level.

Hilary: Wouldn’t it be great not to have to explain to your CEO what EHS is and what we’re responsible for and what we do on a daily basis? That would be so exciting. 

Elizabeth: It’d be really exciting to for everybody to not have to go “what’s OSHA?.” And I’m like it’s the organ, the department that oversees basically all work in the US of whether people are safe or not like this shouldn’t be a novelty to some people.

And it continues to surprise me that it is. And it’s not just because it’s the compliance aspect of it but are you keeping your logs? Do you know what logs you should be keeping, all of that sort of aspect of it? I just think that, even for business owners to protect their business, it would be great to have a little bit more kind of broader scope, so as the new engineers coming out of college, they know they had that OSHA course there, or they had that occupational health and safety course or whatever it is.

And so it’s not new to them. 

Hilary: I totally agree. And especially to hit all the elements that this was something we talked in the beginning of the podcast about broadening the scope of what EHS is, what you can deliver to your business. Same is true on this side of broadening the understanding of what EHS oversees and what it can do, the cultural aspects and building at the foundation of your employee and your business culture, right? Then the documentation, as you said, how big of a burden that is moving your compliance program, obviously I think is one of the easiest to ascertain, but just such a small part.

Risk management. Not everything is a compliance rule, right? There’s a whole now new host of risk management, resiliency, business continuity, security, the sustainability side of things and how that’s impacting our place in the market and who we can sell to, et cetera that’s becoming a much larger part of what we do, right?

And so I think understanding for executives, for business leaders to get this idea prior to actually being in business. Yeah. It does clear the pathway so much for EHS leaders. 

Elizabeth: Yeah, and I think about it. I have a teenage daughter who very soon will be out of the house and in college and starting to live her life.

And I’m sitting going, these classes are not really going to impact the business world that I work in now, that sort of thing. But it could impact hers, so when she goes into the career field, her generation of upcoming, young professionals, 20, 30 years from now when they’re in the equivalent of my seat, what they’re going to be able to accomplish just because they had more tools in their toolbox when they started than what we did, that’s what I’m really passionate about. The world you and I work in Hilary, we’re going to be able to continue to make gains and strides, but ultimately that’s, what’s going to make the biggest difference, but it’s going to take a while for it to really reap the reward.

Hilary: Yeah, Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Because I’m still continually shocked by how many businesses are way [00:25:00] far behind, right? And they’re not even ready to collaborate and to partner and to give EHS a seat at the table. There’s no EHS budget, and many times there’s no dedicated EHS resources.

And we’re not talking about small companies here, talking big companies with no EHS resources. In my current role with technology I get to meet lots of prospective clients, get to hear about their infrastructure, what they have, and I’m trying to sit here with a poker face, what do you mean?

What do you mean you’re a one person show for 85,000 employees? What do you mean? This cannot continue. 

Elizabeth: I’m right there with you. I’m floored, that people think Hey, OSHA just applies to the US yes, you’re absolutely correct. But other countries have their own versions yeah they don’t get that. 

Hilary: It might be like the Department of Labor, or it might be Social Security, it might be a different governing body but there’s still rules. 

Elizabeth: Yeah, and so I think this kind of goes back to that whole, basic education is, if you look at our education system, people that, especially, business majors, people like that, engineers, I keep going back because I’m surrounded with them with my current work, having just a basic one on one intro, maybe it’s just a chapter, or something that kind of goes, Hey, and not does, it doesn’t have to be just EHS related.

Hilary: There’s aspects about finance about human resources about compliance, all of these quality, about all of these supporting departments that really help business functions that just get passed over. Yep. Pushed. Pushed. Yeah. 

I think because they’re not linked to profit generation.

Hilary: So anything that isn’t clearly making that value creation is over here. Over here. . 

Elizabeth: Yeah. And so when you have these new people coming into the workforce, everything they learn, they learn tribal knowledge, and sometimes they get a great manager and they learn that tribal knowledge in a matter of months.

Sometimes it takes years, if not decades. And even then you’re still learning. And and every business is different, but having that basic of who, what, when, where, and why would be great. So that’s my big dream. 

Hilary: I just love that. I support your dream. I think your dream’s amazing. Anyone else who supports Elizabeth’s dream, please drop it in the comments. I think that would again really set the tone for EHS.

That would clear a pathway for EHS leaders to be more successful in the organizations that they support. And it would also give all of these other functions a much better idea about how to partner with EHS, how to collaborate, how to get the most out of those technical resources. Speaking of which,

yeah. But again more fun things to go get better at. 

Elizabeth: Yeah. Cause it goes back to just the basic skills that I think are really critical, but yeah, I can spend probably days talking about this and the education past, but those two things I really think that are really critical for all EHS professionals is learn some skills, learn how to talk to the room and then continue to educate yourself. 

Hilary: Let me also disclaimer to everyone who’s listening to this podcast, I learned all these things by failing at these things. I don’t mean to sit here and say, oh, I’m just so knowledgeable, like literally learned by train wreck failure over the years in my EHS career and walk out of a meeting and go, why didn’t that land?

Why weren’t they on board with me? Why was there so much pushback? And then having the self awareness to sit back and go, maybe I didn’t present this right. Maybe I didn’t have the right people in the room. Maybe I need to work on my influencing. I wasn’t prepared enough with the data and the analytics, I didn’t make a good enough business case.

So absolutely all these things, at least from what I shared today was learned through failure. 

Elizabeth: Oh. Same here. I swear it. If my resume was based off of every time I put my foot in my mouth. Or every time, I had a failure moment that was just so off the mark, my resume, it would be like a dissertation.

It would just be an encyclopedia of how did you even get where you are? Because oh, my goodness. But yeah, but that’s again, as professionals, the longer in your career, those have really been those impactful moments. 

Hilary: Just like to live on the edge.

I don’t know if you’re not on the edge, then you’re not cutting it and pushing the boundaries. 

Elizabeth: Yeah. And mine is looking back and going all the missed opportunities, hindsight is 2020 and going back and look like, man, I totally screwed that up because I didn’t realize what that opportunity was or whatever.

And now there’s any opportunity that comes in the way and you don’t turn it down. You never know what it’s going to lead. Never say never. Maybe that’s what I should write a book on about all the things I’ve screwed up in my life.

Yeah. 

Hilary: Not to do as an EHS leader, Elizabeth, you and I can coauthor. 

Elizabeth: Do as we say, not as we’ve done, starting with chapter four. 

Hilary: Yes, exactly. I would say listeners capture this opportunity to learn from us, but we’re all learning. We’re all growing. We’re all on that scale. And I think let’s end on failure because I love that.

I think it was something that I underappreciated. I always ran from it. That was just part of my upbringing. I just thought that was the worst thing that could happen would be to fail at something. So I pushed myself and push myself and I ran from the failure moments. And it made it very difficult for me to fail later in my career.

And I was very uncomfortable with it. But I’ll tell you, I learned. Like you said, those are those pivotal career transforming moments when you can take a horrible, a great failure and learn from it, change yourself, make improvements, go back at it and do it again. 

Elizabeth: Absolutely. Failure has been my greatest motivator in the sense of going, I never want to go through that again.

So what do I have to do to not go through that again? In that horrific, I’m so embarrassed. I’m not showing my face ever again. I think that’s the most powerful aspect of failure is it’s opens the door for success. 

Hilary: It does. And I think if we start to look at, we can learn a lot from failure, like learning how not to do something is important information because it tells us what pathway we’re not going down.

And the more comfortable we are with that and using it as a way to steer ourselves into the right direction. I think we get to the right answer faster. Towards the later years of my career I became much more comfortable with saying, it’s okay. I don’t care if it’s not the right thing, let’s go do something.

Yeah. And once we figure out it’s not the wrong thing, change. Be agile and make a direction, make a directional change and go in a different direction. And then fine. If that fails too, fine, keep going because you find that it is still a pathway forward, even though it’s not linear.

It’s a pathway forward and it is progress. And there is something to be said about. Making effort and trying to infuse innovation and effort, into a project change. So I think there’s a lot to be said about that. 

Elizabeth: Yeah, and it takes courage to fail. It means that you’ve gotten out of your comfort zone and you’ve tried something different.

I grew up in similar to you in the sense that, that failure is this big, negative thing that you never want to do. And, realistically, especially at my age, in my stage of career, I look back and go, no, failure is the most positive thing that we can do.

It really honestly is because it allows us to really get out of that comfort zone, get out of that box and really start tackling what’s happening today and prep for what’s going to happen tomorrow. 

Hilary: Exactly. And being comfortable with that’s really complicated.

I have no idea how to solve for that. There’s so many human factors and business factors and organizational factors that are contributing to our current performance. So no, I don’t know how to solve for it. I have some ideas. I think there’s some ways that we can go attack various parts of this and then we can see if that’s the right recipe.

But no guarantees. 

Elizabeth: That’s your project management coming out right there. 

Hilary: Just a little bit, just a little bit. 

Elizabeth: But again, that skill set that you don’t have to know all the answers. You just have to know about going about how to get to a answer, which is again, it’s project management, it’s soft skills, it’s your education and it’s having that courage to get out of the box of this is how we’ve always done it.

Hilary: Yeah, agreed. It’s been so much fun to have you on the podcast today. And I wish we had more conversations like this. I’m so thrilled that we have a platform like a podcast to be able to have these conversations because they need to be had in order for us to propel the career forward. And so thank you for everything that you shared for your authenticity, for your transparency, and for everything that you’re doing in EHS. 

Elizabeth: Thank you Hilary, it was great to be here. So honored to be a part of your podcast. It’s a fantastic podcast and I hope somebody somewhere got something out.

But again, if there’s continued conversations. I’d love to be a part of it. 

Hilary: Absolutely. I’ll take even just one change. That’s my goal. Even if it just changes one person’s frame of mind, it’s worth the time and effort. So thank you again. And bye bye, listeners. We’ll see you next time.