Karoly Ban Matei's Linkedin Analytics

 Long before I started a career in occupational health and safety I was already neck-deep into safety. I was practicing, and often introducing my friends to parachuting, climbing, spelunking, helping everybody have fun and stay safe. None of us ever got hurt, though we had some near misses! Climbing out of a cave shaft using my shoe strings as rope grabs was not an easy feat! When I formally started my first health and safety position, I was still a fresh immigrant to Canada with an economics degree, thinking this was supposed to be a short time gig, until a more suitable “safety guy” would be found. Eventually, it turned out, my analytical personality was a good match for safety and I was the right guy. For a while I suffered from the “impostor syndrome”, and training was my response to that. I started with generic safety courses, the NCSO, then CRSP and eventually completed my diploma in health and safety. School and practical experience led me to believe that safety does not live in isolation and that it is a symptom of the whole organization's performance. I learned that while there are the occasional personal errors, most often than not, the causes of unwanted events were systemic, outside of the employee control, and totally within the organization’s control. From here it was only a step to leading multidisciplinary groups (HSE, HR, Operations, QAQC, transportation, etc) that addressed inter-departmental issues, which, in turn, improved the organizational culture and the safety performance. My background in microeconomics and an MBA trained me to better understand and integrate these departments, while good communication and the ability to convey "what's in it for me" to all levels help me get the buy-in. Every single company that hired me wanted me to help them change their culture, which is the most radical form of organizational change. I believe that to be seldom necessary and, most often than not, the organization needs to become a learning organization – we need to unearth and accept our past, which we often have a deformed view of it, in order to be able to create a realistic vision of the future and put together a plan to bridge this gap. These learnings and experiences made me who I am – an analytical and relational multi-tool for fixing systemic organizational issues, which, non-incidentally, also improve organizational safety performance. More about me: https://banmatei.wixsite.com/kbm-profile