Personality and role

Oddly enough, personality issues can be paramount in a safety engineer. They must be personally pleasant, intelligent, and ruthless with themselves and their organization. In particular, they have to be able to "sell" the failures that they discover, as well as the attendant expense and time needed to correct them. They can be the messengers of bad news.

Safety engineers have to be ruthless about getting facts from other engineers. It is common for a safety engineer to consider software, chemical, electronic, eletrical, mechanical, procedural, and training problems in the same day. Often the facts can be very uncomfortable.

Teamwork

It is important to make the safety engineers part of a team, so that safety problems cannot be discounted as due to the safety engineers' personality problems or ignored by firing a single engineer.

It is a severe safety problem if an engineering team or management discredits a safety engineer: either the manager appointed a poor engineer to the position, indicating that there may be numerous undiscovered safety issues, or the team has inverted development priorities and considers safety to be less important than upper management or government does.