There is a generally-held belief that management is exempt from exposure to hazards. That’s so if we’re considering the toxic and flamable hazards to which the plant operators are exposed - - - the manager level in those and many other, if not all, industries does not experience work-related hazards.

Or do they? There have been incidents in which office buildings, expected to be safe from plant events, have been damaged, from which we must deduce that someone at the staff/manager/executive level in a firm could be involved in results of a plant-level disaster-event.

Are there hazards inherent in what a manager does, day by day? A manager plans, organises, leads, and controls, with decision-making central to those functions, from which the major hazard a manager faces is making a mistake in one of those actions. A mistake in one can begin an avalanche through the others. They may be active, or passive, or by neglect, or the result of something done by a subordinate person to whom work was delegated, and whose manager must stop the buck when it reaches him or her. All that can lead to a conclusion that managers can be both exposed to hazards and cause hazards to exist, the latter leading to a failure of process safety..

The paper based on this abstract will work through the possible styles of mistakes, with what’s in the literature, and examples from local and international industry, the results, and what needs to be done to prevent them.