At a recent Electrical Safety and Operational Reliability Conference in Chantilly, Virginia, a simple question sparked a flood of wisdom: What advice would you give to young safety and reliability professionals who are just starting out?

The answers came from across the spectrum of engineers, consultants, managers, and maintenance leaders, and they all seemed to point in the same direction. Success in this field, they said, isn’t built on technology alone. It’s built on character.

Across every conversation, the message echoed loud and clear: reliability isn’t just about sensors, data, and digital transformation. It’s about the people who make systems work and how they carry themselves while doing it.

Back to Basics
“Don’t forget the basics,” said Bridgette Douglas, HSE Director at CBRE. “We all want to jump to AI and great tools, but unless we master those basics, like planning and progress, then we can’t move on to those advanced tools.”
This cuts through the noise of an industry increasingly enamored with analytics and automation. The fundamentals, like good documentation, consistent procedures, and disciplined follow-through, still form the foundation of every successful reliability program. Tools may change, but the principles do not.
Reliability, after all, is built one decision at a time. When those decisions are grounded in process, the technology becomes an amplifier instead of a crutch.

A Mindset of Curiosity
That commitment to the basics goes hand in hand with curiosity, the kind that fuels lifelong learning. Jesse Saastamoinen of Arqtec Relays put it simply: “Never stop learning. Try to deeply understand whatever you’re working with. Knowledge is never out of fashion.”

The reliability profession rewards those who ask questions, not just about equipment failures, but about systems, people, and patterns. The curiosity that drives a young engineer to trace a fault line in a circuit diagram is the same curiosity that, years later, drives a plant manager to ask why a program failed to take root. It’s not about knowing everything. It’s about wanting to understand more today than you did yesterday.

Humility Is a Superpower
In a culture that often equates expertise with authority, several veterans argued for humility as the real measure of strength. “You need to remember that nobody knows it all,” said leadership and safety consultant Karl DeLooff. “But you have an advantage. You’re new. You can ask questions, you can learn with humility, and you can ask the questions that you’re going to learn from, and then also help the more senior personnel to realize what the limits of their knowledge actually are.”
Humility, he suggested, isn’t weakness. It’s an invitation. When younger professional ask questions without fear of judgment, they open doors that arrogance would otherwise close.

Sales manager Dan Black agreed: “Know the right channels so when you get more experience inside the field, you know where to reach out if you need some help or some additional support. [Don’t be] afraid to say, I don’t know, I don’t understand. For Mike Doolan, Global Technical and Reliability Director for CBRE, the idea was even simpler: “I think just being honest with yourself and know your limitations and be willing to ask questions.” The equipment doesn’t care how much you pretend to know. It responds only to competence. Owning your blind spots is the first step toward eliminating them.

Building the Network Before You Need It
For many veterans, success in reliability has as much to do with relationships as with technology.
Lee McClish of NTT Global Data Centers reflected on what he wished he’d done earlier in his career: “I wish I had started 30 years ago and going to conferences more and networking. There’s a lot of people at those conferences who are out there in the field, they’re experiencing the same problems that you could be, and you get a network, and you can reach back to them to help you in real day-to-day problems that you’re experiencing and need to tackle.” Networking, in this sense, isn’t about business cards or LinkedIn connections. It’s about building a community of shared experience. The reliability field is full of people who have solved the same problems you’re struggling with. The difference between isolation and insight often comes down to who you can call.

And as James Braker of Electrical Reliability Services LLC reminded us, relationships aren’t just external. They’re internal too. “When you find a company, you want to grow with that company and you want to stay with that company and try to grow as long as you can with your career. And I see a lot of young professionals kind of jumping from company to company. I think that if you grow with a company, you’re going to gain the technical experience to have a really long career.”
In a world that glorifies constant motion, his advice was a quiet argument for depth over breadth, for staying long enough to learn the real rhythms of an

organization, not just its processes.

The Hard Lesson of Documentation
A few voices spoke up for an often-overlooked pillar of reliability: documentation. Daniel Furbush, the Co-Founder, President, and CEO of autoLOTO, put it bluntly: “Document your building. Do not lapse on the documentation of how we maintain it… you just get to the point where you’re operating strictly on tribal knowledge or you’re just straight operating at risk. And that’s because we just did a really poor job of documenting all of these changes in these buildings over the years.” It’s not glamorous work, but it’s the kind that makes the difference between resilience and chaos. When procedures, changes, and lessons learned live only in someone’s head, they die when that person retires. Documentation is what keeps knowledge alive and keeps teams from relearning the same hard lessons over and over again.

Safety Beyond Compliance
In a conference devoted to electrical safety, the discussion inevitably turned toward standards and regulations. But one of the most respected voices in the room, Lanny Floyd, offered a warning against complacency: “The belief is that if you achieve compliance with those regulations and standards, then you have achieved the level of safety that you want. That may not be true. The regulations and standards are tremendously powerful to help reduce injuries, accidents, and mishaps, fatalities, but there’s always residual risk.” Compliance is the floor, not the ceiling. The best organizations understand that safety and reliability are living systems that evolve faster than the codes that govern them.

The Human Connection
Reliability is, at its core, a human discipline. “You’re probably not the smartest person in the room,” said Brett Schwartz. “There’s going to be someone who has more experience in some different subject matter and you’ve got to take that person’s information and you’ve got to be able to absorb it and then teach it to someone who may just be straight out of high school or maybe hasn’t graduated high school. And then whatever initiatives you’re trying to move forward with, you have to get the people with high experience and the people with no experience to walk that same path with the same goal in mind.”
That’s leadership in its purest form: connecting people across experience levels, building trust, and aligning purpose. Technology can capture data, but only people can build culture. As Bridgette Douglas reminded us at the start, it all comes back to mastering the human connection.

The Thread That Ties It Together
Every one of these voices carried the same undercurrent: be the kind of person others trust when things go wrong. Reliability isn’t a single skill; it’s a posture, a way of showing up. It’s patience under pressure, curiosity in the face of the unknown, and humility when experience falls short. For anyone stepping into the world of safety and reliability, the advice is simple and timeless: stay curious, stay humble, and never stop building connections. These lessons, gathered from the field, the shop floor, and decades of lived experience, remind us that while technology may define the tools of reliability, character defines its success.

To hear these experts’ voices in their own words, watch the full RED Talks compilation video at redtalk.com