The Chess Bishop
On influence without authority, and the diagonal career of the safety practitioner.
When I teach safety leadership, I sometimes ask the room a question that produces a long silence. "On the org chart in your organization, who reports to you?" Hands go up. Numbers get called out. Some practitioners have teams of forty. Some have teams of two. Some are individual contributors with no direct reports at all. I write the numbers on the whiteboard, look at the room, and ask the second question. "And whose work do you actually influence?"
The answers change shape. The number gets larger. Sometimes much larger. The general manager. The plant managers. The operations leaders. The supervisors. The frontline crews. Procurement. Maintenance. Corporate communications. HR partners. Legal. Vendors. Contractors. The board, on occasion. The practitioner who walked in believing they led a team of three walks out realizing they influence the work of hundreds, sometimes thousands.
This gap — between what you formally control and what you actually influence — is the defining structural feature of the safety practitioner's career. It is also, I would argue, what makes the work both difficult and uniquely powerful. The leadership literature has been writing about it for decades. Allan Cohen and David Bradford named the territory in their 1989 book Influence Without Authority and developed it more fully in the 2005 edition: "In organizations today, getting work done requires political and collaborative skills." Their core insight was that authority can be problematic on its own — it does not guarantee commitment, and it can motivate people to act for the wrong reasons. The real work of influence is exchanging value, not invoking position.
Cohen and Bradford's framework is good. It is not, in my view, quite enough. The image I have found most useful for describing how a safety practitioner should actually operate inside that gap comes from a chessboard.
Consider the bishop. On a chessboard, every piece has a movement pattern that defines its power. The rook moves in straight lines across ranks and files — direct, forceful, easy to anticipate. The knight moves in L-shapes, jumping over other pieces, capable of unexpected angles but limited in range. The queen combines straight and diagonal movement, dominant in nearly every dimension. And then there is the bishop, which moves only diagonally — never straight, never sideways, always at angles.
The bishop is, on the surface, a strange piece. It can only access half the squares on the board. It is constrained in ways the queen is not. New players tend to undervalue it. But experienced players understand something about the bishop that does not become obvious until you have played a few hundred games. The bishop's diagonal movement is the most effective way to reach territory that direct movement cannot touch. While the rook is constrained by the file in front of it, the bishop is already cutting across the board on lines the rook will never travel. A well-placed bishop, deep in the opponent's position, can shape an entire game without ever moving in a straight line.
This is the safety practitioner's career. Not the rook's direct authority. Not the queen's combined power. The bishop's diagonal influence — reaching across the organization on lines that bypass the formal hierarchy entirely.
Once I started thinking of the role this way, a lot of things in my own experience made sense for the first time.
I have spent most of my career as the safety leader inside organizations where the people whose decisions most affected safety outcomes did not report to me. Operations did not report to me. Engineering did not report to me. HR did not report to me. Procurement, which often selects the contractors who do the most dangerous work in any facility, did not report to me. Senior executives, whose tolerance for risk shapes the entire system, did not report to me. And yet the safety performance of every one of these functions was, in real terms, the result of choices they made.
Trying to influence those choices like a rook — straight lines, formal authority, escalation up the chain — almost never worked, and when it worked, it produced compliance rather than commitment. The decisions got made the way I wanted them made, and the next decision, six weeks later, went the other way. The straight-line approach also burned political capital that I needed for the moments when escalation was the only option.
What worked was diagonal. It was building real relationships with the people whose decisions mattered, before I needed anything from them. It was being useful to operations leaders on problems that were not strictly safety. It was speaking the language of finance when sitting across from finance, the language of operations when sitting across from operations, the language of HR when sitting across from HR. It was knowing the engineering enough to be a credible voice in design conversations, knowing the contracts enough to shape procurement decisions, knowing the business deeply enough to be sought out for counsel rather than tolerated as a constraint.
Cohen and Bradford would call this currency exchange. They identified five categories of organizational currency — inspiration, task-related, position-related, relationship, and personal — that flow between people who do not share a reporting line. The practitioner who understands what each potential partner values, and who has invested in the relationship before needing the exchange, can move resources, attention, and decisions in ways that the org chart alone would never permit. That framework is sound. The chess metaphor adds something to it: the angles you can reach are determined by where you started the game and how early you developed your lines. A bishop developed late in the game is rarely decisive. A bishop developed early shapes everything that follows.
There are three implications of the bishop model that I think safety practitioners — especially those earlier in their careers — should think hard about.
The first is that your effectiveness will be determined more by the breadth and depth of your relationships than by the size of your team. A practitioner with three direct reports and trusted relationships across operations, engineering, HR, finance, and the executive team will produce more durable safety outcomes than one with twenty direct reports and no diagonal lines. The org chart is the wrong instrument for measuring your power. Map your relationships instead.
The second is that you have to invest in being credible outside your specialty. The bishop's power is the line that reaches across the board. The safety practitioner's power is the ability to speak credibly in rooms where safety is not the primary topic. That requires reading widely, understanding the business deeply, and being willing to participate in conversations that are not yours to lead. Many practitioners refuse this work and then wonder why they are not at the table when important decisions are made.
The third is that diagonal influence has to be replenished. Relationships decay. People move. New leaders arrive with no history of working with you. The bishop's diagonal is not a fixed asset. It is a discipline you maintain. The safety practitioners who do this well are constantly investing in new relationships, even when they do not yet know what they will need from them. They are playing the long game.
There is one more thing about the bishop that I think about often. On a chessboard, the bishop does not win the game alone. It works in combination with the other pieces — the rook's straight authority, the knight's unexpected angles, the queen's dominance, the king's strategic placement. The bishop's contribution is not to replace those pieces. It is to do what only the bishop can do.
Your job, as a safety practitioner, is not to be the CEO or the operations leader or the engineering chief. It is to be the bishop. To reach the squares no one else can reach. To shape the game from diagonal lines. To make the work safer not by commanding it but by being trusted, useful, credible, and present across every function whose decisions affect the worker on the floor.
The diagonal is the work. Play it well.
Sources & Further Reading
• Cohen, A. R. & Bradford, D. L. (2005). Influence Without Authority (2nd ed.). Wiley.
• Cialdini, R. (1984). Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.
• Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional Intelligence.
