The Leader’s Values and Emotional Commitment to Safety

An Excerpt from Leading with Safety

The word “value” expresses the notion of worth or desirability. There are two categories of value: intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic values have worth for their own sake; they are ends in themselves and have ethical import because they characterize what we think people should be pursuing. Extrinsic values, on the other hand, have worth only as a means to an end and their import is in their utility.

Getting promoted, having personal power, and acquiring prestige are good examples of extrinsic values. Job titles, power, and prestige are all rightly regarded as having worth because they are useful. Human life, ethics, a sense of duty or stewardship, and the well-being of the individual are examples of intrinsic values. They are valuable in themselves, not because of their utility. One can’t say that a person has an ethical obligation to becoming powerful, but one can say that people should value human life and well-being.

The worth of extrinsic values is derivative. They get their worth because of their power to further intrinsic values. For example, the reason money is valuable is because it can further one’s happiness and well-being.

A good leader is sensitive to extrinsic values. This is how he or she keeps an organization focused and working to achieve its proper end – attaining objectives and maximizing the bottom line. Additionally, a great safety leader is also sensitive to intrinsic values. He or she believes in and is deeply committed to the worth of the individual. This belief is deeply felt as an emotional commitment to the health and safety of each individual employee.

One senior leader of a 25,000-employee manufacturing organization described those feelings this way: “When I was a Vice President of Operations, my children were college-aged and living away from home. When the phone would ring unexpectedly, sometimes in the early morning hours, the first thing I thought of was them. Were they okay, or was there a problem prompting the unexpected phone call? Fortunately, I’ve never had a call that told me my children had been harmed. But I have had phone calls saying that our employees have been harmed. And I think about it the same way each time I get one of those phone calls. We are a family here in this organization, and my commitment to our employees is like my commitment to my family members.”

A great safety leader can have this kind of emotional commitment because they don’t relate to the organization’s employees as merely a resource or as an anonymous group. If the company is large, a senior leader can’t know
every employee individually, but is acutely aware that every one of them is an individual human being like themselves who experiences life as intrinsically valuable and has sufficient empathy to respect that fact.

Being an effective safety leader takes something over and above what it takes to be a good leader generally, and it is this awareness and feeling, this emotional commitment that makes the difference. It requires a significant degree of empathy, compassion, and maturity. These qualities are available to all leaders, but they must be cultivated and nurtured. Most people possess such qualities, but many don’t know how to allow them to interact effectively with their business leadership roles and personas – allowing these qualities to be influential to the right degree and visible to the right extent.

Why is this important? Why is it worth the effort? Because what we value is what we strive to achieve, and a leader’s values color and shape the direction set for the organization. The leader’s values play out in the culture he or she creates. For example, if a leader relentlessly and exclusively pursues extrinsic values (or even if that is just how employees perceive it), an organizational culture may be inadvertently created in which employees cut corners in the name of production or profitability. At the very least, a culture is created in which employees are not taken care of properly and the organization’s safety performance plateaus, allowing serious injuries and fatalities to continue.

Intrinsic values serve as a kind of behavioral and cultural insurance policy both for the organization and the individual employee. They are a boundary that keeps both out of trouble, but there is more to it. Because extrinsic values derive their worth from their relation to intrinsic values, a leader’s neglect of those values ultimately disconnects employee behavior from its motivational source. People don’t want to work just for the money, they want to work at something they value doing. If a leader neglects intrinsic values, or worse, creates a conflict between extrinsic and intrinsic values, employee morale and motivation suffer. Conversely, if a leader calls upon employees’ intrinsic values, greater engagement will result.

So, it’s important for a leader to understand what they really value. Compassion for others is a basic core emotion found in almost all of us, but the pressures and frustrations of day-to-day organizational life may drown it out. For some leaders this critically important compassion comes naturally and for others it doesn’t. In the latter case, it’s the job of the senior-most leader in the organization to awaken it in others.

Knowing what we really value, and really valuing safety, is necessary but not sufficient to create effective safety leadership. It is also true of human nature that we often do not see ourselves as others see us. You may feel that you are a compassionate individual who values your fellow employees – and you may really be that kind of person – but others don’t judge you according to how you feel about yourself, or even by your intentions. You are judged by your behaviors, the visible things you do and say, the decisions you make, and the way you communicate, or fail to communicate about them.