What safety leadership attributes matter most?
A few years ago we were working with a VP of Operations at a mid-sized oil and gas company. The VP was well intended, and he sincerely wanted to show his commitment to safety. However, the entirety of his safety leadership plan was to send a message out to all his employees every two weeks. In each message, he’d tell a story about an incident he’d heard about, and the moral of the story was a Hill-Street-Blues-esque, “Let’s be careful out there.” He believed that if people were aware of the risks they were facing, that then they would protect themselves. He believed that safety was mainly a matter of using common sense. He believed raising awareness was the most powerful thing he could do to help his group improve in safety.
Now this executive was not stupid. He was a man we knew to be of high integrity and intelligence. He had come up through his organization without operations experience, and he was simply uninformed—severely—about how safety works. We thought about what we might say that would be helpful to him. This is the predicament many safety professionals are in.
Awareness of risk is important in safety. But it is a small piece in a complex puzzle. To make the workplace safer, you actually have to make the workplace safer. Getting new awareness will help for a short time, but an awareness campaign that ignores the state of the workplace ultimately does more harm than good. It contributes to a culture of cynicism, which is not uncommon in the workplace today. Workers think: “I’m supposed to ‘be more aware,’ and they ask me to work in an environment that is obviously unsafe. I turn in problems and never hear back. Then we have a safety contest.”
We have observed that organizations that think awareness alone is enough to improve safety often try to achieve those gains through incentives. Let’s be clear: Making financial reward contingent on safety results is almost always a mistake. It sends the wrong message, fails to address the real issues, and causes the culture to deteriorate. When you make pay contingent on safety outcomes, without ensuring healthy systems, processes, tools, practices, and leadership necessary to drive those outcomes, then you’re basically relying on awareness of the importance of safety to drive results. You’re hoping that if people are aware that safety is part of their job, and worth paying for, then they can and will do all the right things to avoid getting hurt. All that awareness still needs support and action to make a safer workplace.
This is an excerpt from Tom and Kristen’s latest book, 7 Insights into Safety Leadership
Postscript: This may seem obvious to some, but it matters what the “support and action” looks like. What senior leader actions are most effective? What senior leader actions are least beneficial, or ineffective? We would like to pose these questions to you. In your experience, what specific actions have senior leaders taken in your organization that have actually made the workplace safer? What well-intended, but ineffective, actions have you seen? Please comment below.
To TRK: I’m not a fan of “mindfulness” which seems to be a very popular topic these days. I believe there is an opportunity to help people recognize the limitations of mindfulness-based approaches to performance improvement. I also think, given the popularity of the topic, addressing mindfulness in some manner – either embracing the positive or pointing out the limitations, will increase readership. This is a topic that is ripe for thought leadership. Let’s push into the therapeutic realm where it belongs.
Regards,
Tom Oyan
Tom, very nice to hear from you and thanks for this thoughtful observation. In my view it is a bit of a dilemma. On the one hand, as we both agree, awareness is a necessary but not sufficient element for safety excellence. And it is very often over-rated, often thought of as the end point rather than the beginning point.
At the same time there are safety issues these days with a variety of important distractions. Texting while driving, talking on the phone while driving, spending days of work in which the individuals attention is divided across tasks; these are new issues introduced by technology that affect the quality of our work and of our lives. We see the effects in the recent national increase in automobile accident fatalities. And there is data suggesting that younger people tend in this direction more than more mature people. Self driving cars make the issue even more important.
For our work in organizational safety it seems to me we have to take on two messages: 1)awareness isn’t the end point generally, and 2) divided attention tasks in the workplace are hazardous.
Thanks again for your comment, and lets stay in touch.
Tom
Thank you Tom for another thought-provoking article. To my mind, the encouragement and practice of mindfulness, or being in the moment, IS an effective strategy for managing our tendency toward cognitive drift to the unconscious mind where we’re most comfortable. The practice of being mindful HAS to start with a conscious decision to attend to the moment. I think that positioning sets the stage for creating safety and resilience in ways that simple awareness can’t. Awareness reminds me of the conundrum my cognitive psychology professor used to introduce our subject, “This course will be the only one you take that forces you to use the organ being studied to learn how that same organ works.” At the exposure level, I believe mindfulness better supports the ability to create and maintain a safe worksite.
Thanks again to you and the providers of the thoughtful responses for another great discussion.
In response to “What senior leader action are most effective”? Instead of safety/compliance think “Risk Management.” Compliance is often the most basic place to start working on safety. Compliance does not equal safety. As an example the Titanic had more lifeboat capacity than the rules at the time dictated, yet as history teaches us this was not enough for the disaster they met. So while compliance is important, time and energy into risk management in my mind is of more value.
Tom,
Thanks for the article sharing. All you’ve written in this article is correct——-Awareness is not everything. But I believe it’ll be a “vice versa” for anything else. I don’t see a safe workplace itself is enough for injuries prevention either without safety awareness. Just like american football, with all those personal protection gears, it somehow encourages the players to take risky and reckless moves even more, and causes serious injuries.
On the other hand, in some industries, there are some workplace just won’t be perfectly safe for many reasons, that’s where awareness or mindfulness shall always be raised and emphasized.
Regards,
Li Jun
Excellent article on the need for meaningful Safety Leadership at the corporate level! Over the years, hourly and salaried employees see and hear a lot of comments from management that “Safety is the #1 Goal” for the organization. Perhaps this is true in the hearts of the management team but in order to be a Leader, you’ve got to go beyond the rhetoric and develop/implement actions that will have a significant impact on preventing the next injury. Great job on this article, keep up the good work!