The Relationship Factor in Safety Leadership

Achieving Success through Employee Engagement

Rosa Antonia Carrillo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429614200
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Business allgemein

At the core of The Relationship Factor in Safety Leadership are eight beliefs about human nature that are common to leaders who successfully communicate that safety is important while meeting business results. Using stories and business language the book explains how to create and recover important stakeholder relationships by setting priorities and taking action based on these beliefs.

The beliefs are based on the author's 25 years of experience supporting operational and safety leaders with successful and unsuccessful change efforts in pharmaceutical, nuclear, mining, manufacturing and power generation. The author also offers compelling evidence from many social and scientific disciplines that support the conclusion that satisfying our need for relationship is a major motivator.

The Five Orientations Model offers a perspective on solving complex problems when confronted with multiple demands. The book provides managers and supervisors with the motivation to build relationships and points to the conditions needed for success. It also describes a process to take united action but retain the flexibility to change course as necessary.

The book is written for managers and leaders, at all levels, concerned with occupational health and safety, and wishing to learn how to leverage relationships to achieve higher employee engagement and performance.

1 Making the case for Relationship Centered Safety Leadership

Relationship Centered Leadership (RCL) is a strategy that enables the full commitment and engagement of employees to work together towards excellence in safety performance. Many leaders sense the need for this approach. A company’s safety record as well as protecting the environment and the community has become a determining competitive factor. Yet, the traditional safety management activities are not meeting the demands for improvement (Deloitte, 2009).

The principles of RCL have the potential to exponentially improve organizational performance. They focus on developing a leader’s ability to engender employee engagement by developing his or her ability to build relationships. This ability is both a set of skills and a set of beliefs about what works to get the best results.

Leaders act from their beliefs about human nature. Beliefs create thoughts and thought informs action. A belief is not a passive thing like a value. Values can be espoused, but not practiced. Beliefs are so deep that you sometimes don’t even know they are influencing your decisions. It is not a matter of having faith that something is true; it is knowing that it is true. Our understanding of the nature of relationship and how it affects safety performance could be the defining factor between success and failure. The eight beliefs of RCL reflect what successful leaders believe they know about people. These concepts are philosophical, but also based on research in cognitive psychology as captured by Argyris’ Ladder of Inference (see Chapter Two).

There is a growing body of research showing that employee engagement is essential to successful organizational performance (Saks and Gruman, 2014; Saks, 2006). A large part of that engagement depends on the quality of relationships that employees experience. So, a leader’s effectiveness is impacted by his or her ability to build both personal relationships and enable collaborative team member connections.

The need for belonging and identification with relationships is so strong that people will adopt common attitudes and expectations to belong. The research presented here shows that individuals are so concerned with belonging that they view each interaction as a risk. These hidden emotions and feelings undermine our ability to communicate and maintain trusting relationships. These dynamics make the case for working at the group or relationship level rather than the individual if you want organizational change. The individual is not separate from the group. These findings and implications come from the research of thought leaders in psychology, sociology, organizational psychology, complex responsive processes, relational leadership and neuroscience. All of which I have found validated by my 25 years of experience and related in the stories I recorded in this book.

In spite of the overwhelming evidence that could make building relationships the most important leadership skill, a widely recognized study found that out of 60,000 leaders less than 5% excel at both achieving important results and building social relationships (Lieberman, 2013). So once you read about what worked or didn’t work for other leaders you are faced with a decision. Shall I experiment with the eight beliefs to build vital relationships? Shall I find out what could work for me? Or shall I dismiss these ideas as simple coincidence; a flight of fancy created by an individual who wished to see a pattern and connection but has no definitive proof? I can understand either approach, but if you are impatient or frustrated with the results you are currently getting then you might want to take a small risk and experiment with building the trust and empowerment expressed in the eight beliefs.

Someone who did was Bernie Mattimore, a maintenance director at Lawrence Livermore Labs. He had been frustrated for months because employees kept removing the equipment guards. My team had shared some ideas about employee engagement with him, so, one day he called a crew together and said, “You all decide how these guards should work. Here’s a budget. Let me know if you need more money.” As Bernie related it to us within a month the guards were up, everyone respected them and the crew came in under budget. This happened many times over the years in different companies and industries, eventually leading to the development of RCL and the eight beliefs.

The word relationship can bring up immediate resistance in the workplace. Many consider it an irrelevant subject that detracts from getting the work done. They often ask, what about the employee’s responsibility? This book focuses on the leader’s responsibility because, no matter how flat an organization is, there is still a hierarchy in social relationships. Power relations define what is appropriate interaction—who can disagree or initiate a relationship? Even if you do not consider yourself in a power role, others view you that way if you have a title. They behave accordingly unless you go through specific and consistent effort to build a relationship.

Building a relationship-centered organization or safety program does not mean that the only thing needed to be successful is good relationships. It is the foundation. It is what we have been calling the culture that provides the nourishment that your vision, initiatives, processes and goals need to become a reality.

There will be setbacks and disappointments because of unexpected challenges. Some people will not want to change the way they operate for reasons beyond your control. To meet the challenge each leader must decide if RCL is the right path or if living from a different set of beliefs will serve them best.

The influence of relationship on organizational performance is difficult to measure empirically. However, consistent stories that point to consistent results are valid forms of proof when dealing with dynamics not fully understood. The nature of human relationships is one of them, and the narrative from successful leaders in safety consistently points out that positive relationships and meeting the emotional needs of employees is essential to the well-being of organizations.

Let’s begin with one of the most difficult and successful turnarounds that convinced managers to take on the belief that people are different from machines and to form positive relations with them.

The Millstone Nuclear Power plant where John Carroll (et al., 2002) participated in culture change activities reported this story of how managers changed their belief system. The work consisted of daily conversations and educational sessions that eventually led to success. It began when a Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) review concluded there was an unhealthy work environment, which did not tolerate dissenting views and stifled questioning attitudes among employees. The NRC took the unprecedented step of closing the plant until management could show a shift in climate.

The changes needed were to convince employees to believe that managers could be trusted to listen to their concerns and to take appropriate action. The managers had to believe that “employees were worth listening to and worthy of respect…the underlying values had to change from control to openness and trust” (Carroll et al., 2002, p. 114). It took more than three years to shift the culture, but in June 1998 the regulators certified the first unit back on line.

The cultural change required was at the deepest levels. Some of the initiatives included extensive new training programs and coaching. Individual managers experienced personal transformations through exposure to the principles of emotional intelligence. They learned new skills, including sensitivity to their own and others’ emotions and perceptions. Managers learned to respond differently to employees who were afraid of reprisals for speaking up and to those who simply lacked confidence that management would take effective action.

CEO Bruce Kenyon met regularly with small work groups and in large all-hands meetings to give and receive information. An employee concerns program was initiated where employees argued passionately with each other and with management. Over time they were able to communicate and reach a common understanding of the issues and corrective actions. Kenyon publicly admitted some errors and reversed some decisions allowing others to see that mistakes were part of the process but could be corrected.

The belief that people are different from machines took hold. As managers acknowledged the importance of feelings and emotions and maintained an open expression of trust to differing points of view, it allowed for discussion of the human side of organization. This challenged assumptions about human nature and rationality. Trained in a strictly rational approach to problem solving, it was difficult for them to accept that the way they made people feel impacted organizational performance. Of course, many Millstone managers were uncomfortable and initially incompetent in this domain, but the crisis allowed for the openness to viewing relationships and working in new ways because it was painfully obvious that their previous approach had failed.

Many new mechanisms and venues for communication were created. Over time, managers and employees learned by doing and through feedback from colleagues and coaches. This approach resulted in a new culture with higher levels of trust and open communication.

As long as executives, managers and safety professionals fail to adequately address the relational side of organizations they will not effectively engage employees in a mutual commitment to action. Successful leaders do not produce results in isolation. They create powerful generative relationships with people because they are aware of their interconnectedness with others, and consciously develop those connections to achieve objectives.

I acknowledge that even when leaders believe in its importance, cultural and political obstacles could block the implementation of a relationship-centered approach. The RCL model described next is designed to help navigate these obstacles in a way that gains political support and maintains alignment with your values.

RCL: A strategy for employee engagement

RCL is a strategy to achieve operational excellence in safety performance through full employee engagement. Each of the elements is designed to influence decisions and resource allocation towards building the relationships that support safety as a common purpose. The benefit of these elements is in no way limited to safety but extends to every aspect of organizational performance. This book will, however, principally focus on safety impacts.

The definition of employee engagement used for this model integrates Kahn’s theory of engagement and the Job Demands–Resources (JD-R) model (Saks and Gruman, 2014). While Kahn wrote about engagement as employees expressing their full selves in their work, the JD-R model looks at engagement as a response to the balance or imbalance between demands on the individual and the resources he or she has to deal with those demands. Therefore, the RCL strategy is designed to help the leader maintain engagement by identifying and providing the resources employees see as needed to do the work safely, and creating the inclusive environment where people can bring their whole self to work. Developing trust and relationships is the foundation of this strategy.

Redefining relationship

To accept that relationship is at the center of organizational effectiveness, we have to see it through new eyes.

We usually think of relationship as interpersonal between two or more people ranging from casual to intimate. In the workplace, leaders may feel restricted in the kinds of relationships they may develop to protect themselves from the perception of unfairness or favoritism. I have had workshop participants express fear that relationship is too personal; they feel it necessary to keep their personal and professional lives separate. Edgar Schein (Schein and Schein, 2018), who has been a significant contributor to helping us understand how a leader’s behavior affects the people in organizations, has suggested that until leaders treat relationship as personal the trusting relationships needed for top performance will be missing.

In the RCL strategy relationship is defined as a biological, mental and emotional connection shared by humans for the purpose of mutual support in adaptation and ultimately survival. This definition is based on research in the areas of neuroscience, psychology and sociology that expands the definition of how we usually think of relationship and its purpose. Scientists found evidence through long-term studies that close relationships actually predict longevity and health (Archie et al., 2014; House et al., 1988) They also found that our need to connect with other people is even more fundamental, more basic, than our need for food or shelter (Lieberman, 2013; Cozolino, 2014).

Relationship is not only a social connection that exists between people who know each other or have frequent interaction. It is also a physical phenomenon. Connections, felt as emotions between people who may or may not be present, are triggered by biological mechanisms in the brain (Cacioppo et al., 2000). Daniel Goleman (2006) describes these connections as a “neural ballet” that connects us brain to brain. We may not be aware but our encounters with employees, bosses and even strangers shape our brains and affect our bodies in positive and negative ways. Those in a position of authority have greater impact.

The evidence presented by neuroscience may help to persuade leaders on the importa...