Next Generation Safety Leadership

From Compliance to Care

Clive Lloyd

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000192728
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Tecnologia e ingegneria
• Subtopic: Salute e sicurezza sul lavoro

Next Generation Safety Leadership illustrates practical applications that bring theory to life through case studies and stories from the author's years of experience in high-risk industries. The book provides safety leaders and their organisations with a compelling case for change. A key predictor of safety performance is trust, and its associated components of integrity, ability and benevolence (care). The next generation of safety leaders will take the profession forward by creating trust and psychological safety. The book provides safety leaders with actionable goals to enable positive change and translates academic languages into practical applications. It leaves the reader with a clear strategy to move forward in developing a safety plan and utilizes stories, humor, and case studies set in high-risk industries. Written primarily for the safety community and can be used to influence day to day safety operations in high-risk organisations.

PART 1

1
Trust

The Currency of Leadership

Trust arrives on foot but leaves on horseback

– Dutch Proverb

When we’re facilitating workshops for teams, we request (whenever possible) that a senior leader opens up the day. This shows that the leadership team is committed to and invested in the change process. Similarly, we ask that, whenever possible, a senior leader comes in at the end of the session to close out and perhaps take a few questions from the group based on topics that may have arisen during the workshop.

This approach generally works very well, however, not always!

In a recent session at a mine site, a Safety Superintendent, ‘Greg,’ opened the session and did a great job. Greg had already been through the program and was looking forward to his team gaining similar insights. He thanked everyone for their attendance and suggested the training was part of the company’s journey toward doing Safety Differently.

The session went well, and the group was animated, curious and candid throughout the day. They came up with many action items for themselves and a few probing questions to ask Greg when he returned to close out the session. Except it wasn’t Greg who came (he was otherwise occupied) – it was the HSE Manager – ‘Nigel.’ I had not met Nigel prior to this point as he had been on long service leave and, hence, had not participated in the program. He began, not by enquiring about the group’s experience of the day, but by saying the following (and this is pretty much verbatim).

So, I hope you got a lot out of the group – this guy is not cheap! I’m looking forward to seeing our incident numbers coming down. I hope you now see the importance of complying with the safety ‘golden rules’ and why I have a zero tolerance for rule violations. So, are there any questions for me?

Despite the fact that there was a list of questions on flip chart paper very close to where Nigel was standing, nobody in the group asked him anything. Some participants were looking down at the table; others were looking at me – nobody was looking at Nigel! His final offering was, “Gee Clive, tough crowd! Looks like you’ve bored them stupid!”

Suppressing and editing the unsavory words that first came to my mind, I thanked Nigel for stepping in for Greg and let him know the group and I still had a few things to discuss before wrapping up. I added that I’d come over and chat with him later (which I did, and the ‘chat’ quickly morphed into a much-needed coaching session!).

Inadvertently, what Nigel had done in those few, excruciating minutes was essentially to undermine any fleeting hope the attendees may have once possessed that anything was about to change in terms of the team culture. He had raised the fear level about speaking up and consequently reduced the level of trust within the team. The unintended costs of Nigel’s ‘pep talk’ illustrate the fragility of trust. It can take a long time to build, yet be destroyed in seconds.

My experience, as well as the research, tells me that where fear is high, trust and psychological safety will be low (often indicated by an employee’s reluctance to speak up). Conversely, in a high trust culture, such fears are no longer present and people feel free to share their concerns and ideas. As Edmondson (2019) warns, “no twenty-first century organization can afford to have a culture of fear” (p. xix).

Similar observations were shared by Professor Patrick Hudson, who identified increasing levels of trust as an indicator of maturity in his Five Levels of Safety Culture Model (Hudson, 1999, 2001). The original model is now almost 20 years old, and while there have been a number of variations to this framework over the years (including by the Keil Centre which used slightly different terminology to describe its Safety Culture Maturity Model), it still holds up quite well.

Nevertheless, while drawing upon more current research, and with a particular focus on the social–psychological aspects of safety culture development, I found it useful to propose a revised version of Hudson’s original model, presented in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1 Mapping the journey from compliance to care.

In Hudson’s original model, the levels were drawn as separate, discrete entities, suggesting that a company is at one level or it’s not. The revised model shows level progression more as a journey, including the inevitable ups and downs encountered along the way.

Hudson’s model also listed an increasingly informed workforce as an indication of progress; however, that still infers top-down, one-way communication. I have revised that to an increasing flow of authentic information, which points to the fact that leaders of more mature cultures don’t merely keep their employees well informed – rather they are also well informed by their employees – indicating genuine two-way communication. In order for a team to feel comfortable speaking up, psychological safety must be present; hence it has also been added to the model.

Finally, the essence of the revised model depicts a journey from compliance to care, and illustrating what that means is the central theme of this book.

A brief description of each level’s basic attributes is presented below:

• Level 1 – Apathetic
  In apathetic cultures, management adopts a ‘blame the worker’ approach in that incidents are generally seen as a result of a worker’s stupidity, inattention or willful violation. ‘Being safe’ is primarily viewed as mechanically following procedures and adhering to regulations, with the safety department deemed responsible for ‘policing’ such compliance. This creates a perception that safety is distinct from day-to-day operations, which conveniently negates any need for visible, felt safety leadership from outside the safety team. In apathetic cultures, many incidents are seen as unavoidable and just part of the job (“sh#t happens!”).
  Communication between management and the workforce largely consists of top-down parent-to-child interactions, and us versus them language is highly prevalent. As a result, management is often perceived to be uncaring, and trust levels are low (incidentally, much of the above is experienced by contractors when working with client organizations that operate within apathetic and reactive cultures, partly explaining why incident rates among contractors are so high).
• Level 2 – Reactive
  At the reactive level, safety is a priority … after an incident! Senior managers may apply elements of behavior-based approaches (e.g., punishment) when incident rates increase and may operate under the errant assumption that the majority of incidents are solely caused by the unsafe behavior of front-line staff. Hence, among the workforce there is still a degree of fear around reporting incidents, and secrets are often kept from management, impeding the authentic flow of potentially vital information. Unsurprisingly then, reactive organizations tend to have more than their share of serious incidents (Hudson, 2001).
• Level 3 – Involving
  Companies operating at the involving level recognize that the active participation of the workforce in safety discussions is important; hence teams are invited in to contribute. Consequently, as trust and psychological safety increase, employees become more willing to work with management to improve health and safety. Moreover, leaders are now prepared to concede that a wide range of factors cause incidents including management decisions. Safety performance is actively monitored, and the data is used purposefully. The organization has developed systems to assist with hazard management; however, the systems are often rigidly applied (Hudson, 2001).
• Level 4 – Proactive
  At the proactive level, the majority of employees in the organization believe that health and safety is important from both an ethical and economic point of view. Leaders and staff recognize that a wide range of factors cause incidents and the root causes are likely to come back to management decisions (Hudson, 2001). There is a growing recognition around the importance of all employees feeling valued and being treated respectfully, which helps build trust and psychological safety. The us versus them language associated with less mature levels is replaced by we, and communication between management and the workforce increasingly consists of two-way adult-to-adult interactions. The organization puts significant effort into proactive measures to prevent incidents through visible, felt safety leadership and by demonstrating genuine care for its people. Safety systems are designed to support staff, not the other way around.
• Level 5 – Integrated
  At the integrated level, leaders have fully invited their teams in, as they are seen as the subject matter experts. Leaders have created the climate necessary (high trust and psychological safety) for the workforce to accept responsibility for managing their own risks.
  Safety is not viewed as ‘separate’ from the work done – safety is just how the organization does business, and the focus is on reliability, learning and doing work well. While such organizations may have had a sustained period (often years) without a recordable or high potential incident, there is no feeling of complacency. They live with the knowledge that their next incident is just around the corner, yet they are highly resilient when dealing with challenges (Hudson, 2001). The organization uses a range of indicators to monitor performance, but it is not performance driven, as it has trust in its people and processes. As a learning organization, it is constantly striving to improve and find better ways to design and implement hazard control mechanisms with the full involvement of the workforce (Hudson, 2001).

I have worked with many global multi-site corporations, and it is interesting to note that they te...