…My Beliefs on Leadership
Leaders are people who have a vision of what is possible, are concerned and care enough to make a difference, have the courage and commitment to do the work, and truly engage with people to learn, grow and to achieve their results. These are people who regularly go into their organizations, walk around, have the important conversations about getting better, building a respectful workplace, listening carefully, building trust and interdependence, and helping the people to be the best they can be. They create environments where it is safe to openly talk together, ask questions, share information, think out-loud and build a better future.
Leaders take a stand on their solid beliefs and values, then ask the people to hold them accountable to live up to their stand. When I was the plant manager of a large chemical plant, my stand was, “I don’t have a right to make my living in a place where it is okay for you to get hurt. We also need to make a living so let’s work together to accomplish all this. Please help me to live up to this standard.”
As leaders take a stand, ask for help and use conversational processes like these, the organizations will transform themselves and build long-lasting capability to learn, grow and prosper. I walked the plant for 5 hours a day, for 5 years, listening, talking, learning, building trust and openness. In doing this, my work got a lot easier and more effective. For example, in working this way, our injury rates dropped by about 98% to a Total Recordable Injury Rate (TRI) of about 0.3 and sustained this for 17 years. Productivity rose about 45%, emissions dripped about 87% and earnings rose about 300%.
This way of leading is proven, sustainable and achievable.
This is Partner-Centered Leadership. Our organizations desperately need this kind of Leadership. (Scroll down for more on this!)
But where are the Leaders?
Lots of managers talk about the need for organizations to change and improve. But as I talk with people, go to conferences and read the safety literature, I hardly ever encounter anyone leading this way. So many managers do not know what it means to lead.
- Many have been promoted into positions of responsibility without having practical experience so they do not know what actually happens and how things work.
- Many are deeply trained in the business economics, but have little understanding of how to work with or value people.
- Most business schools do not teach a safety course so these graduates do not know what it takes to build a safe, sustainable organization.
- Some managers are afraid to go into their organizations to talk with the people. They lack the courage to genuinely engage people.
- Many managers are enamored with numbers, big data and statistics thinking that these are the main source of knowledge; they are not.
- Many managers think that they know best and have little value for the knowledge of the working people so they drive a top-down management approach and wonder why morale is so low and things do not change.
- Many managers like the safety and comfort of their offices seeming to hide from the people in their organizations.
- Many managers think that more rules and procedures are the way to improve the safety performance, but it takes the people to make the real changes.
- Many managers do not understand or appreciate the difference between work as imagined and work as done.
- Many managers do not seem to be interested in learning something new.
- Many managers are very uncomfortable with the ambiguity in our complex organizations.
- Too many managers are comfortable with the status quo; we have always done it this way.
- Almost 50% of the bullying in organizations is from people in supervisory and management positions so they are unable to build trust and openness.
I mentioned earlier that our TRI stayed at about 0.3 for 17 years, with 12 of them after I was reassigned to another plant. During that 12-year period, there were 5 different managers with behaviors like those listed above and lost contact with the people. The standards fell apart and then a man was accidently killed in a situation that was entirely preventable.
It is a problem across society in general and a big safety and HR problem in our organizations. In 2017, it is estimated that there were about 72,000 overdoses across the country. About 70% of businesses report that they have been impacted by this terrible problem. The National Safety Council reports that there are problems with poor prescription drug use, higher absenteeism, injuries, and accidents resulting from overdoses.
Next, you need to reach out to the people with respect and offer to help them. Many people with drug problems believe no one cares, so reaching out to help would be a step forward.
The patterns at work are also changing as the business activities and demands are changing. There are not enough good, trained people to fill all the openings so the pressure on everyone is going up. Everything at work happens through people so it is critical that we keep everyone engaged in helping to achieve our successes. We need to open up the trust and build interdependence among everyone to keep the information flowing freely. It is clear how important genuine engagement is within our workplaces.
They are totally unconscious that they are an important part of networks at work and at home. Many are the bread winners and if they get hurt or killed, they will cause their loved ones terrible hurt and trouble. The indifference of so many people in supervisory or management positions to this sort of behavior is terrible.
The rapid growth of active shooter incidents was one of the main areas of concern. The FBI and other experts gave talks about this, with their main focus on the active shooter incident itself. Most active shooter situations are conducted by men. Most of these occur in places of business. There is no typical profile for these people who come from all walks of life.
The more people who are involved in thinking about, looking at and helping each other, the more likely that the organization’s safety performance will be outstanding. A key to having the people come together as partners in helping each other begins with respect. I think that most of us want to be treated respectfully and feel valued by each other; I know that I do. We all have jobs to do and our work quality and productivity need to be as good as we can do. We each need to be held to high standards and keep learning and growing in our knowledge and understanding. We can achieve this while treating each other respectfully, honestly sharing our knowledge and insights, asking for help when we need it, and giving a helping hand.
We help to knock down the walls that have grown up between people and groups so that the arguments and fighting stop and they learn to value and help each other. We help to drill holes in the silos of production, HR, maintenance, and finance so that people can talk to each other to get the information they need to do their jobs. We help to remove the barriers that are restricting the up and down flow of critical information, improving its accuracy, so the organization can function more easily. We help to remove the barriers between the people writing rules and procedures (the work-as-imagined) and those doing the front-line work (the work-as-done). We help people to see that most of the injuries and incidents are the result of patterns and processes that need improvement and shift away from a culture of blame and criticism.
Changes are coming fast and furious. President Trump is moving ahead on deregulations and removing barriers to improve our businesses, so we’ll probably see a lot of changes show up in our workplaces. Some will be positive and others will not. It is our responsibility to work together and make all these changes as good as possible.
Almost every day I see people post on LinkedIn, engaging in awful safety practices. Some are so ridiculous that they could be funny – except that people are getting hurt. Some workers seem quite content to endanger their lives and co-workers seem to be so unaware of the risks around them – that it is unbelievable!
A recent Gallup study conducted over several years, covering about 150 countries, revealed that only about 15% of the people were actively involved in their work and that another 15% were actively opposing their managers and supervisors. The other 70% must be just doing as little as possible and not helping or looking out for each other. We are better in the USA, but not by much.
One of the most effective things that I did in stressful and changing times like these was to follow these three rules:
There are three important things that everyone needs to do to help to keep the safety performance and productivity high:
In your tool box meetings or shift start meetings, consider expanding your thinking to imagine how someone could get killed in work planned for the day. This is beyond what most groups do, but is an excellent way to prevent an unlikely tragedy. Talk together about how a fatality could happen. Even the most unlikely scenario will happen one day. Talk about what is in place that will prevent the fatality if the event should happen. Then ask yourselves if these preventative measures are good enough to really protect you. If not, then consider what you need to do so that you will be protected from being killed if the unlikely event should happen.
A wicked question is one where it is so complex that there is no final answer. We work to the best solution we can, which works for some period of time, then we have to revisit it again as conditions change. (The wicked question keeps repeating, sometimes reminding us of a bad penny – that keeps showing up at inopportune times!)
We need to approach this from the whole systems perspective since everything is connected to everything else. Experience shows that if we try to just fix one part of the system or another, we will wind up making other parts worse.
Recognize Einstein’s Words of Wisdom: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.“
