In our November Safety Newsletter, I wrote about Partner-Centered Leadership. This is the most effective way to improve safety performance. This way of leading also results in improvements in most other aspects of the business as trust and interdependence are built and the environment is safe for the open flow of information. A key aspect of this is working with the people.
When I was the Plant Manager for a big chemical plant in West Virginia, we wanted to engage with the people as effectively as we could. We helped the people to form teams around their own work groups as well as being on site-wide teams to help improve other things. There were site-wide teams to address:
- safety shoe quality, cost and fitting issues,
- environmental improvement and reporting issues,
- safety glasses purchasing and fitting issues,
- addressing and correcting the roomer-mill chatter,
- eliminating sexual harassment problems,
- contractor safety improvement and coordination of safety training and
- many other site-wide challenges.
As we moved to teams, we in management all realized that we had a lot to learn. For example:
- Many people were very cautious and skeptical. How do we overcome this?
- What did it mean to go to teams?
- No one wanted to be seen as cozying up to management.
- What extra work would be required?
- Would there be a lot of extra training?
- Would a person be required to come in during the day for a team meeting when they were scheduled for working at night?
In contemplating this shift in how we wanted to lead, it was clear that all of us had a lot to learn. For example:
- Who would be the team leader?
- How often should they meet?
- How was the work to be shared?
- Would the teams need a facilitator?
- What is the best size for a team to be?
- How do they keep track of their work?
- Do we pay overtime for the meetings if they were conducted in an off-shift?
- Do we pay for meals during the team meetings?
- And on and on.
A really important resource for helping us was the Association for Quality and Participation (AQP) located in Cincinnati, Ohio. They helped us to set up a Chapter for our site and invited our teams to national meetings to see other teams from other companies and learn from them. All of us could see for ourselves that many companies were shifting to teams and that they were effective and fun. This was at the time of the big excitement about the quality movements in the early 1990’s.
These engagements with AQP were a big boost to us and really helped us to learn how to work in a team environment. Then the AQP was merged with the American Society for Quality (ASQ) and the whole team movement seemed to fade away.
But at our plant, we kept the teams moving, building on all we’d learned. We kept improving and learning together about what it meant to be really engaged with the people. Month after month the teams got stronger and more effective. The people in the teams became better leaders and the whole organization became leaderful, that is, when someone saw a need to improve something, they took the lead to get it done. The move to Partner-Centered Leadership became a real strength for us helping to eliminate injuries by 98%, reduce emissions by 88%, improve productivity by 45%, and increase earnings by 300%. The people sustained our safety performance at a Total Recordable Injury Rate of about 0.3 for 17 years.
The move away from AQP to ASQ was part of the broader shift to emphasizing costs, earnings, profits, and using big data to try to solve problems. Moving away from the people reduces the organization’s capacity for real, sustainable success. (Is this what has happened to GE?)
We kept key business indicators before us, but we did not lose sight of the people who make all this happen. When we brought the people side of the business together with the people side, things really improved.
Bringing the people and the business together is a powerful and effective way to release the energy and creative energies of the people to achieve terrific, sustainable results.
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.
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.
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 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.
