…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.
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