ESSENTIALS OF SAFETY BLOG 1/14
Exploring what the underlying ‘essentials’ of safety that tie together the ‘Individual’, ‘Leaders and leadership’, the ‘Systems’ that we are a part of, and the ‘Cultures’ of the workplace.
I have not published any blogs for a long time. Sorry about that, I have been super busy but will try to do more as I love sharing ideas with people. Over the last few years, I have been somewhat preoccupied with a number of questions about people, safety and leadership.
- What are the few things in Safety that sit beneath all of the complexity and complicatedness of safety and that we simply must get right?
- What are the underlying elements that look through each of the lenses of the Individual, Leaders and leadership, the Systems we use and the workplace Cultures?
- What would it look like if leaders understood and practiced these underlying essentials of safety? – What would that workplace look like?
- What if leaders of workplaces had the skills, knowledge and expertise to make sure things go right, rather than having to worry about putting things in place after things go wrong?
- What could all of that look like?
This is my attempt to answer these and other questions. In the end, I came to the conclusion that safety is all about people. People do work. People lead other people who do work. People create systems such as procedures, rules, guidelines, and policies that provide guidance and direction for the people who do work. People create cultures – through their shared basic assumptions, beliefs, values, ideals, and observed behaviours – that help explain how people do work.
I believe the essential elements for creating safe work are manifest as twelve essentials of safety. This is what this blog is all about.
These Essentials of Safety are a set of individual characteristics, distinctions, attributes or traits that permeate the workforce at all levels. These essential elements talk to each viewpoint of: the individ-ual, leaders and leadership, the systems we use and the cultures of the workplace. It is evidenced by a state where, driven through strong relationships and trust, everybody:
Thinking:
• Understands their ‘Why’.
• Chooses and displays their attitude.
• Adopts a growth mindset – including a learning mindset.
• Has a high level of understanding and curiosity about how work is actually done.
• Understands their own and others’ expectations.
• Understands the limitations and use of Situational Awareness.
Doing:
• Listens generously.
• Plans work using risk intelligence.
• Controls risk.
• Applies a non-directive coaching style to interactions.
• Has a Resilient Performance approach to systems development, and
• Adopts an authentic leadership approach when leading others.
Using the above as a framework for thinking and doing (or behaving), individuals, whether they are workers, leaders, technical, or support people will be internally driven to a state of Created Safety – a set of procedures, systems, behaviours, practices, processes and routines that align with these elements. It is through the consistent and interrelated application of the ‘essential elements’ that the workplace cultures will manifest, the systems will be developed, leaders’ behaviours will emerge and individuals will thrive.
The Essentials of Safety are meant to help us look at things from different perspectives in our drive to create safety in the workplace. I encourage you to think differently about what you do, how you do it, and of course, why you do it. The elements are just a construct – a bunch of words that por-tray an idea, a theory, of how things appear to be. It is not the truth.
I am endeavouring to cover all of these elements in turn in upcoming BLOGs. Here is a quick over-view to get us going:
Thinking Essentials
Understands their ‘Why’:
The more we understand our ‘Why’, the more we are able to be ourselves. The more we are able to be ourselves, the more effective we become as human beings. Feeling, believing, expressing and engaging in our authentic selves, powers our effectiveness. Our ‘Why’ describes what is driving us – what underlying purpose makes us do what we do.
Chooses and displays their attitude:
We are sometimes given tasks that we do not really want to do, do not see the value in, or other-wise would prefer
not to do. When this happens we can make a choice – we can choose what atti-tude we’ll bring to the task. We can pick a positive attitude or we can pick a negative attitude. The choice we make can result in a huge difference to how we perceive the task at hand and how others perceive us as we undertake the task.
Adopts a growth mindset – including a learning mindset:
When we have a growth mindset we understand that we can learn, change, adapt and improve as we journey towards being the best we can be. When we have a fixed mindset, on the other hand, we tend to feel limited – that we are at the highest level we can attain in the world, that there is nothing else we need to learn, and that this is simply the way it is.
Has a high level of understanding and curiosity about how work is actually done:
We all tend to have opinions and views about how work is done in our part of the business. As leaders and safety professionals, we often write down rules, procedures, standard ways of work-ing, safe systems of work et cetera and then we believe that this is how the work is then being un-dertaken. In the real world, however, the way that work actually gets done does not always match how we imagine it is being done. Sometimes an individual does something that is different to the way everyone else is doing it and sometimes the way the work is normally done by many in the group does not match how the written method or procedure tells us it needs to be done. Leaders need to be curious about all three: Work-As-Done – how the work of interest is actually being un-dertaken by an individual; Work-As-Normal – how the work is commonly done across the broader group or business; and Work-As-Written – how we have documented the work method in proce-dures, work instructions, rules, standards et cetera. In other words, the way the Work-As-Done ‘should’ be completed.
Understands their own and others’ expectations:
We all have expectations of ourselves and we all have expectations of others. Our goal is to explore how expectations can be formed, shared, understood and translated into behaviours and conversa-tions. We also talk about the exploration of leaders’ behaviours as an indicator of expectations.
Understands the limitations and use of Situational Awareness:
In the workspace, situational awareness is the ability of a human to observe and understand their environment. The trouble is that human beings are not capable of keeping an eye on everything that is going on around us – it is simply not possible. Deciding what to keep an eye on and how to keep an eye on it are key to using situational awareness here. Aligning mental models before, during and after an activity is hyper-important when trying to keep a collective eye on what is about to happen, what is happening, and what did happen.
Doing Essentials
Listens generously:
Listening is the most important skill a leader can possess – it is an art and a skill that can be learnt and practiced. Generous listening is all about paying attention to, being curious about, and other-wise focussing on the person being listened to, rather than having the focus on what the person doing the listening wants to hear.
Plans work using risk intelligence:
Planning is one of the foundational elements of getting the creation of safe work right. There is al-ways a balance, however. We cannot get the planning done to such a level that we know 100% of the time how 100% of the tasks are completed with 100% accuracy. We have to strike a trade-off between being efficient and being thorough in all things, including in our planning. We need to do enough, but not too much. We can help strike this balance by understanding what is actually going on, being risk intelligent and having the right level of understanding that things will not always work out the way we plan them to. Being preoccupied with failure also sits well here.
When things are going well, leaders should worry. When things are going not so well, leaders should worry. Leaders need not be obsessed by what could go wrong, they just need to be preoc-cupied with it…
Controls risk:
The path to controlling risk lies, on an individual basis, with always preserving options, applying procedures thoughtfully, monitoring trigger steps and critical steps combined with activities such as telegraphing deliberate action. These can all make a real difference as we strive to make things go right as we do work. Each of these concepts are explored, along with the recognition that control-ling risk is a balance of people trying to keep in mind; why they doing what they’re doing; what the level of situational awareness is; what their level of risk awareness is; what their mental models are; what they put into their planning activities; the risk control measures they choose (hierarchy of con-trol for example); their expectations regarding failures; preserving options; being mindful; and of course what tools and equipment, procedures and systems they need to use.
Applies a non-directive coaching style to interactions:
Coaching, and using a coaching style in leadership and management is a wonderful way of making a profound and positive difference in helping people bring out the best in themselves. We explore a commonly used coaching approach utilizing the GROW model. We will talk about how it can be used in a pure coaching environment as well as in the leadership and management space. I have also included what I have found to be a great set of question topics that I review each and every time I prepare for a coaching session.
Has a Resilient Performance approach to systems development:
In order to build sound, effective, useable and accurate systems it always pays to be logical about it. One effective way of doing that is to apply the framework, or lens, of resilience as you create your systems. We also discuss the idea of a Safety Oscillation model that explores the various ele-ments of a system and aids in helping us decide which links between elements we can strengthen or reinforce and which links between elements we should reduce our emphasis on. For example we may wish to de-emphasise / disconnect the negative impact an increase in production pressure can have on safety focus, especially as we create or modify our systems.
Adopts an authentic leadership approach when leading others:
Truly effective, caring, powerful and sturdy leadership is all about people being themselves only more so. Leadership is about setting context, direction, purpose and the ‘Why’ of work. Leadership is all about people being authentic with their stories, their backgrounds, their foibles and their fail-ures. Intent-based authentic leadership and a strong motivation to help their peers and teams be the best they can be is most assuredly the way to go.
Before we get into the nitty gritty of each of the essential elements, I offer a final reminder that the elements simply represent my views of what I think are the essential elements of safety. I believe that they are important to get right, and will make a difference. Is it complete? Probably not. Is it definitive? Absolutely not. Will it drive the reader to think differently about how they think about safety and leadership? I certainly hope so.
Each of the upcoming BLOGs will talk about one of these essential elements. I will also have some specific BLOGs on some of the ways we can use the essentials of safety more specifically, during investigations for example.
I hope that by sharing these ideas with you, it has prompted you to think about how you think about safety and leadership.
Cheerio.
Longy