There is no difference between a great leader and a great safety leader.
I believe that through strong relationships driven by authentic leadership; setting clear expectations; applying a coaching style; developing a learning culture in their team – especially learning from when we get it right; listening generously; being appropriately wary of the effectiveness of risk controls; and having a high level of curiosity as to how work is actually done rather than how we think it is being done, we will achieve greatness in safety and greatness in leadership generally.
Let’s have a look at some of these:
Building Relationships
The attention we pay as a leader to the relationship we have with our team can make or break the rest of the work we do in the leadership space. Getting relationship, and hence trust right gives us permission to engage, coach, mentor, guide, teach, encourage, inspire and otherwise help our team members be the best they can be. Getting relationship wrong can make us and our team unhappy, resentful, untrusting, discouraged, uninspired, and dysfunctional as a team with all the consequences of that situation, including adverse safety outcomes.
Leadership style
The best and most effective leadership style – by a long way – is authentic leadership; leaders leading from who they are. They know who they are and why they do what they do. They act according to their values and principles, care for their people, have good relationships with peers and followers, are real, come across as genuine, have a growth mindset, admit their mistakes, recognise that leadership is an improvisational art, know that leadership is not about power, persuasion and personality, and truly believe it is all about helping others be the best they can be.
Setting expectations
Setting expectations is a critical activity that never stops. It is based in relationship and conversation. Expectations need to be shared otherwise they are simply wishes. For example, we need to have conversations around our expectations on ‘procedures’, what we want with respect to any ‘drift’ people experience and we need to have conversations about our expectations related to ‘Just Culture’. The last is important so that we have absolute clarity around our behaviour when something does not go to plan.
I feel that procedures are very interesting tools of the trade. On one hand they play a critical role in the creation of safe work. On the other hand they are the bane of our existence. There are too many of them; they can’t always be followed; they can’t easily handle unexpected interruptions; they can’t guarantee safety; they’re usually not accurate; they’re sometimes simply dumb; and they are often written by people who do not actually do the work.
I love the idea of ‘freedom within a framework’ that Sidney Dekker talks about. It roughly means that we provide workers with guidelines and context about a task but do not tell them exactly how to achieve it. They need to get together and think about it, come up with a plan and then execute it. They have control over the nitty-gritty and this helps them think, make decisions, and act in alignment with the intent.
The most important expectation is that all procedures are accurate, both from the perspective of the business and, critically importantly, from the perspective of those who need to use them in their work – the end-users.
I support a simple process that can easily be applied when you are asked to approve or sign off on a new or modified procedure and that can help us have accurate procedures: Get a couple of people together as you review (or approve) a procedure and collectively answer a few simple questions along the lines of:
1. What is the value to safety of this procedure?
2. What is the value to the end user of this procedure or change?
3. Will it help us in the journey to ‘always getting it right’?
4. How does this change add or reduce complexity here?
One of the biggest issues we all face is drift – both within procedures and within processes. We need to be cognizant of the fact that work undergoes a slow and steady disconnection from the procedures that are intended to describe how the work is to be done. This drift, or sometimes called practical drift is happening and continues to happen. We need to help our people understand this and encourage them to keep an eye out for it– this is harder than it looks. Keeping an eye on how work is actually being done on a day-to-day basis and comparing it to the ‘work-as-written’ helps here.
We also need to acknowledge that sometimes things do not always go according to plan. People make mistakes, mis-plan their work, take well-intentioned shortcuts, do work that does not have the desired outcome et cetera. When this happens we must try to learn from it. I hope we have learned from the past in this space. Many of us used to apply a “Just Culture” process. We have now learned that you cannot apply a culture – you can only do things that may promote or impede its creation. So we should now be applying various activities and have various conversations to ensure we minimise blame and maximise learning. With the aspiration of achieving a culture that is just.
Overall, we need to constantly, consistently and comprehensively share with our teams that there is a difference in making sure things going right, and attempting to stop things going wrong. We want things to go right.
A coaching style
Adopting a coaching style, preferably a non-directive coaching approach is critical and an important skill all leaders should possess. It needs to be taught, supported, nurtured, and practiced over a long period of time.
Coaches, and leaders managing using a coaching style, need to know that the answers to problems lie within the capacity and expertise of the player, not themselves. This is aligned to the idea of intent-based leadership that Marquet so masterfully discusses.Doing the thinking for players is simply a waste of time – getting them to think by asking great questions and listening to the answers is the way to go.
Creating a learning culture within the team
Teaching is not learning. Learning occurs in the mind of the person doing the learning. This is why a person at the front of a room reading a PowerPoint presentation for two days in an induction has nothing to do with learning. We should all know this by now …
We need to seek to learn during every conversation, activity, induction, workshop, incident, and in-the-field interaction.
What I think is a good example of embedding learning into daily activity is talked about in my last blog. I hope you have all read it. It is called Learning from Normal Work. If not, take a break now and read it. OK. You are back? Let’s keep going.
In order to focus on learning we can also talk about the fact that human performance is variable and that unexpected events come from both good decisions and bad decisions. This means that we do not simply focus on bad decisions when investigating incidents. Human performance variability in neither positive nor negative, it just is. We need to try to learn just as much from low-level incidents as from major incidents. It is even better that we learn from normal work, when things normally go right.
Overall, in an effort to encourage learning, we need to remind people to speak up. More importantly, to support this, we need to spend a lot of time making sure, we, the leaders, listen. Listening is the most important skill a leader can have. And to listen generously is to listen with intent, to listen to understand, to listen to learn, and not to listen to interrupt and tell people how it is. This is not always easy and definitely needs practice.
Being wary of control effectiveness
When things are going well, we should worry. When things are going not so well, we should worry. We should not be obsessed by what could go wrong, just preoccupied with it … This preoccupation with failure is sometimes called chronic unease.
I first read about chronic unease in James Reason books and loved the idea – as long as it is not taken to extremes, which some leaders have done in the past. It is all about a healthy scepticism about whether stuff is going to be OK or not. I have heard the phrase ‘wariness of risk controls’ and ‘vigilance’ popping up quite often in references about chronic unease.
In keeping with the concept of wariness of risk control / chronic unease, one of the ways we can ensure we maintain a preoccupation with failure is that we can take on a systems perspective that tells us we must look beyond the individual behaviour, mistake or ‘error’ and understand the underlying structures, culture, leadership and system interrelationships that create the required conditions for a failure to emerge.
We need to encourage people to have sufficient unease such that they approach each day as if something will go wrong, and then plan for it.
Mindset
Whether we have a growth mindset – believing we can all learn, get better and grow, or whether we have a fixed mindset – where things are simply how they are and that is it, will greatly impact our thoughts and hence our words and actions.
A growth or fixed mindset can also manifest in the way we, as leaders, search out for and listen to expertise. If we have a fixed mindset and believe that we know all we need to know and do not defer to expertise as and where it resides, then trouble ensues.
Even how we ask our people to do things and how we ask questions reflects our mindset. For example, questions like ‘What are we doing that annoys you?’ ‘What can we do to learn from you?’ show a growth mindset in the leader asking the questions.
Resilience Engineering
As I hope you are already aware, resilience engineering has four potentials of interest to us, and these we need to encourage, measure and talk about. These are the potentials to; Respond, Monitor, Learn and Anticipate:
Respond: Knowing what to do when trouble goes down, or is about to go down.
Monitor: Knowing what to look for or being able to monitor things that could go wrong.
Learn: Knowing what has happened and being able to learn from the experience, and
Anticipate: Knowing what to expect or being able to anticipate developments into the future.
We should think about Resilience as we do our in-the-field leadership conversations, checking out how resilient our procedures and systems are, and checking whether the teams doing the work have; thought about what could go wrong; are keeping an eye on what is going on as issues develop; and have plans to bounce back from the face of adversity back into safe production without the event impacting. We need to identify resilient performance and celebrate it, understand it, and learn from it. i.e. establish how much of Work-As-Normal represents resilient performance on a day-to-day basis?
I actually like a bit of a tweak on resilience. The intent is not to change what the resilience potentials mean but to focus them on ‘getting it right’:
Respond: Knowing what to do when things start moving away from going right.
Monitor: Knowing what to look for or being able to monitor things that need to be in place to ensure things go right.
Learn: Knowing what has happened and being able to learn from the experience, and
Anticipate: Knowing what to expect or being able to anticipate developments into the future.
Conclusion
It has been said (by Edgar Schein and others), culture and leadership are two sides of the same coin. We sometimes forget that as leaders we create the culture we see in the bits of the organizations that we play in, and that what we think, say and do can make a huge difference… positively, or negatively to the safety of our people.
To reiterate, I truly believe that the few things a leader must do every day in order to most powerfully assist in the creation of safety and production are associated with building strong relationships driven by authentic leadership, applying a coaching style, listening generously, being appropriately wary of the effectiveness of controls, and having a high level of curiosity around what is driving any differences between Work-As-Done, Work-As-Normal and Work-As-Written, all balanced with a growth mindset.
Authors you should read (That the above thoughts were drawn from – and not in any particular order): David L. Marquet; Erik Hollnagel; Simon Sinek; Jim Wetherbee; Carol Dwyck; Sidney Dekker; Scott Snook; Diana Vaughan; James Reason; Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe; Rob Goff and Gareth Jones; Steven Shorrock and Claire Williams; David Woods; John Maxwell; Bill George; Sharon Parks; Amy Cuddy; Joe MacInnis; Art Kleiner, Jeffrey Schwartz and Josie Thomson; Ron Westrum; Andrew Hopkins; Daniel Kahneman; Art Kleiner, Jeffrey Schwartz, and Josie Thompson; Corinne Bieder and Mathilde Bourrier; Adam Higginbotham; John Whitmore; Myles Downey; Max Landsberg; Ronald Heifetz; Sharon Parks; Carol Wilson; David Rock; Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan and Al Swizler; Ian Long; J.G. Mahler; Todd Conklin; Steven Poole; Tom Nichols; Peter Senge; Chesley B Sullenberger III; Art Kleiner, Jeffrey Schwartz, and Josie Thompson.
If you are after specific books by these authors, just drop me a line.
Enjoy
Ian