ESSENTIALS OF SAFETY BLOG 6/14
When you understand your own expectations along with others’ expectations, you have some access to their ‘Why’, to the context within which they operate and think. This will make life so much easier for everyone concerned than if you are not aware of those expectations.
This is the sixth of a dozen or so blogs covering the Essentials of Safety that I talked about in the first blog of this series. We have covered an introduction – which we called Essentials of Safety, Understands their ‘Why’, Chooses and displays their attitude, Adopts a growth mindset – including a learning mindset, and Has a high level of understanding and curiosity about how work is actually done.
The other blogs in the series are:
- Understands the limitations and use of situational awareness.
- 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.
- Adopts an authentic leadership approach when leading others.
- Bonus – The oscillations of safety in modern, complex workplaces.
Understands Their Own and Others’ Expectations
Whatever occupation we have, wherever we sit within the hierarchy of an organisational structure, however we interact with people, we all have expectations. We have self-imposed expectations regarding our own behaviours. Other people also have expectations regarding our behaviour. We have expectations regarding how we are treated in the workplace. Other people have expectations regarding how we treat others. And we also have expectations regarding how we treat others, including those who report to us in the workplace, as well as our bosses.
It is a critical component of creating safe work that we understand both our own and others’ expectations.
Keeping those expectations to ourselves helps nobody. It helps neither us nor others in the workplace. If others know our expectations and we know theirs, then we are all in a better position to understand what is going on around us – what other people are doing and hopefully what the shared mental models of the work are.
Setting and sharing expectations is a critical activity that never stops, especially for a leader. The simplest way of sharing expectations is by talking about them. A leadership team needs to have open and authentic conversations within the team about the expectations they have of each other.
Another great time to explore mutual expectations with a direct report is during the regular performance appraisals that leaders undertake with their people.
A big driver of the behaviours we exhibit as we share our expectations has to do with our brains and the way thinking can further influence our thinking. The more frequently a thought or a pattern of mental activity occurs in our minds, the more entrenched the neural connections become. With enough repetition, this can become permanent. It is as if the pathways in our brains are like paths in the bush or in the forest; the more people that hike along them, the more the paths become entrenched as paths. The more these paths are used, the easier they become to follow. So the more we verbalise our expectations, the more we think about them and the more aligned our behaviour is with our verbalised expectations. They become very consistent over time as a result. This is driven by neuroplasticity – the ability of the brain to change as a result of changes in what we think, say and do. This is why, through routines and thinking, ‘behaving like a great leader until you become a great leader’ can be an effective approach. This is not to suggest faking it is the way to go, but rather that we can change who we are by thinking and behaving differently over time and with effort.
One area that I believe leaders need to be crystal clear about is in the dis- playing and discussing of their expectations in the province of ‘just culture’. We need leaders at all levels to recognise that incidents come from normal people doing normal work and not from individual failures, violations, poor choices, or loss of situational awareness. If you have or are contemplating setting up a ‘just culture’ process to explore where culpability lies after an incident, you need to keep this in mind. It is often not the structure of the ‘just culture’ decision tree that is the issue that drives frustration and an ‘unjust culture’ in this space. It is the inconsistent application of the ‘just culture’ process by the various managers and leaders who apply it that can cause problems. It is by talking through our expectations about how people are treated when something goes wrong – consistently and openly – that a culture that is just can be created.
An interesting bit of brain science helps us understand the drivers to blaming versus learning. Due to neuroplasticity, if you are used to finding people to blame after an incident, you will find your attention easily drawn towards facts and information that point to someone at fault. If, however, you are used to finding the learning out of an incident, you will find information that supports that. This is what we strive for. This is why I suggest shutting down blame con- versations and encouraging learning conversations. Ask ‘What can we learn?’ instead of ‘Who can we blame?’ At the end of the day, you cannot ‘apply’ a ‘just culture’ – you either have a culture that is just or you don’t.
Having expectations around how we react to a team member being involved in an incident is also very important when we think about leadership and the impact we have on others. An example is having a supervisor who insists that the person involved in an incident is accident-prone, is a bad apple, a maverick, or they are the reason for the incident. When this happens, an approach that seems to work well is getting the supervisor to rhetorically, and maybe also literally, answer a few questions:
- Who hired the maverick?
- Who trained them, and how?
- Who has supervised them, and how?
- Why has it taken an incident to raise the issue?
- Who allowed them to stay in the business, and why?
- How were they actually trying to make things go right at the time?
- How can we learn from answering these questions, rather than blaming and therefore not learning?
- What can we do to rebuild trust in this individual?
When talking about expectations, whether they are our own or someone else’s, we need to make sure that our communications are affective; i.e. they are sent and received as intended.
A way of sharing expectations effectively is through displays of behaviour. It has been said by Edgar Schein and others that leadership and culture are two sides of the same coin. This manifests here in the behaviour of leaders at all levels. The behaviour of leaders will create the cultures we strive for, and the behaviours of leaders will be influenced by the cultures we have. Sharing expectations through displays of behaviour can be far more powerful than just talking about them. It moves from ‘Do what I say, not what I do’ to ‘Do what I do’.
This is limited to no value in trying to force the creation of a culture. It is far more powerful to let leaders’ behaviours – what they focus on and how they react to things – tell the story about who you are as a business and what you stand for – your culture.
It is recognised that senior leaders’ behaviours have a much greater influence on the culture of the place than do the behaviours of middle managers and frontline supervision leaders, who to a greater degree tend to live within the culture rather than create it. So it is very important to spend time focussing on how we behave, rather than telling others how to behave. We need to constantly share the expectations we have of ourselves in this regard.
Each year, I encourage leadership teams to undertake a somewhat self-reflective internal review and check out the behaviours they exhibit. This will also help call attention to the expectations that the leaders display relating to things in the following categories:
- Visible leadership.
- The level of strategic importance that safety has in the business.
- The quality of our procedures and work instructions.
- Application of the Management of Change process.
- Interest in close-out of actions from safety-related incidents.
- Compliance with local regulations.
- Clarity of roles and responsibilities.
- Measurement of safety inputs (as compared to outcome measures such as Total Recordable Injury Frequency, or the number of days since an injury). Handling of conflict.
- Leadership development.
- Leaders’ mindsets concerning safety (growth or fixed).
- Whether people see safety as an external, technical requirement, or an aspect of what they do to succeed.
- Leaders’ views of procedural compliance and operational discipline.
- ‘Blame’ or ‘learn’.
- Leaders’ reactions to failure.
- Resilience as a way of being (culture of resilience).
- Effectiveness of the ‘Safety’ department – coaches or policemen.
The idea of the reviews is to explore the behaviours that drive our cultures. Getting these behaviours to be the best they can be will ultimately drive the cultures we strive to display and the associated expectations of ourselves and of others.
An Example
I feel that it is very important to be specific in communicating our expectations. An example is in relation to people’s expectations with respect to procedures. What follows is an approximation of how I view and talk about my expectations surrounding ‘procedures’, what I expect with respect to any ‘drift’ people experience, and my thoughts on compliance.
My View of Procedures
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 can be the bane of our existence. There are usually too many of them; they can’t always be followed; they can’t easily handle unexpected interruptions; they can’t guarantee safety; and they are usually not accurate. Sometimes they are simply not very smart – like requiring safety helmets to be worn between open car parks and offices. They are often written by people who do not do the work.
I clearly understand and talk about the fact that no set of procedures will cover all situations. No set of procedures will guarantee safety. No set of procedures can be a substitute for adaptive, intelligent human beings, and no set of procedures should ever be followed blindly. Procedures should be followed ‘thoughtfully’. Procedures do not create safety, people do. This can be seen in situations where ‘violation’ of a procedure, accompanied by sound mental models and some good thinking, has resulted in work being done safely and successfully. This is further supporting the conjecture that the human contribution plays a major role in the creation of safe work.
Another expectation I have regarding procedures is that the procedures need to be suitable for purpose. I feel this can be achieved by ensuring absolute clarity about which bits are important and which bits it is okay to apply a bit of adaptive thinking to.
To this end, we can build procedures that contain two types of components, or sections. I believe calling these ‘framework’ sections and ‘critical’ sections of the procedures works as a naming convention, providing both clarity and purpose to the elements. Even if you do not agree with the nomenclature, I hope you get the idea.
‘Framework’ sections attempt to align with the concept of ‘freedom within a framework’. This is where work teams and/or individual workers decide how the work will be done within a framework. The framework is set with clear guidelines and context but limited information on exactly how to achieve the task. The workers need to get together and think about how to do the work, come up with a plan, and then execute it. They have control of the nitty-gritty and this helps them think, adapt, make decisions, and act in alignment with the intent of the procedure.
‘Critical’ sections of procedures are critical in the sense that they are a step within a task that must be completed in a very specific way, accurately and repeatedly each and every time the task is done. The idea behind the critical sections is that failure to follow the critical steps that they contain in the way prescribed could result in a fatality or other similar significant incident.
Trying to get the balance right between framework and critical sections maximises the idea of promoting thinking – of providing that ‘freedom within a framework’ approach where and when it makes sense.
A much-needed leadership skill is to be consistent in our expectations regarding where the balance lies between absolute compliance to procedures. We also have to be clear on how we feel about adaptation outside of the procedural requirements. This can be done through our behaviours and what we attend to.
Clear expectations should also be set regarding the accuracy of procedures. If procedures are not accurate, or if a procedure does not adequately cover some critical step or concept, then those expected to use the procedure may adapt and make up their own way of doing the task anyway. This clearly may not be a good thing in some circumstances. Therefore, to maximise the likelihood that procedures are accurate, we need to have a process that asks the following sorts of questions when reviewing procedures or any changes within them:
- What is the value to safety of this procedure or its proposed change?
- What is the value to the end user of this procedure or its proposed change?
- Will this procedure or its proposed change help us in the journey to ‘always getting it right’?
- How does this procedure or its proposed change add or reduce complexity here?
Key Takeaway: When you understand your own expectations along with others’ expectations, you have some access to their ‘Why’, to the context within which they operate and think. This will make life so much easier for everyone concerned than if you are not aware of those expectations.