ESSENTIALS OF SAFETY BLOG 2/14
Knowing your ‘Why’ changes what you do and how you do it. When you truly know why you do what you do and it aligns with your values and your authentic you, you become unstoppable in your drive, destination, and delivery.
This is the second of a dozen or so blogs covering the Essentials of Safety that I talked about in the first blog of this series a month or so ago.
The other blogs in the series are:
- 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 gets done.
- Understands their own and others’ expectations.
- 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 ‘Why’
Knowing our ‘Why’ drives everything else we do. People who know why they do what they do tend to operate more effectively than those who simply know ‘what’ they do and ‘how’ they do it. Those who know ‘why’ they do what they do are able to live by their own guiding principles. Whatever job they have, they don’t consider their work ‘work’ – they consider work as a manifestation of their choices and as a display of who they are and why they do what they do.
Although related, knowing our ‘Why’ is significantly deeper than having a purpose, set of goals, targets, wishes, or hopes in life. It is a foundational driver or raison d’être, if you will, of what we do. It is our reason for being.
The moment we understand our ‘Why’ is like the moment we turn on a light in a darkened wine cellar: as we flick the switch, the path we need to take is illuminated. Things become clear. And somewhat more importantly, the reason why we are heading in that direction appears before us. In the case of the wine cellar, the path to the fine bottle of Australian Shiraz is apparent. In the broader context, knowing our ‘Why’ gives us the path ahead, the direction we need to go in, and forces us to think about the ‘What’ and ‘How’ of our activities. This is the power of understanding our ‘Why’ and why it is worthy of our exploration.
To find our ‘Why’ is not always an easy task. We cannot just make some- thing up on the spot. A person’s ‘Why’ is something that needs to be worked out over time. It needs to be drafted, re-viewed, refined, and rehashed a number of times before we get it right. A person’s ‘Why’ is not something that you can simply tell them. If we are their leader, we cannot tell a team member what their ‘Why’ is and then make sure it is aligned with ours. We need time to allow them to work it out for themselves, just as much as we need to give ourselves time to work out our own ‘Why’. Allowing people space and time to work out their ‘Why’ is critical if we want it to be real for them. Helping understand your ‘Why’ or helping someone else get theirs is a bit like baking a loaf of bread. You collect the ingredients, knead it around for a while, let it sit and prove, mix it all up again, let it sit around for a bit longer, and finally pull it all together into a fine fresh loaf of under-standing, meaning, and direction.
In a later section, I will talk about the need to understand our true self as a part of uncovering what authentic leadership is all about. So it is with the exploration of our ‘Why’. In both the exploration of authentic leadership and in the exploration of our ‘Why’, we need to find our authentic and true self. This is because both are all about a deep and absolute characteristic of self. It does not matter whether you are a C-suite executive, a frontline operator, or a professional in your field, you need to authentically know who you are, what drives you, where you have come from, and where you want to go – you need to get to your ‘Why’.
Once you know why you do what you do – or in other words, once you know your ‘Why’ – it is important to keep your ‘Why’ alive and up to date. I have refined and tweaked my ‘Why’ a number of times over the past few years. Talking about your own ‘Why’ with others and asking others about their ‘Why’ is a great practice – as long as you don’t overdo it.
In a more general way, expanding the concept of ‘Why’ to other areas of a business also helps to keep the concept alive. I try to always spend some time at the start of significant training and learning sessions to explore the ‘Why’ of the training. For example, at the start of training sessions on coaching or field leadership conversations, I talk through ‘why’ using a coaching style in the participants’ leadership activities that could help them be more effective as a leader. I also talk about why having effective field leadership conversations can actually make their job much easier and their leadership more impactful. Exploring the ‘Why’ of the process being learnt can be a great way of enrolling people into the concepts you are trying to help them learn. After all, if the ‘Why’ of the learning session has some level of alignment with the individual’s ‘Why’, there is a much higher likelihood of learning being achieved.
Another example is when I talk about why we do investigations after work- place incidents. Historically, we were taught that we do workplace incident investigations in order to reduce the likelihood or eliminate the possibility of a re-occurrence of the incident. These days, I do not believe this. Not having a re-occurrence is a side benefit of the investigation process, a bonus if you will. The reason why we investigate incidents is to learn. The ‘Why’ of a workplace incident investigation could be described as: ‘To dig deep into the whats, whys and wherefores of the incident so that we can uncover the lessons that need to be learnt across the broader business so that related activities go right into the future’.
When you are in the field interacting with other people, say in some kind of field leadership conversation process, or simply a peer-to-peer conversation, regardless of your leadership level, take the opportunity to ask people why they do what they do. It is always an easy and fun conversation. When pushed, they often go way beyond the ‘for the money’ response and talk about the impact that work has on their families and on their lives. With a bit of thinking, people will realise they have a personal purpose in what they do. People who know their ‘Why’ tend to be able to answer these sorts of questions with more conviction and less deliberation and thinking than others. Al-so, people who know their ‘Why’ tend to be more satisfied with what they do because they know why they do what they do and the difference it is making.
In summary, the more we are able to be our true authentic selves, the more effective we are as individual human beings. Finding, expressing, feeling, believ- ing, and engaging our authentic self powers our effectiveness. Being powerfully effective frees up our ability to decide what to do in a situation and this then empowers us to go and do it. There is an art to being authentic. We must understand and be very clear about our differences, what sets us apart, what we con- tribute, and what works for us and have a strong sense of who we are and where we have come from. This all comes together to establish our unique ‘Why’. This is what knowing our ‘Why’ is all about.
This is my ‘Why’:
‘To share ideas, concepts, and practicalities in safety and leadership with as many people as will listen, so that people start to think differently and positively about the why, what, and how of the things they do in both leadership and safety’.
My ‘Why’ gives me direction and provides a touch stone to test against when I do something new. It gives me feedback when I go off-track and it gives me feedback when I am firmly on track. I can ask myself: ‘Is this in alignment with my ‘Why’ – why I do what I do – or is it something else that may be a distrac- tion to the main game?’ I find it supremely beneficial in my life and work.
My ‘Why’ has helped me and continues to help me greatly in being persis- tent in writing both Simplicity in Safety Investigations and in the three years and multiple drafts of Essentials of Safety.
An Example
I was asked to facilitate a session with a small mine as they created their annual Health and Safety plan. The draft workshop agenda included the creation of the draft Health and Safety plan as the ‘What’ – what we plan to do during the year. And it talked about creating a Charter to describe the ‘How’ they intend to complete the Health and Safety plan. The Charter was to talk about the ways the team would interact with others, the styles of communication they would use – their rules of engagement as it were. The team had recently had a pretty tough set of culture survey results. They felt a bit lost and were not looking for- ward to another workshop that led to another set of goals, half of which were likely to end up being unattainable, just like in previous years. I proposed they dedicate the first few hours at the start of the two-day workshop to run a session aimed at discover-ing the team’s ‘Why’. I felt that if the team had a common idea of what the team existed for, what contributions they have made to others, and the impact those contributions have had, they would be in a far better place to make sure that whatever they came up with in the Health and Safety plan and the Charter were in alignment with their ‘Why’. This is, of course, all classic Simon Sinek stuff. The outcome of the two days was a team ‘Why’ that read as: ‘To build relationships and partner-ships that drive cultural change around risk management so that people are empowered to make informed decisions about work’. Beautiful.