Features
Leadership impacts safety
The superintendent stated, “The corporate office believes we’re hiring the wrong person because our accident rate is so high on this job!”
The prevailing notion, at one time, was to hire the “safe personality type.” That notion has died a slow death. Today, the focus is on the impact that leadership has upon the safety climate. Research shows that leadership plays a crucial role in creating a workplace environment that promotes safety, thereby reducing accident rates as summarized in the illustration below.
Fortunately, leaders can learn the characteristics which are attributed to creating a safe work environment. Listed below are behavioral examples of two different leadership styles. Which one do you think is more apt to have a higher rate of safety incidents?
Leader A: Instills pride in me for working safely, acts in ways to promote safety, displays a sense of confidence that we can work safely and goes beyond self-interest for the safety of the team.
Leader B: Focuses attention on irregularities, mistakes, and deviation from the safety standards; concentrates full attention on dealing with mistakes, complaints, and other safety failures; directs my attention toward failing to meet safety standards, and is absent when needed to work on safety issues.
Your choice is correct if you chose Leader A. There are more leadership behaviors than we have space to list in this article, but you get the point.
The bad news: In spite of knowing the importance of being the Leader A type, there is research showing that many supervisors cling to Leader B behaviors. And the bad news gets worse. Ed Lawler, a management guru, reports that only about 5% of the leaders implement the best practices after learning about them.
The good news: You can be in that 5% group if you approach leadership development systemically. By that I mean training. Telling employees or displaying signs is not going to result in a behavior change. At best, only about 10% of the leadership training automatically transfers to the workplace. That is the reason best selling authors (e.g., Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence) state that billions of training dollars are wasted every year.
The better news: That percentage can be increased markedly when you approach leadership development from a systems approach. The advantage of the systems approach is the ease of holding the change process accountable. I’ve underlined accountability to highlight the fact that the lack of accountability is usually the weakest link in the change chain.
A very basic change system includes the following: (1) Define the desired leadership behaviors, which become performance standards, to achieve a safe work environment. (2) Discuss the importance of safety at the beginning of every team meeting. (3) Cite examples of safety at work at every team meeting. (4) Communicate success throughout the organization. (5) Implement leadership accountability.
The traditional thought is that leadership accountability is quantified through the number of “near misses” and “reportable accidents.” Review the figure presented in this article again. Such measurements represent the end of the chain. If you want leaders to use the behaviors to create a safe work environment, you want to introduce a measurement process at the beginning of the chain to quantify the degree leaders are being effective. Yes, that can be done. Measuring leadership behavior gives you the opportunity to coach and help struggling leaders to become more effective. Now that’s a safety win for everyone!
Larry Cole, Ph.D., founded TeamMax, Inc. and the TeamMax methodologies to improve employee performance to maximize financial success. He is the author of People-$mart Leaders: Maximize People, Performance & Profits. Each year he speaks to thousands of people on personal development, change management and measuring behavioral change. He can be reached at: larry@aligningchange.com
