An Example of (Safety) Leadership Success: Narrowing Focus to Create Results
The best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. This eighth blog discusses one leader’s intentional push to move away from everything is important right now to a narrowed, organization-wide focus to improve one critical safety leadership skill. Pat’s efforts led to a fundamental shift in how the organization led change management strategies, moving away from attempting to improve everything all at once to one that prioritizes making laser-focused change.
Pat’s organization had a long history of making everything an absolute priority. This included all change efforts, investments in technology, and attempting to improve leadership and employee skills. It was not uncommon for this organization to have multiple, major change initiatives happening at once, which ended up pulling leaders in different, and sometimes conflicting, directions. Leaders in this organization often felt burned out with the competing priorities. Pat knew this was the case inside his organization. Pat is a senior leader in an organization that is considered high-hazard. He has been tasked with leading the change in improving the safety culture. This includes everything from improving leader and worker relationships, moving towards more proactive safety management strategies, to improving the skillsets of leaders and employees around safety critical behaviors. This was a major change effort.
Pat had two types of problems to solve to successfully help the organization move towards its goal. The first issue was a skill deficit issue at the leadership levels. For a long time, the organization would promote people without giving them any training in leadership. This led to people defaulting to using fear as their main management technique. The second issue was dealing with bandwidth and focus, making success feel probable instead of something that was unobtainable. To help the organization improve its safety culture, Pat utilized following leadership behaviors:
Invested in training and a push for something small. Pat knew that any new initiatives would be met with the same driving-through-fear leadership behaviors if they were not given any additional skills on how to lead. Therefore, Pat invested in ADI’s safety leadership process to give leaders some necessary skills to take a different and more influential approach to leading. What makes this example unique was Pat’s work in aligning senior leaders to help the organization put the training into practice. One of the first major pushes for Pat was something simple to do: Pat asked leaders to go out and have discussions about what they liked on jobs. The workers in Pat’s organization are all professionals, and their level of work in creating a safe workplace is high. This did not match how leaders typically conducted their interactions, audits, or job site visits. These typically focused on finding anything wrong. Pat and the other senior leaders made a significant push to move away from just error hunting to identifying and giving positive feedback on the activities the crew did to keep the workplace, and themselves, safe. This small shift began to make a big difference in the organization. Pat saw relationships improving, people being more honest and open, people offering to help and be more engaged with the work, and safety-critical behaviors beginning to get even better.
Created a laser-focused plan. The next small step Pat invested in was developing a Behavioral Roadmap with the help of ADI. Instead of making the focus on something grandiose, like improving the organization’s safety culture, Pat decided to focus the roadmap on improving the quality and consistency of one safety essential meeting: the Job Brief. In this Behavioral Roadmap, we pinpointed the critical supervisor behaviors to occur before, during, and after a job brief that the organization considered best practices. We also identified how those best practices should better influence the worker performance and what managers needed to do to support them. This narrowing of focus was useful for many reasons. First, it gave all leadership levels a clear target to focus on (i.e., improving the quality and consistency of the job briefs). Second, because the focus was narrowed to one meeting, it reduced the response cost for all levels of leadership. And finally, it created quick win potential. If supervisors improved their running of the meetings, it should be easily seen in the worker behaviors and jobs. This moves one step closer to an improved safety culture.
The implementation of these critical behaviors by Pat helped create real change in the organization. Giving leaders training gave them some new and necessary skills to bring their safety culture forward. Having a narrowed focus Behavioral Roadmap gave people clear direction and set them up for a quick win. With the combination of these two approaches, Pat saw much less reluctance in the beginning and quickly saw the signs that the narrowed plan was working. Through Pat’s hard work, the organization saw improvements in their relationships and Job Briefs. Any leader, or organization, who wants to create sustained change should consider emulating these critical behaviors.
