Turning HOP Principles into Action: Response Matters

This is the fifth blog in my series on the five Principles of Human and Organizational Performance (HOP). I will be discussing the principle, Response Matters. This series is written to help provide specific actions leaders can take to implement HOP. My hope is to provide practical daily and weekly behaviors leaders can use to apply these principles. 

HOP Principle 5: Response Matters

Response Matters: How leaders and managers react immediately following a failure sets the tone for the entire organization. Thoughtful responses encourage future reporting and growth, whereas knee-jerk judgments hinder progress.

Here are a few ideas to consider when pinpointing what leaders can do to put actions behind this principle. 

1. Failure of some kind has happened, like it or not. And now the spotlight is shining on the leadership. There will be stories told within the organization about how leaders react, and they can last for years.
2. Emotions can run high after an incident. If leaders fall into the trap of looking for who failed, instead of what failed, then how they respond will likely lead to blame and punishment.
3. Employees know the failure points inside organizations. If leaders fail to address the root causes that lead to the incident, it can send a clear message to the frontline that “we don’t truly care.”
4. Responding is not only referring to what leaders do after an incident has occurred, it’s how leaders respond to everyday issues such as near-misses, minor issues, unsafe conditions, use of stop-work authority, and even how they respond to success. If leaders respond poorly to any of these, they are poisoning the well, either by the bucket load or by an everyday drip. 
5. Making systems, processes, or resource changes will not guarantee behavior change. A fuel source is needed to get people to adopt new ways of working. 

The following are behaviors or actions leaders should do every time something does not go as planned or failure has occurred. Building these into habits will ensure their organization is living out this 5^th HOP principle. 

Proactive Behaviors for HOP Principle 5

Respond immediately with empathy after an incident. When an incident happens, someone has experienced what could be the worst thing in their life: they got seriously injured, the course of their lives has changed (at least in the short term) drastically, they could experience PTSD, and/or they are not going home the same way they came into work. While the incident might be a shock to management, it is worse for the person(s) involved. Therefore, responding immediately with empathy is critical.

To respond with empathy, put the incident aside and focus on the human first. Here are some pinpoints:

• Acknowledge that something bad as happened. Statements such as “I am here to see how you are doing” or “I am so sorry you got hurt today, how are you feeling?” address the person first. Once done, let them know you are here to help. 
• Ask what their immediate needs are. Do they have a child they usually pick up, or is there someone you can call to inform them of what’s happened. Determine what leaders can do to help and put those into action. 
• Ask what happened and actively listen. The goal here is not to capture all the details as in an incident investigation: it’s to listen to their story.
• Let them know what the process looks like from this point forward. Letting someone know what the next steps are might alleviate fears around the unknown.
• As a leadership group, answer these questions: Who was impacted by this? What do they need right now? Whose obligation is it to meet that need? (Adapted from Sidney Dekker’s Restorative Just Culture)

Seek to understand why something happened. Organizations often find themselves in a frenzy after something does not go as planned. Like a disturbed beehive, leaders are flying around, demanding answers, and making knee-jerk reactions to “show” they are doing something. The opposite is also true. Leaders often ignore when things go right, giving their attention to wheels that are squeaky or the next job. Both undermine psychological safety and a resilient safety culture. Being curious into how things get done on a daily/ weekly basis is a critical leader behavior as it allows for open dialog and builds trust. 

In seeking to understand why something happened, consider the following recommendations:

• Slow down and work a formal incident investigation process. Have a clearly defined incident investigation process, with people trained to understand context, ask questions, and use tools (e.g., The PIC/NIC Analysis®) to discover the true root causes of an incident. While a quality incident investigation process may feel slower, it lends itself to better learning and an improved organization. 
• Speed up and capture what’s going right. Leaders should be trained to look for, actively encourage, and share best practices inside the organization. Speeding up here refers to looking for what’s going right daily and providing positive feedback immediately when the desired performance is recognized. A process for capturing and sharing best practices is critical for everyday learning and showing that leaders care about things going right. 
• Celebrate critical safety behaviors, even if they temporarily slow production. Stop work, reporting near misses or minor issues, quality job planning and job briefs, and conducting after action reviews are all things that take time, but they should be celebrated. These activities are proactive safe behaviors that lead to increased learning and work getting done safer. To keep these activities occurring with high quality, leaders must fully support them by providing positive feedback and ensuring organizational systems and processes actively support them. 

Get input from workers on how to move forward with solutions. When things don’t go as planned, determining what can be done to improve the working environment, processes, systems, or the work should be a collaborative approach with workforce representation. Consider this process to help create collaboration and visibility in addressing failure points: 

• Outline identified gaps from the incident investigation.
• Get into the field to see what other gaps workers are currently dealing with. Look to understand and explore work-as-performed to identify additional failure points.
• Ask for insight into what improvements need to be made to close those gaps using the Hierarchy of Controls as a guide for making decisions.
• Create a project management and communication plan. Clarify what the win will be in completing the plan. By win, I mean what the organization is going to do with what it learned: what failure point(s) is it going to address, how will it communicate what was learned, what the solutions will be implemented, and what is the timeline and expectations around adopting the change. 

Support change through coaching with Positive Reinforcement. When change is needed, good efforts in safety often fail inside organizations because they did not account for supporting behavior change. We have all seen it: give someone a new tool, and they don’t use it; develop a new procedure, and people still use the old one; put up a new barrier, and someone will find a way around it. It’s also seen at the leadership levels when leaders are asked to improve work planning to reduce schedule pressure and stick with rushing the schedule, or when asked to improve their leadership skills and stick with do it or else style leadership tactics. No matter what level on the Hierarchy of Controls the solutions are developed, if those solutions affect how someone works, then that the required behavior change must be supported. 

By Coaching, I am not referring to coaching and counseling as typically used in high-hazard industries; that is, part of the formal progressive discipline process and often written into the contract. Coaching here is the purposeful development of new skills or behaviors to create new habits in their natural environments. It’s about building up or increasing these new activities. Behavior, much like a vehicle, needs fuel to increase speed or maintain movement. In this case, organizations are asking people to change the way they were working and adopt a new way of working. The only way to sustain that change is fuel. As discussed in other blogs in this series, the best way to strengthen behavior is through the deliberate use of positive reinforcement. And in this case, we will be using it to specifically target and support the new behaviors through a planned coaching effort.

Coaching begins with defining what new behaviors are needed to support the change being adopted, starting with the lowest level the change affects. Once those behaviors are clearly pinpointed, it’s necessary to define the leadership behaviors needed at every level to support change. At ADI, we call this process Behavioral Roadmapping, and it is critical to clearly understand how the organization is going to support the change efforts. The Behavioral Roadmap becomes a tool to help everyone in the organization allocate time and resources, develop skills, and clearly understand their roles. 

A large portion of the coaching efforts recommended here is the deliberate use of positive reinforcement to support the behaviors identified in the roadmap. As mentioned in the first blog in this series, strengthening behaviors beyond compliance requires positive reinforcement. It is fuel for behavior. Learning how to effectively deliver positive reinforcement as well as connect behaviors to natural reinforcement is a critical leadership behavior at every level. And while most leaders recognize that it’s needed, they fail to be effective for a number of reasons. In the book, Bringing Out the Best in People, Dr. Aubrey C. Daniels discusses common errors leaders make when they attempt to deliver positive reinforcement in the chapter, Effective Reinforcement Delivery. It is beyond the scope of this blog to discuss how to deliver effective positive reinforcement, but if you are interested in learning more, I suggest reading additional blogs on our website, or coming to one of our Applications of Behavioral Leadership classes. 

The fifth principle of HOP is focused on how organizations and leaders respond to failure. Responding to failure the right way will create an opportunity to learn; responding to it recklessly will damage the culture, drive open and honest communication underground, and prevent the ability to make the organization better. When leaders know what to do to support the HOP principles, organizations can learn, adapt, and become more resilient to improve safe production. Once leaders shift toward showing empathy, work with the workforce to develop solutions, and focus on coaching through positive reinforcement, the organization will foster learning. Building leadership habits around these principles will build a safer organization.

References

Dekker, S. (2025). Restorative just culture: From disciplinary action to meaningful accountability (4th ed.). CRC Press/Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group. 

Daniels A. (2016). Bringing Out the Best in People: How to Apply the Astonishing Power of Positive Reinforcement (3^rd ed.). McGraw Hill Education.