Two Consultants on Leadership: Accountability in HOP
Human and Organizational Performance (HOP) is becoming an increasingly popular approach to safety. HOP’s five principles offer an interesting framework for thinking about human error or behavior in the workplace. This view of behavior is influenced in part by systems theory and the science of behavior. The influences of the field of Behavior Analysis can be seen in HOP’s approach to understanding people’s behavior in the context in which it occurs, namely the workplace, including its systems, processes, physical conditions, people, consequences that follow behavior, etc.
Given that HOP is portrayed as a view or philosophy, organizations adopting an HOP perspective are required to translate the principles into practice. One of the HOP principles states that blame fixes nothing. How this principle shows up day to day has resulted in organizations asking how and where accountability fits into HOP. In this blog, Bart Sevin and I will discuss accountability in HOP, discussing a traditional view and a more scientifically-sound interpretation of accountability. We will also discuss how leaders can integrate accountability into their overall safety management systems while still decreasing the use of blame in safety.
Bart Sevin, Ph.D., Vice President
What People Mean by “Accountability”
The term accountability has been used in many ways, but the underlying theme involves providing an account of or answering for one’s behavior and/or certain outcomes, presumably to a person or persons who are positioned to deliver consequences for those behaviors and outcomes. Unfortunately, when people talk about “holding someone accountable,” typically they are referring to delivering negative consequences for undesired behaviors and outcomes (compared to providing positive reinforcement for desired behaviors and outcomes). So, the principle blame fixes nothing can loosely be translated into the following: punishing people for undesired behaviors and outcomes fixes nothing. Ok, so what’s the problem with blame?
Blaming Frontline Employees for System Problems
First, blaming an individual fails to consider systems and process issues that may be playing a role. For example, a frontline employee at a client site experienced a close call during a lock-out/tagout (LOTO) procedure. After he de-energized the equipment and placed his lock and tag on the equipment, he tried to restart it. Unexpectedly, the equipment restarted. Fortunately, the employee wasn’t hurt. The site leadership did a wonderful job of performing a cause analysis and discovered that the LOTO procedure posted was out of date, indicating that management’s system for updating LOTO procedures wasn’t functioning as intended. If management had disciplined the employee (they did not), this response would have failed to recognize the deeper problem in how management updated LOTO procedures.
Overuse of Negative Consequences to Manage Safety
Additionally, use/overuse of negative consequences to manage safety results in a cascade of negative side effects, including suppressed reporting, damaged relationships, a lack of engagement or discretionary effort, decreased trust between frontline and management, and ultimately a safety culture that runs counter to what organizations want. And what do organizations want when it comes to safety? Typically, the goal is to decrease at-risk behaviors and unsafe conditions, increase safe behaviors, and identify more opportunities for learning and improvement that result in fewer incidents and injuries. So, if blame isn’t the answer, does that mean that blame-free is the same thing as accountability-free? Stated differently, if blame fixes nothing, then is there still room for personal accountability (Dekker, 2008)?
I would suggest the answer is yes, but it’s important to make a distinction here about what type of accountability approach we’re talking about, and who is responsible or accountable for what. A traditional view of accountability (i.e., punishing unwanted behaviors or outcomes) represents a backward-looking or retrospective approach to accountability that is triggered by behaviors or outcomes that have already gone wrong (Sharpe, 2003). Blame-free isn’t about giving people a pass or a lifetime get-out-of-jail free card, it’s more about recognizing that punishment doesn’t usually lead to a safer workplace1. A more constructive approach to accountability is forward-looking or prospective, and Bryan will cover this approach that organizations can adopt as an alternative to blame.
Bryan Shelton, M.S., Senior Consultant
Forward-Looking Accountability
Forward-looking, or prospective, accountability focuses on learning and adapting to create an environment that supports desired behaviors and allows people to fail safely. This type of accountability moves leaders away from the hierarchical, leader-disciplines-employee approach most organizations are used to, toward one that puts the role of creating behavior change in the hands of everyone. In this type of accountability, leaders and organizations accept their part in unintentionally creating an environment that contained failure points and supported undesired behaviors. Organizations and leaders account for this by learning (e.g., cause analysis) and adapting the systems, processes, and work to better encourage safe behaviors and set people up for success. Employees are responsible for participating in learning and improvement activities, adopting new work practices, and then working to make the changes become common practice. Rather than being blamed, employees are responsible for helping the organization move forward to improve safety. So, is addressing systems and process issues, most of which also require behavior change at different levels, enough to ensure the changes stick?
Creating Sustained Behavior Change
The missing component in many performance improvement strategies, including HOP implementations, is how to create sustained behavior change. Learning in HOP consists of identifying failure points and improving systems, processes, work environments, and procedures to make safe behaviors more likely or to allow someone to fail safely. What’s needed is a process for creating the behavior change at all levels to move from how we did things to the new way of doing things.
Organizations are filled with failed attempts at creating behavior change. Redesign a process and people still follow the old one, provide a new tool and people will not use it, redesign the local area and people will retro fit it to look like the old one. Even though solutions are designed to ultimately help people in the organization, expecting people at any level to immediately stop doing a task one way and adopt a new way of working usually does not happen.
This is where using the principles of behavior science and systematically applying positive reinforcement are needed. To create behavior change, organizations need to introduce a positive accountability process to support needed behavior change, whether that is influencing leader or employee behaviors. A positive accountability process includes deliberate identification, coaching, and positively reinforcing the critical behaviors needed to create sustained change. Learning requires positive reinforcement to strength new behaviors, which is key for replacing old habits with new. The goal of positive accountability is to create this catalyst that supports sustained behavior change throughout the organization. This is what positive accountability looks like in practice.
Final Thoughts
HOP offers a fresh look at performance improvement, using systems theory and behavior science to guide its principles and offer leaders a potential paradigm shift in their thinking about behavior. HOP’s view on accountability moves leaders away from backward-looking toward forward-looking accountability, a transition that is easier said than done. Guiding principles without a methodology for change can result in inaction. As Bart mentioned, there is accountability in HOP, it’s just not the backward-looking accountability leaders are used too. Forward-Looking accountability takes more work to do effectively, and the leadership and frontline behaviors involved in forward-looking accountability are different. Having a system to support behavior change throughout all levels of the organization is a critical step in creating sustained change.
References
Dekker, S. (2007). Just culture: Balancing safety and accountability. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing Co.
Sharpe, V.A. (2003). Promoting patient safety: An ethical basis for policy deliberation. Hastings Center Report Special Supplement, 33 (5), S1-S20.
1 There are situations or behaviors in the workplace that warrant punishment, usually in the form of progressive discipline, such as clear, deliberate safety violations (e.g., an employee damaging equipment to set up the subsequent shift for poor production), but these behaviors and situations are rare.
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