Fighting the Uphill Battle

Strategic leadership can reap extensive returns from safety. But it is critical that senior management move from barebones verbal "support" to active, focused safety leadership. If professionals wish to make a major impact on the safety culture of their organization, they should consider developing a mechanism for activating upper management as safety champions.

However, in many organizations the reality is that, like the weather, many managers talk about safety, but few do much about it. Perhaps this is because, when all is said and done, many executives believe they have as much control over safety results as they do over preventing a seasonal rain.

This laissez faire approach to safety management can be seen as:

The Blind Eye. While they don't even attempt to learn anything about safety, some managers still gladly legislate statistical expectations (as in, "I don't want to see any more accidents"). This approach, unsurprisingly enough, encourages people to hide whatever accidents they can. And, this also often results in casting a blind eye towards design, procedural and human factors that contribute to injuries. Which, in turn, leads to more severe and costly problems. Isn't it better to have 5 low-level sprains that cost $500 each than 1 full-blown problem that costs $200,000?

Other "Blind Eye" comments I have heard include: "I'm too busy to worry about this", "This is insignificant", "We don't have a problem any more than anyone else" and "Just don't make me look bad."

Invisible Man. Frequently, upper management is so busy and accord so little value to safety that they don't make themselves available to safety professionals. In one 25,000 employee site with which we worked, the safety director had not met the plant manager in the 5 years he had been there.

Other "Invisible Man" comments can be: "Isn't that why we have a safety director? It's his/her responsibility" or "Maybe it will all blow over - next quarter."

"Band Aid" prevention. Here superficial motivation is supposed to replace a strategic safety system. Well-designed incentive systems can be useful for reinforcing changed behavior, but they aren't effective at teaching new methods or techniques. When they are perceived as "bribes" for safety compliance, incentives fail miserably in the long-term. I have seen incentive systems that resulted in decreased safety morale and have caused other problems. People tend to feel entitled to their incentives; at that point, managers have to continually raise the stakes to get employees' attention.

A "Band Aid¨" approach is revealed in comments such as: "What's the matter with them? Why don't people just follow the procedures/pay attention?"and "Just up the ante if they're still getting hurt."

"Why Bother" Safety. Employees of the coffee chain Starbucks use the expression "Why Bother" for an order of a decaf, nonfat latte coffee drink. Similarly, some managers have moved to a Why Bother approach to safety. While they may talk a good game, their bottom line is to cut safety resources. Too few staff are made available to fulfill a safety mission with an insufficient budget with which to create change.

"Why Bother" comments may be: "If employees aren't concerned about their own well-being, why should I?", "Injuries are just a cost of doing business" and "Injuries are inevitable."

Of course, problems roll downhill. When managers don't actively lead safety, health and safety professionals suffer the repercussions. They are frustrated by lack of tangible and moral support, such as:

Difficulty getting access to upper management and, when they do get access, have limited credibility to institute new programs.

Are always treating symptoms, focused on post-injury clean-up activities. This way they can't make a positive, proactive movement towards a healthier safety culture.

Work overly thin with an overwhelming task.

Are still held accountable for safety improvements, yet feel little control over creating positive change.

The Ugly, the Weak and the Outstanding

But, if done strategically, real change is possible. To prepare to move towards higher levels of functioning, it's important to honestly determine the current state of an organization's safety culture.

"Ugly" safety cultures are characterized by below-average statistical performance, are compliance-oriented (rather than prevention focused), have a minimal program that is mostly on "paper" (posters, handouts, policies and procedures, occasional safety meetings), try to bribe and threaten people to act safely (moving between incentives and punishment). Safety professionals are seen as the "Safety Police." These cultures are like gardeners who scatter seeds on an unprepared ground and then expect vegetables to flourish by themselves until harvest time.

"Weak" safety cultures are reactive with a short-term perspective (programs retroactively address past areas of greatest statistical problems); these organizations tend to be trendy, chasing the latest safety "magic" that will make all problems go away with minimal effort on anyones' part. While safety is considered more than in "ugly" cultures, "weak" safety organizations lose focus quickly and, unless they see immediate results, fail to continue applying needed efforts. These cultures are similar to those gardeners who do some ground preparation, but, after a week, either stop watering or impatiently dig up seeds they've sown because they haven't seen the plants take hold. Either way, the plant withers.

"Outstanding" organizations see safety as part of their basic culture. Safety is seen on a par with productivity and morale for long-term organizational health. They use positive motivation, positioning safety as personally beneficial for all organization members. They offer continuing, tangible support to safety efforts. Procedures and promotional practices are consistent with strong safety (e.g. to get promoted, executives must manage safety well). Everyone is involved; strong safety committees have a real voice and power/budget to make change. High-level training is provided for everyone. Training and safety procedures are reinforced continuously. With the understanding that safety is about creating positive habits, "outstanding" organizations emphasize safe practices both at work and at home. These safety cultures are the prize-winning gardeners who till the land, plant seeds and continue to weed and tend the crops, rotating new plantings so they receive overlapping harvests.

The Opportunity

So, if your culture and management is not as effective as you wish it to be, what can you do? By supporting management to actively lead safety, professionals have an opportunity to make safety an organizational focal point. There are potential personal benefits here too. If they can boost their ability to influence executives, safety professionals will see their credibility similarly enhanced, which generally leads to improved career opportunities and job security.

By promoting personal responsibility for safety - and that includes for supervisors and managers just as much as for employees - safety professionals can heighten morale, prevent injuries and also help ignite employee involvement and employee-management safety communications.

Methods for Eliciting Active Safety Leadership

The good news is there are practical and proven strategies safety professionals can employ to activate managerial safety leadership. If you operate in a unionized environment, consider applying these methods to bargaining unit leadership as well as to managers.

1. Start by Positioning Safety in a Managerial Context

If you want managers to see safety as part of what they do and support, you have to lead the way. Which means thinking that way yourself. To influence others, be able to talk their language. Show executives that safety is much more than just preventing injuries and cutting accident statistics. Suggest to them that, for long-term organizational strength, there is a Critical Organizational Triangle of: A. Productivity & Quality B. Safety & Health and C. Morale.

What you don't say is also important. I'd suggest you avoid promulgating "Safety is Number one." This is definitely not true for most executives. People are not being paid just to be safe - they are employed to do a job as safely and productively as possible. Most managers I've worked with worldwide agree that Productivity, Safety and Morale are all critical to fulfilling their organizational mission. I suggest all three of these targets are equally important long-term.

By thinking and speaking from a managerial perspective, you will go a long way towards gaining the initial credibility you need from executives - as well as starting the process of influencing them toward safety support.

2. Offer Managerial Benefits

The best way to attract someone's attention is to offer them benefits. This positive motivation approach also makes buy-in more likely, critical for activating change. Whether you are presenting one-on-one, to a group of executives or in writing, alerting senior managers to the benefits of safety will further reinforce their perception of you as someone who considers the overall interests of the organization - not just as a professional who is merely pursuing his/her own narrower objectives.

You might emphasize that, as well as cutting the company's direct injury costs, a strong safety initiative also serves as an underpinning for improved public image. That a high-level loss-control system should result in a business advantage in hiring and community relations. In fact, many companies find a strong safety record gives them a competitive edge overall. Petroleum Services industry leader Schlumberger Ltd. (dubbed "The Intel of the Oilfield Services industry" by Fortune Magazine) has had successive 5-year plans to cut injuries 50% in each period; market research fuels their belief that recognition as "the safety company" in their field has been an advantage in winning contracts and in recruiting during competitive times.

Remind managers that keeping people on the job facilitates scheduling and workflow. That helping reduce those nagging injuries that people often work with can accelerate their efficiency. Because most employees value their own safety and want to be so esteemed by management, a strong, consistent safety program can serve as the underpinning of positive employee relations and morale (and improved union-management communications, where appropriate).

On a more personal level, in this era where there is more focus on cost control, successfully managing safety can boost an executives' own career development; and, in some organizations, benefits come more tangibly from performance pay tied to safety results.

By managing safety smartly, executives can reduce their own exposure to lawsuits or arrest (as has happened in some places).

Managers who truly lead safety have an opportunity to be in the forefront of their field, to run a highly efficient operation and to upgrade their leadership power.

3. Make Highly Effective Presentations that Energize Safety Leadership

Of course, safety professionals have to present cogent and logical reasons for using resources. But logic is not enough. Too often, people - both senior managers and line staff - don't do what seems obviously in their best and safest interests.

We've found that, ultimately, the thrusting force behind change is excitement. While it is first essential to gain credibility and second to show managerial benefits, creating buy in requires activating executives' personal commitment. Managers have to see and feel safety as an exciting process if you want them to deem it worthy of their personal and professional commitment and support.

Apply the principle that executives, as well as their organizational responsibilities, also have personal concerns. For example, in our MoveSMART¨ system for handling and lifting safety, we have received extremely good response from time-deprived, resistant managers after showing them how some of these safety techniques could also improve their golf game. Others with families light up when we show them practical methods for improving the safety of their older relatives, younger children or grandchildren.

If you do some research on the hobbies and interests of your senior managers, you will be better positioned to offer them benefits that will be of real interest to them. This will build your credibility and help bond them closer to the safety mission.

While presenting to managers is an art with a systematic set of principles and techniques, you might at a minimum plan the following:

High-leverage preparation. Any time you are communicating with executives, your image and the mission of the safety program are on display. Prepare yourself thoroughly (even for a 5 minute briefing); be ready to answer any question within 15 seconds (especially important should you have a chance elevator encounter with a senior executive who asks you how things are going).

Have a "managerial presentation plan." One that I recommend is: a. Statement of problem (in a way that gets their attention, offers benefits) b. What we are currently doing to address the problem (include strengths and weaknesses) c. Some alternative approaches (be sure to offer at least two; give your analysis of strengths and weaknesses of each) d. Your recommendation.

Provide them with a big picture overview; provide only a few illustrative details, unless they ask for more.

Give them options and allow them to make final decisions. Don't appear to be forcing a proposal down the pikes of people who may be highly control-oriented.

Prepare yourself to be interrupted. If you know your true and "soft" objectives and are interrupted, you can respond and then subtlety return to the underlying message you want to leave them with. By the way, the more prepared you appear to be (with a displayed agenda, handouts, efficient pacing) the less likely you will be interrupted.

Less is more. Keep your presentation short; should you be held over longer than originally allocated, be ready for further questions.

Focus on serving organizational/managerial objectives, not on pushing your own agenda.

Next steps. Be prepared to suggest what they might do, with minimal time, that will leverage strong returns in productivity, safety and morale.

Case studies. Offer case studies and quotes from senior managers in other organizations - especially those your executives are likely to admire (well-known and profitable, seen as leaders) or who are in your field (competitors).

Respect and approval. Thank them for their time and for being a proponent of safety (you might wish to recognize any successes they have had with safety).

4. Offer Managers Practical Safety Leadership Methods

In these times of swirling change and heavy workloads, people have few extra minutes to fritter away. You are most likely to elicit active safety leadership if you are able to offer methods that require little time commitment while clearly broadcasting a strong safety message.

Like people, companies differ in what is important to them and this will change over time. It is essential to match and customize any presentation to the culture of an organization and its specific objectives when you make your intervention.

The following are some of the sample messages that have proven successful in our work with senior management in a wide range of organizations such as Alcoa, American Airlines, Amtrak, Anheuser-Busch, Boeing, British Columbia Telephone Company, British Petroleum (BP), Conoco, James River Corp., Johnson & Johnson, Kodak, Quebecor Printing, Petro-Canada, Phelps Dodge, Potlatch, Rock-Tenn, Schlumberger, United Airlines and many others worldwide.

Remind them that, when asked to summarize his approach to leading substantive organizational change Tom Peters responded, "Attention is all there is." What you put your attention to is what you get, and what you don't, you won't.

Let them know that a small portion of their time and attention goes a long way towards influencing others. Brief time "investments" they might consider include: dropping in for 5 minutes on a safety meeting or safety committee session, asking those who report to them the current status of their safety efforts, authorizing a brief safety message to be placed into all company reports or directing that all staff meetings spend at least a few minutes considering safety implications of any plans in progress.

As an example, when Johnson and Johnson experienced a slight rise in their serious injury cases, CEO Ralph Larsen made two videotapes - one sent to all managers and another for line employees - where he spoke on camera of the importance to reinvest in J?'s commitment to safety.

Reinforce the need to send consistent messages. This might start off with an organizational safety pledge (e.g. "We are committed to protecting not only our employees but also the environment in our community. We further believe that all injuries can be prevented, and that it is the responsibility of all managers and employees to be personally involved accomplishing these objectives."). If managers are willing, you might offer to write a first draft of that statement; this makes it more likely that this statement will be generated, saves them time and includes those elements you see as important.

Suggest that who managers recognize, hire (contractors) and promote sends messages throughout your organization. Safety performance can be advertised as one of the criterion for organizational rewards.

Offer to managers that their critical role is creating an environment where people are not "looking to bail out of their jobs with a soft-tissue injury" (as one safety professional told me). Remind them that the fruit of your and their efforts is statistical improvements, but the means to that end are building block changes in attitude and behavior.

Introduce executives to a "cumulative thinking" approach to safety. That there is often a lag period between the introduction of a new program and the time you will reap reductions in injury rates. (For example, cumulative trauma injuries that show themselves next week may have been mounting for years).

Give them a preview. If you expect them to lead safety, they have to be kept abreast of changes. Again, rather than risk boring or overwhelming them, offer an abbreviated "best parts" version of any new training you plan to offer company-wide. Be sure to adapt that training to their specific managerial concerns.

Applaud senior managers who ask hard questions about safety; remind them to have high expectations of safety. And that they can lead the way when it comes to personal responsibility. They can do this on a personal level by modeling safe procedures during company walk-throughs. And on an organizational level in how they set the safety mission overall.

Enlist others' help in reaching safety goals. James River Corporation actively involves supervisors and line staff in designing safety programs and incentive systems. Their people are highly trained in observational and accident prevention skills.

Supervisors, often a weak link in safety communications, have to be turned into an ally. Senior management at United Airlines Onboard Services arranged for supervisors to be given custom-designed, skill-based training in safety supervision that simultaneously focused on helping them realize all of their organizational goals.

Conclusion

If you want to build outstanding organizational safety, it is critical to move from fighting an uphill battle to enlisting the excitement of those at the top. Set your sights beyond mere "verbal" support. It is possible to motivate managers' active safety leadership. Safety professionals can catalyze substantial improvements by realistically assessing initial obstacles, setting cultural and behavioral goals, eliciting management interest and offering practical methods for managerial leadership.

Don't settle for the frustration of operating without senior leadership support. More and more organizations throughout the world are actively pursuing outstanding safety culture. You can help your managers lead the way to reduce losses, protect people, promote creativity, and boost morale and overall organizational strength.

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