Eddie Greer is very interested in finding and cultivating safety leaders in any organization.
How do I know? He wrote an entire article about it in a recent issue of Professional Safety magazine. No one takes the time to do that unless he or she is passionate about the topic. and there is reason to believe that leadership could well be lacking in terms of safety with many organizations.
It’s not that safety is not a priority for many companies; we’re not saying that at all. What we are saying is that safety is not a management issue, it’s a leadership issue. Greer touched on the important distinction in the first part of his article, which I recapped a bit in my last post. As Greer wrote, it is important to understand the difference between a manager and a leader. And as safety is more about people and their behaviors rather than protocols and procedures, having a leader in safety is far preferable to a manager.
Without further ado, we’ll look at the qualities that make an effective safety leader, and address the importance of leading over managing when it comes to safety. Most of these have to do with leadership at a most basic level, which is to serve as a problem-solver, mainly in a proactive sense where problems are observed and addressed before they become actual problems (keep them more as distractions, in other words).
- Communication Lines are Open: An effective leader understands potential problems, and he or she does that by having open lines of communication with others – peers, supervisors, executives, clients, vendors. That communication should be respectful, but honest and open so that there is no fear of retribution for reporting a potential problem. Every distraction or challenge is an opportunity to learn and improve, and everyone in the chain of communication should look at them in that way and not as a “whistleblower,” which has a negative connotation to it. If everyone is on the same page in terms of promoting safety, then every challenge or observed issue can be openly and honestly addressed in a constructive-criticism kind of way so it is rectified quickly and humbly.
- Silos are for Grain: Most problems aren’t limited to just one department or one area of the worksite. Therefore, keeping up silos and not having cross-relations between divisions or departments will prove to be ineffective and inefficient – staying within a silo only addresses a symptom of the problem and not the actual cause. A good leader will tear through those walls and get everyone involved who may have a role in the challenge and establish communication lines to address the cause and not just the symptoms.
- Place the Right Assets: Leaders know the strengths of those they are leading, and addressing a problem effectively means being efficient – which means placing people in areas where they utilize their best strengths. Effective problem-solving among a team means trusting that you have everyone on your team doing what they are good at, and communicating with each other actively and positively so the problem is addressed directly. When a person is not in the right position that matches a skill set, there can be obstacles and inefficiencies that can frustrate the problem-solving process and cost more time and money, which then leads to the problem becoming bigger and needing mroe resources to address later.
- Make a Road Map: A good leader can see the destination ahead and will draw an effective roadmap to get there, using available personnel and resources to make a plan and execute it. This also involves getting full buy-in from the people being led, and there are four steps to doing so:
- Be the model for the group: If you have and expect high standards for your team, you have to express those yourself.
- Counter the status quo: Be willing to know that what has “always been” will change, and leaders are to be able to listen and understand ideas that come from anywhere and be willing to consider an idea if it means improving how things are done. And a leader doesn’t assume that he or she is the only one with ideas, or the only one with ideas that matter. Listen, ask questions and be open-minded through humility.
- Say what you see: A leader has a vision in the distance, and he or she should and ought to share that vision with the team and encourage the members to work with you and see the vision for themselves. Teams are dynamically effective when they share the same goals and vision for success, because they will work together more readily.
- Enable action: This is not in a negative way, but put the tools and resources in place for your team members to do their job well for the benefit of the team and the organization. You are not the hero by doing everything yourself; you are the hero when you trust everyone else to do what they do best, and you just let them.
- Build the Passion: When things get frustrating or th goal seems too far out of reach, the logical parts of us will say to stop wasting time and money. But if you believe in something so strongly, it is your job as a leader to play to the teams’ emotions and find ways to fire them up and give them the emotional adrenaline they need to get up that next hill. Logic is good to get the team to understand the how behind what you’re doing; emotion and passion can give them some of the why to keep going and fighting through the obstacles. This goes back to having that shared view and goal so that everyone is on the same page and understands the value of keeping up the fight.
- Motivate: This is about lighting that fire within the team members, whether by playing to a member’s emotion or passion, or whether it’s about incentives externally – such as a promotion, a bonus, or a couple of extra days off if he pushes past the eight-hour mark to see this through to the end. A good leader will know each individual on his or her team and what it is that drives each individual to do their best work, and will find the right motivation to keep the team focused on the task at hand until it is completed.
Leadership is safety isn’t about a position that a person holds, or his or her title in an organization. It’s about the skills nad traits that a person possesses that determines an ability to lead and be a leader. Identifying those people in your organization who has these abilities, then encouraging them to take on leadership roles in your company when it comes to safety, is a big step toward establishing a culture of safety that will keep everyone safe and make the company more efficient and profitable.