What roles does a leader play in the safety effort and what role do systems play in the safety effort?

Background
My talk today is specifically focussed to senior management and addresses the question - "What role does a leader play in the safety effort and what role do systems play in the safety effort?" We pose this question - not only because safety leadership is a specialty area of interest to us in ZEAL, but because we are completely committed to safety effectiveness, and in pursuit of that commitment we have become convinced that leadership is a key lever in success in the safety game. We have also realised that to attempt it without a strong discipline base is dangerous, so systems and controls are necessary to allow our operational gains to be locked in.

But there are obstacles that make safety leadership more often rhetorical than reality. First, safety is not perceived to be intellectually as challenging as other areas of management. It is usually only with grudging effort that a leader will truly commit to safety. This is largely because safety is misconstrued as mainly a system of discipline and mind bending rigour and bureaucracy. We will address this misconception as we go on. It is enough to mention at this point that a leader must have passed over this hurdle to exercise genuine leadership in the safety field.

A second obstacle is that safety efforts are too often delegated to a lower level in the organisation and leaders have little hands on involvement from then on. (I would add that this problem is not confined to safety…) The danger of such an approach is that safety efforts can become 'unstrategic' and over engineered - i.e. they can focus on the wrong approaches and lose sight of the outcomes. They can erect impressive bureaucratic record keeping structures but lose the plot as to why they are doing so. In short they can become engrossed in the 'hows' of safety and lose grasp of the 'whys' and the 'whats'. This is the pitfall of premature or over delegation. Another aspect of the 'delegate low' approach is the 'delegate sideways' approach - i.e. the safety effort gets concentrated in a specialist group off line. This can then subconsciously relieve line management of their responsibility.

Yet another obstacle to safety leadership is the 'trust the expert' approach. We can passively give safety leadership into the hands of external auditors who check our systems for compliance - now we do need auditing and external audits are probably necessary as well - but the systems that they audit must be our systems not theirs; for the lives we hope to save and preserve are our lives not theirs. We must therefore use them as helpers of our safety effort not as our conscience or as our defacto leaders.

Care must be taken for the safety audit system not to become the total safety system…

Standard Safety Management Systems are becoming inadequate
Many organisations have tried various different Safety Management Systems approaches to safety - the engineering, prescriptive and performance based approaches to name but a few. However, the common outcome among organisations is that their performance is reaching a plateau and in some cases reversing.

Organisations need new approaches based on mobilising and empowering the entire workforce. The pace of change is increasing and organisations need to be agile to survive and prosper. For this they need the full contribution of their staff.

Organisations are faced with a growing plethora of "off the shelf". Such programs often fail or worse damage the entire safety initiative. Approaches must be customised to account for your specific circumstances and needs.

Behavioural and cultural development is fundamental Ultimately safety performance is the outcome of the interactions of people with the equipment and processes they operate and the environment they work in. The behaviours of people at the workface are a critical factor in the equation, however, the values and beliefs of individuals shape these behaviours. In turn these values and beliefs are influenced by the organisational systems and management behaviours and leadership. Finally all this operates within the framework of organisational goals and values.

Traditional behaviour based safety approaches focus on workface behaviour in the immediate context of the worker and the task. This leads to short term incremental improvements, which may lose impetus over the longer term. What is needed is an approach, which treats organisational culture as a whole and as a result achieves transformational change, which permeates the entire organisation. See model below.

A new approach is needed
Programs should prepare organisations to meet the challenges of the new millennium by developing self sustaining safety cultures and behaviours, which break the plateau and drive excellence in safety. It should do this by building sustainable risk focussed behaviour into all levels and aspects of organisational culture. The first focus is on what are the critical risks in the workplace, then solutions are developed to improve the behaviour - equipment - environment. In this way, you are assured that high risk, high impact work tasks are not only reliant on human frailty but that people are equipped to perform the task safely. People are trained to do the task where necessary and this is backed by education directed at ensuring that staff at risk are fully cognisant of the values expected including "360 degree caring" where every staff member actively cares for every other staff member.

The next focus of the program is to look at the interactions of organisational systems, leadership and management with the workplace in the context of the organisational goals and values. It is critical for alignment to occur between these secondary factors and the direct workplace factors. If management behaves in a way contrary to the expressed values of the organisation this will be detrimental to workplace beliefs and behaviours.

Management and leadership behavioural expectations should be clarified and defined to ensure complete synergy. Organisational systems should be repositioned where necessary to remove any dissonance with other factors. Organisational goals and values may need to be repositioned to clarify messages and expectations. Hence behavioural change is not seen as for those at the "risk front" but is seen as an organisation wide change giving the program credibility and sustainability. See model below.

Tools for the 2000's
You need to identify the behavioural, systems and organisational issues you need to address to bring about substantial and sustainable cultural development, which results in ongoing safety improvement. It should provide the analytical tools to identify the leverage points for action and then provide the practical tools and processes to implement the change rapidly and effectively.

The approach should be highly flexible to meet the needs of organisations that have varying approaches to business and indeed safety management. Its flexibility should be designed to ensure compatibility in a variety of operating and national cultures. This flexibility must be achieved through the initial evaluation phases, which ensure that cultural and specific organisational issues are properly addressed in designing the detailed program.

Your approach must logically be designed to achieve business effectiveness in safety. These steps will enable appropriate account to be taken of the current strategic processes and goals of the company as well as any key initiatives that are under way or have been recently implemented.

This will allow the program to dovetail into your organisation and to promote other key initiatives and be reinforced in turn by those initiatives. The program should enable and empower your staff by involving them throughout the process and providing them with tools and processes to develop the improvements that fit with the desired organisational safety culture. You will need to employ a number of template tools, which must suit the organisation's purpose and circumstances. Leadership development programs and safety skills training must be developed to suit your organisation. You will need an Organisational Transformational Process which assists with the three levels of work needed to effect all these changes. This is shown in the model below, the First level referring to the Directional Level of work, which is to set the context for the safety push. The second level of work is the Transformational Level and the third is how to lock in the Organisational Gains.

Conclusion
The use of Safety Management Systems without a full understanding of the broader business context and without answering exactly why we need a safety push, mostly leads to plateauing performance and ultimately losing the gains we initially had. The role of the transformational leader is essential to ensure you will end up with a "Designer Safety Culture" tailored to your organisational needs. The more advanced your safety culture the more strategic benefits you can get from your safety thrust. Most transformation efforts fail due to the leaders not establishing a great enough sense of urgency', i.e. we don't fully understand the business context within which we are functioning.