The safety leadership challenge building soft skills for exemplary safety performance

THE SAFETY LEADERSHIP CHALLENGE:

BUILDING soft-skills for exemplary SAFETY PERFORMANCE

Despite decades of attention across a raft of disciplines, the goal of zero harm continues to elude the grasp of most organisations in heavy industry. Quite simply, the costs of incidents—both personal and financial—continue to accumulate, and represent significant road-blocks to safety performance and societal well-being. To overturn these costs and continue to realise performance gains in safety, organisations must look beyond engineering-based control, behavioural, and attitudinal solutions, and toward leadership.

Significant inroads to our understanding of safety performance were made when organisations realised that traditional engineering and control-based approaches to safety management were insufficient. But the hierarchy of control can only take safety so far. The effects of technology, automation, job design, and formalised policies and procedures on safety performance ultimately plateau after a certain point. Without consideration of ‘the person element’, that inescapable and unpredictable energy experienced by all employers, organisations are destined for mediocre safety performance. Indeed, while figures vary across industries and reporting methods1, between 50%-90% of safety incidents are believed to involve some degree of human error.

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Tristan Casey

THE SAFETY LEADERSHIP CHALLENGE: BUILDING SOFT-SKILLS FOR EXEMPLARY SAFETY PERFORMANCE

sentis.net© Sentis Pty Ltd 2012

P.2Understanding these human factors proved to be 7 the key to further gains in safety performance.ttConsequently, psychology initiated the next .. evolutionary stage of occupational safety.

Behavioural, and later, cognitive-based approaches contributed significantly to the effectiveness of safety management strategies across industries and work contexts. Following the Chernobyl disaster, occupational safety was once again reinvigorated by the consideration of a new phenomenon—safety culture. Knowledge of these collective social forces provided a neat extension to existing models of workplace safety performance, and directed attention toward safety factors that operate across multiple organisational levels. Yet, despite this significant progress, occupational safety is an ongoing and significant issue for many organisations.

In Australia, national statistics suggest that current safety models and approaches, while achieving significant improvement over traditional methods, fall uncomfortably short of eradicating incidents from the workplace. In 2009, an estimated 640,700 workers experienced a work-related injury or illness2. In particular, the mining industry carries a significant risk to employee safety, with as many as 1 in 20 workers experiencing one or more workplace incidents... every year.

Safety incidence rates translate to significant costs for employers, workers and society. Worksafe Australia3 estimated that during 2005-06, safety incidents cost the Australian economy $57.5 billion—a staggering 5.9% of GDP. So, despite the attention directed at occupational safety, there is a sizeable shortfall between what organisations are doing and what they are achieving in terms of safety outcomes. Moreover, mismanaged safety carries significant competitive, financial and personal costs.

Whereas engineering-based safety approaches focussed exclusively on the removal or reduction of risk, behavioural, and to some extent, attitudinal and motivational approaches target employee compliance.[Figure 1] This shift in thinking from the physical to the psychological helped many organisations realise improved safety performance beyond that achieved by traditional methods alone4. However, compliance will only get you so far. Indeed, compliance is often defined in terms

of acquiescence, or ‘agreement in a passive way’5. So, compliance should be taken at face value: an in-principle agreement to act according to some externally-imposed directive. Although employee compliance fosters a strong safety climate, risks may still be present if employees believe that shortcuts provide an immediate payoff in terms of speed and efficiency6. At this level, organisations may appear ‘on the surface’ to possess a strong safety ethic, yet in reality, genuine ownership of safety is somewhat lacklustre.

BUILDING SAFETY CITIZENSHIPA new wave in safety performance is coming. Borrowing from industrial psychology, safety scholars have begun to apply what is known as ‘organisational citizenship’ to safety contexts. Organisational citizenship is an umbrella term for behaviours outside the normal scope of employees’ position descriptions. Such behaviours go above and beyond what is minimally expected from employees7.

Applied to safety, citizenship or ‘participation’8 behaviours range from voluntary membership of safety committees, actively promoting management’s safety initiatives, keeping informed about the latest safety changes onsite, and monitoring the safety performance of team members9. Safety citizenship represents a significant opportunity for organisations in high-reliability industries to capitalise on their greatest asset—their people—to further reduce the prevalence of safety-related incidents. [Figure 2]

FIGURE 1

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SURMOUNTING THE PLATEAU OF SAFETY PERFORMANCE



P.3CORE SAFETY CITIZENSHIP BEHAVIOURS

HELPING

Helping other crew members to learn safety procedures and perform work duties safely above what is expected as part of their role.

USING INITIATIVE

Raising safety concerns and providing recommendations even where others disagree or are not receptive to these inputs.

CARING

Taking action to proactively protect other crew members from harm, such as identifying risks and preventing safety violations before they impact on others.

SUPPORTING

Supporting leaders to monitor and correct safety performance of the team through reporting violations, providing feedback and checking work standards.

KEEPING INFORMED

Seeking out and monitoring sources of relevant safety information across the organisation and the industry.

CONTINUALLY IMPROVE

Identifying and actioning (where appropriate) changes to duties, tasks, practices and procedures to further improve safety performance.

Although research in this area is in its infancy, work to date has shown that leadership is a particularly powerful predictor of safety citizenship behaviours9,10. During leader-crew interactions, implicit social ....exchanges are established, whereby the leader provides feedback, encouragement and support to employees. In return, the crew member feels obligated to reciprocate, which increases the likelihood of extra-role behaviours such as helping, organisational loyalty, task initiative and voluntary self-development11. Citizenship has the potential to burst beyond the safety performance barrier established by compliance approaches; however, success depends on the leadership capabilities available within the organisation. And this requirement is not as easily fulfilled as one might think.

SAFETY LEADERSHIP ON THE FRONTLINEIt is a given that effective leadership is crucial to.... organisational performance. Study after study has shown that specific leadership behaviours promote employee productivity12. Leaders, through the way that they interact with others at work, exert powerful effects over the way that employees think and act. Consequently, leadership researchers have put forward and tested a number of models that describe the typologies of behaviours that promote employee productivity and organisational performance.

Of these models, the ‘full range leadership model’ proposed by Bass and Avolio13 has received considerable attention. Under this model, leadership style varies across dimensions of effectiveness and passivity. At the low end of the model, leaders can adopt a passive or laissez-faire style that is characterised by avoidance of decision-making and other leadership responsibilities. Such leaders may only react when issues are explicitly raised or problems manifest in tangible outcomes. Next, transactional leaders typically use rewards, recognition, monitoring, and corrective feedback strategies. These leaders are good at achieving a consistent level of basic performance across their team. The final level in the model characterises active leaders who weave together a range of interpersonal and technical skills to inspire, motivate, and support crew members to adopt organisational goals as their own. These ‘transformational’ leaders move followers beyond mere compliance and toward helpful attitudinal and motivational change13.

Yet, surprisingly, these concepts were only introduced to safety-specific contexts within the last decade. Barling and colleagues14 were the first to explicitly define and test ‘safety leadership’ as a predictor of workplace safety. This seminal study showed that leadership, operationalised as a safety-specific form of transformational leadership, predicted the frequency of subordinates’ workplace injuries via safety climate (shared perceptions of management’s priority for safety) and employees’ safety consciousness (awareness of the importance of safety).

Since this work, a flurry of research has confirmed and extended the role of leadership in safety performance. Safety leadership has been shown to increase the quality of safety communication9, the strength and value of safety climate6, and the likelihood of compliance with safety procedures and demonstration of safety behaviours that go beyond role boundaries10.

FIGURE 2



P.4Further research has shown that certain styles of leadership are more (or less) effective at promoting safety outcomes. Whereas transformational leadership consistently.... produces positive effects on safety performance, passive leadership conveys significant negative effects15. Leaders don’t have to do much at all to produce adverse outcomes—in fact, safety leaders that do nothing at all are still likely to exude a negative influence over their work area. This point begs the question: how prevalent is passive leadership within your organisation, and how much damage is it doing to your safety bottom-line?

“The major cause of managerial failure among.... engineers, scientists and other technologists..... is poor interpersonal skills.” 16

Organisations that operate in highly technical fields often experience challenges with leadership capacities as employees progress up the chain. In these contexts, leaders perhaps end up doing less of the leading and more of the managing. In practice, engineers and other technical-folk are typically promoted into leadership roles based on their job skills and knowledge. Issues arise when technical skills are emphasised at the expense of interpersonal skills. In this situation,... organisations (and individuals) often fail to realise that technical ability is inversely related to employee level. In reality, as management level goes up, the importance of technical ability goes down16. Where technical leaders go wrong is that they tend to neglect the development of soft-skills so they can continue to ‘muck-in’ with crews, which requires continual updating of technical skills. This perspective leaves little room for leadership development.

Also, people with certain personality types and past experiences are more likely to be attracted to technical roles, which means that the gap between current and desired leadership skill-sets can be quite large. While personality undoubtedly plays a role.. in predicting performance in leadership roles17, the evidence shows that leadership is trainable18. And therein lies the problem. Organisations need effective leadership to survive, yet in technical fields it is less likely that such talent will exist in-house. Leadership development is a priority for organisations in ... this position.

Models of safety leadership provide a useful framework for employee development. Although numerous.... models have been proposed in the general

leadership space, little work to date has explored how the nature of effective leadership changes when applied to safety-relevant contexts. Consequently, Sentis invested considerable effort to develop a comprehensive leadership behavioural framework that is based on a foundation of existing transactional and transformational theory. In sum, the model consists of eight behavioural dimensions: supporting, recognising, actively caring, collaborating, vision, inspiring, role-modelling, and challenging. [Figure 3]

Together, these behaviours provide employees with the baseline expectations for safety performance, and increase motivation to engage in extra-role safety activities.

Of these dimensions, recognising and active caring are two categories of behaviour that are particularly relevant in safety contexts. ‘Recognising’ was drawn from transactional leadership theory, and refers to leader actions that clarify what is expected of employees in terms of good safety performance, and reward or acknowledge such performance when it occurs. Effective safety recognising behaviours include praising employees for safe work practices and encouraging compliance with set safety standards. Recognising behaviours should be employed at both individual and team levels5. Acknowledging and rewarding the performance of individual crew members sets up an implicit transaction between leader and subordinate, which increases the likelihood of employee reciprocation

DIMENSIONSOF SAFETYLEADERSHIP

ACTIVELY CARING

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INSPIRING

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RECOGNISINGSU

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FIGURE 3



P.5(in the form of good safety performance). At the team level, rewarding effective safety behaviours builds the crew’s sense of collective efficacy and contributes to a positive group safety climate. Recognising is a core safety leadership competency.

Active caring moves beyond the foundation of transactional leadership behaviours by considering the nature of the leader’s relationships with individual employees. Across multiple interactions, leaders send cues to subordinates that may build trust and perceived support. In turn, employees experience increased safety motivation and seek out opportunities to become more involved in activities that help the leader perform their duties. Active care may be as simple as ‘management by walking around’—activities that bring the leader out onto the shop floor and prompt regular and meaningful interactions with workers about safety and production matters19. Caring leaders may also show a genuine commitment to crew well-being by seeking out and considering the needs of individuals within the team, managing workloads in response to employee capabilities and preferences, and explaining the need for compliance with safety procedures (in terms of what the employee stands to lose through non-compliance). In demonstrating these active care behaviours, safety leaders convey a sense of genuine concern and interest in their team. Consequently, safety leadership emphasises the importance of mastery over soft-skills such as interpersonal communication and relationship-building.

Given these domains of behaviour, the question remains of how best to build employees’ safety leadership capabilities. Organisations should begin by selecting (and modifying, if required) a safety leadership framework that is grounded in theory and supported by empirical evidence. Without these features, the model may not be appropriate for your specific context, or could fail to produce the desired results in safety performance.

Next, succession planning and employee development processes must be closely examined. Employees should be selected for leadership roles based on interest, motivation and pre-existing supporting attributes (e.g., knowledge, skills, and disposition) rather than technical skill alone. Further, employee development should be facilitated by a competency model that maps out the various levels of performance and concomitant behaviours that should be demonstrated at each level. Such competency models should include organisational language, align with

vision, values and strategic direction, and be designed from the top down—beginning at the executive level and working down to crews.

Third, organisations need to provide structured training that is supported by ongoing coaching and support. Mentoring may also be an option, if strong safety leadership talent exists in-house. Training must be closely integrated with the safety leadership model, and include both knowledge and skill-development opportunities. Techniques such as demonstration, group discussion and role-play are invaluable learning tools in this context. Finally, training transfer (the application of skills and knowledge on the job) will be maximised if budding safety leaders are given ample opportunities to practise their newly learned strategies, and they are supported by ongoing discussions and guidance from subject matter experts. External coaches can be valuable resources for leader development given their third-party perspective, considerable ‘troubleshooting’ experience, and professional distance from the organisation. Together, these strategies ensure safety leadership success.

CONCLUSIONOver time, the management of safety has been characterised by incremental improvements in incident rates as scholars and practitioners unearth further knowledge about their root causes. The largest gains in safety were made when organisations adopted an ‘engineer-it-out’ philosophy: failsafe systems, protective barriers, high-reliability componentry and other ‘human-proof’ innovations significantly reduced safety risks across industry. Next, organisations considered the human element, which saw the domination of behavioural and attitudinal interventions. However, progress in safety performance has once again stalled. To break through this second plateau, organisations must dig deeper than traditional approaches and foster genuine ownership of safety across all levels of their business.

Safety citizenship represents the next level of safety performance, and a point of significant competitive advantage if done well. Yet, safety citizens can only be grown and cultivated through effective leadership. The road certainly won’t be easy as good safety leadership can be hard to find. However, with the right recipe, a little elbow grease and effective tools, home- grown safety leadership beats store-bought every time.



P.6TRISTAN CASEY Currently completing a Doctoral degree in Organisational Psychology, Tristan is an experienced and skilled applied researcher. Tristan’s primary research interests include: safety climate, safety leadership, training transfer and evaluation, and online survey methods. Tristan is passionate about synthesising and translating empirical state-of-the-art for the purposes of practical application.

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REFERENCES

The safety leadership challenge building soft skills for exemplary safety performance

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