Richard Byrne reminds practitioners that to create a safety leadership programme for managers they must first understand the leadership styles of those in charge in their organisation and then demonstrate to them how these can be exploited, in tandem with their own personal approaches, to develop a sound safety culture.

It is well known that for a strong positive safety culture to develop in an organisation its top brass needs to ‘walk the talk’. But this has to be more than just having a policy statement that outlines the safety aspirations of the organisation, and reviewing safety at Board meetings.

Leading safety should be part of the fabric of the way the senior management team acts, behaves and does business. And this doesn’t just apply to the chief executive, or the managing director – the area manager in charge of 10 shops, or the sales manager responsible for a sales force of eight people can all be leaders of safety in their part of the business.

Unfortunately, some organisations tend to forget this and centre their safety leadership approach around the delivery of a one-off course and then expect the manager to go out and ‘do’ safety, along with all the other things they have to do. While this sort of approach will tick the box it won’t help the manager to really lead safety.

Thinking a little wider about what leadership actually means can help organisations deliver a far more engaging safety programme and thus build a sound safety culture and performance. Most current thinking on business leadership and organisational development is based around emotional intelligence, the concepts of which were pioneered in the mid-1990s by Daniel Goleman.

He describes six leadership styles and the effect each has on an individual’s performance when used in the workplace.¹ These styles present a huge opportunity for safety professionals to drive the changes necessary to advance the safety culture in their organisation, as each leadership style maps to different stages of safety culture development (see figure 1 below).

Let’s start at the very beginning

Before deciding what your programme will look like you must first determine how developed your organisation’s safety culture is. This doesn’t have to involve a full-blown safety climate assessment – just step back from the day-to-day hullabaloo and absorb what you see. This will give you a feel for where the culture is against the phases depicted by the Bradley Curve (see panel below) and will help you identify which managers will be the key players in helping to lead safety in the organisation. (Challenge yourself here: don’t just pick the Board of Directors and their direct reports – how often do they get out and interact with the people who have the accidents?)

From experience, the part where most leading safety programmes go wrong is this next bit: having worked out where the culture is and who the key influencers are, you then need to stop and think about what it is you want them to do. In other words, at the end of the programme what changes in their behaviour do you want to see?

Crucially, a good safety leadership programme is about helping the manager or leader find ways to show that they have a ‘real passion’ for safety, and that they know what they’re talking about. So, the practitioner needs to help them understand that what they do and say, and how they do and say it, has a massive impact on their people – hence the importance of understanding leadership styles.

Once you have identified who will be the key leaders of safety in your organisation the next step is to get them thinking about safety: how it adds value to the organisation’s bottom line and how they can affect its culture and performance. Of course, the managers will need some fundamental safety knowledge and instruction here, but pitch it at the right level. The audience for these sorts of programmes are generally second-line managers so they don’t need the detail!

In this ‘launch’ session, try not to bombard your audience with slides. Instead, aim to be more conversational in style and use flipcharts to record thoughts and ideas from the session.

Now that your managers are thinking along the right lines they need to know how to adopt the right leadership styles to help the organisation’s safety culture develop and move into the next phase. It is a good idea to go through the leadership styles with the group and then get them to do some simple exercises along the lines of asking:

• What would you expect to see and hear people doing when they are demonstrating each style?
• Think of people you know who display each style: how easy is it to get on with them? What is the performance of their team like?
• Which styles do you exhibit as an individual?
• Have you ever been frustrated that you can’t get the result you want? Is it your style that is hindering the performance?

(Note: practitioners may find that their colleagues in HR can help here – Goleman’s leadership styles are to learning and development professionals what risk assessments are to health and safety!)

Practise what you teach

Understanding the different leadership styles and how they can be employed to elicit good safety behaviour and results is a great start, but your managers will also need some practical tools that they can use every day to demonstrate their commitment to safety. For example, they can:

• kick off their team meetings by asking the participants to share with the others an incident or safety challenge that happened in the previous month, and talk about what they learnt from it;
• make a point of talking to people at the sharp end about the last toolbox talk they attended – ask them what it was about, what was the main thing they took away from it, and what challenges they face in this particular area;
• resolve to never ignore a problem, even if they know it’s going to be hard to sort out. They can’t expect to have the job title, salary and car without some difficult things to do!
• weave into the normal performance conversation about sales, gross profit, etc. information about the organisation’s safety performance – then walk the floor to identify any problems.

Be clear that these are just examples of what can be done and encourage the managers to come up with their own suggestions, also. Most senior managers tend to object to being told what to do, so open the conservation with: ‘Here are some things that are known to work’, followed by some open-ended questions like:

• Which ones do you identify with most?
• Which ones could you see yourself doing?
• Which ones do you think your people would react best to?

After the session, arrange to spend some time with each manager in their normal working environment. If they’re an area manager, go out with them for a day every few months to see how they interact with their people and what effect they are having on the safety culture in their area.

‘Kerbside’ feedback is really handy here. Simply put, this is when you get back in the car, having been to one of their sites, and give them some feedback on their performance. According to the Corporate Leadership Council, informal feedback like this from your manager can improve performance by up to 39 per cent.⁴ OK, you’re not their manager but if it’s done in the right way the principle still applies, and a 39-per-cent improvement in the way a manager leads safety in their area is a great result.

Conclusion

Organisations consistently have to deliver the numbers, whether that be productivity, profit, customer satisfaction, etc. but as the recent banking crisis has shown, the way in which you deliver the numbers is just as important as the numbers themselves.

Good leaders tend to keep their eye on the horizon, watching their strategic goals and steering their team’s course by developing and inspiring them. In relation to safety, that means they don’t have to focus on the detail of risk assessment and safe systems of work – that’s the job of their health and safety practitioners – they have to find ways to show their people and their teams that safety is important to them, the managers.

The leadership styles discussed tend to form part of the broader organisational development agenda, and there are obvious opportunities to advance the safety agenda at the same time as wider organisational change is occurring.
Helping the managers in your organisation understand and then exploit leadership styles in the right way, in harmony with their own personal methods and approaches, will allow them to show their people that they have ‘fire in their belly’ when it comes to safety, and this can really make a difference to how everyone in the organisation views it.
It is our job as health and safety practitioners to ignite that fire and keep it burning.

Figure 1: Goleman’s leadership styles and the Bradley Curve’s phases of safety culture development (adapted from the Michelin Management Development programme³)

[PANEL] It all depends

The Bradley Curve suggests that there are three stages of cultural development:

• The dependent (first) phase is categorised as a steep drop in the number of accidents as the organisation introduces the ‘basics’ e.g. policies, procedures, and training. Critically, they are also enforced, hence the employees are ‘conditioned’ to work safely, because if they don’t they’ll be disciplined.
• The independent stage, when the number of accidents continues to decline but at nowhere near the rate achieved in the previous stage. The employees’ view of safety matures, so they see it as being important to them.
• The interdependent phase is where the employees’ view of safety is fully matured and they work safely for themselves, their team mates, and will challenge anyone who breaks their ethics. Although there is some improvement in the organisation’s accident performance it never reaches zero. The risks are well managed and understood so accidents, while inevitable, are very few and far between.

For a more detailed discussion of the Bradley Curve, see Tim Marsh and Paul Bizzell’s article in the June 2009 issue of SHP²

References
1    Goleman, D, Boyatzis, R & McKee, A (2002): The New Leaders: Transforming the Art of Leadership into the Science of Results, Time Warner Books, London
2    Marsh, T and Bizzell, P (2009): ‘Bend it, shape it’, in Safety & Health Practitioner, Vol.7, No.6, pp34-36 – www.shponline.co.uk/features-content/ full/bend-it-shape-it
3    Michelin Management Development Programme (2010): ‘Developing yourself and others’, unpublished lecture notes, Michelin Tyre, Stoke on Trent
4    Corporate Leadership Council (2005): Managing for High Performance and Retention – A HR Toolkit for Supporting the Line Manager, Corporate Executive Board, London

Richard Byrne is a chartered member of IOSH.

Continuing professional development is the process by which OSH practitioners maintain, develop and improve their skills and knowledge. IOSH CPD is very flexible in its approach to the ways in which CPD can be accrued, and there are various activities in which members can engage as part of their individual action plan to refresh or expand their knowledge and experience, and thus make a real difference to their professional effectiveness.

One such activity is reflecting on what you have learnt from the information you receive every month in your professional magazine. IOSH and SHP have therefore decided to formalise this process by running a regular CPD ‘quiz’ based on a feature article in the magazine.

Every three issues or so, a set of questions will be posed at the end of one of the feature articles, which practitioners can answer and subsequently award themselves credits. One, two or three credits can be awarded, depending on what has been learnt – exactly how many you award yourself is up to you, once you have reflected and taken part in the quiz.

This month, the questions relate to the article on the preceding pages, ‘Horses for courses’. There are ten to answer in all, and the answers can be found below.

To learn more about CPD and the IOSH approach, visit www.iosh.co.uk/membership/about_membership/about_cpd.aspx

QUESTIONS

1    Leadership styles differ and can be:

• Visionary and democratic   
• Democratic and bureaucratic
• Pace-setting and corroborative
• Affiliative and prescriptive

2    Difficult problems relating to safety should be:

• Dealt with straight away
• Ignored, as they generally resolve themselves
• Delegated to the workforce to deal with
• Discussed at senior management level at its next available meeting

3    A good safety leadership programme helps a manager to show that:

• They will enforce safety rules
• They will take action against safety infringements
• They have a commitment and passion for safety in the job
• That the management is paying ‘lip-service’ to safety

4    Managers can demonstrate their commitment to safety by:

• Asking workers to share what they have learnt from recent experiences
• Writing prescriptive rules for people to follow
• Asking workers to recall their recent experiences
• Asking workers not to talk about incidents, as it might spread panic

5    Emotional intelligence was developed by:

• Bradley Curve in 1984
• Paul Bizzell in June 2009
• Daniel Goleman in the mid-1990s
• Richard Byrne in 2010

6    Which of Goleman’s leadership styles is likely to have a negative effect on safety climate if it is poorly done?

• Affiliative
• Commanding
• Visionary
• Democratic

7    Which of Goleman’s leadership styles would be most effective in creating rapport within a team and helping to solve conflict?

• Commanding
•  Coaching
• Democratic
• Affiliative

8    In determining the safety culture of your organisation what would be a good approach to start with?

• Conduct a full and detailed safety audit
•  Stand back and observe
• Refer to accident reports
• Consider directors’ reports

9    The Bradley Curve suggests that there are three strategies of cultural development – which of the following is not one of these?

• The Independent Stage
• The Dependent Stage
• The Indeterminate Stage
• The Interdependent Stage

10   What sort of leader are you? Do you display any of the following (tick as many boxes as you think fit)?

• Tell
• Set high standards
• Empathise
• Listen
• Inspire
• Consult

Answers to the CPD Spotlight questions

1. a
2. a
3. c
4. a
5. c
6. b
7. d
8. b
9. c
10. Of course, there is no particular answer for this one. You could display any, all, or none of the behaviours. Perhaps you would like to reflect on this question separately and develop a plan to achieve the skills that you don’t have.