Karen J. Hewitt, Founder of Leaderlike says there’s a fine line between influencing safety thinking and being counterproductive.
Safety is a matter of life or death, but the sighs and protests when you insist on one or other safety measures might lead you to think otherwise. The resistance to health and safety is real, but where does it come from?
On a basic level, your audience might simply be unaware of the risks. Even if they are, they are likely to be too focused on the task, distracted or under pressure to have the headspace for what you are suggesting.
Maybe they have been working a certain way for years without an accident and assume nothing bad will ever happen to them. In fact, many people prefer to defer their safety responsibilities to the experts, so that they never have to think about this possibility.
When we think about the many barriers to safety adoption in your average busy organization, employees are probably also on information overload and forgetting things faster than remembering them, no matter how important those things are.
And when the going gets tough, it’s often faster and easier to just keep doing what you’ve always done. Cue that famous of all safety objections:
“We’ve always done it this way.”
Faced with such resistance, it can be tempting to work even harder to get our messages through. There is certainly an argument for creating as much safety chatter as possible, to keep the topic front of mind, provided the messages don’t conflict or overwhelm people into inaction.
And so we put more pressure on ourselves to influence safety, which can often be counterproductive. The people we speak with feel that pressure, leading to conflict rather than collaboration.
The real secret of influence is thinking about it not as an action to be done, but as a process to be triggered when you put the other person not just at the centre of your communication, but in charge of it, whilst gently guiding it in a productive direction.
Bridges Transition Model helps us understand this process, because it depicts individual change as three important steps – first letting go of the old, then exploring possibilities in a neutral or curiosity zone, and then finally embracing the new option or approach. It shows us that if we try to force our ideas on others, we are automatically in conflict with a person’s natural approach to change.
But when we turn the influence process on its head, and put the other person first, the possibilities start to grow, because we are starting from a perspective of understanding. When we first acknowledge the other person’s perspective, we enable them to hold that perspective more loosely. And as the other person starts to feel understood, trust also starts to grow, which makes them more likely to engage in a productive conversation.
What we are talking about here is empathy, and it’s a skill all safety leaders need to, and can, learn.
Empathy is easy when we have had the exact same experience as someone else. For example, I was on a call the other day talking being in pain after a wisdom tooth extraction, and straight away someone empathised with me because they had had the same thing done. They instantly knew how I felt, no matter how long ago it was. But what happens when you haven’t had the same direct experience? Is it still possible to feel empathy?
Potentially no, because if you haven’t had the same experience, how can you possibly know how that feels? In my experience, however, it is possible, even when we haven’t walked even a step, let alone a mile, in someone else’s shoes. Because empathy starts with our imagination – a skill that we excel at in childhood and then often leave behind, unless we work in the creative industries.
Consciously tapping into our imagination, however, is key to metaphorically putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes and knowing what it would be like to walk a mile in them. Imagining ourselves as the person in front of us is almost as good as actually knowing what it feels like to be them, and research studies back this up, showing that the brain cannot distinguish between what is real and what is imagined.
To be more empathic, then, we simply take a breath before judging the safety objection we are hearing and imagine what it would be like to feel the way that person feels. Doing so will naturally lead us to nod in agreement, adopt empathetic body language, and say empathetic phrases like “Yes, I understand, I see what you mean.”
In a nutshell, you imagine what it would be like to feel that way, and then reflect that feeling in what you say and do – in your words, facial gestures and body language.
You don’t have to overdo the empathy, or make it sound insincere, because as humans we respond quickly to people who are not countering us but validating us. As soon as we sense we are not in a battle, we relax, and this is the cue to get curious – not about why they think that way, but how they might think if you flipped their internal script through an entirely different question.
Questions have power, particularly open questions, but in health and safety we tend to underuse this power, using them more often for information gathering than for motivating others. With questions like: “What would make you want to do it a different way?” and “What would another way look like?” in response to “We’ve always done it that way”, you are giving the other person the key to a huge box of treasures they didn’t even know existed.
The 3P formula (Placate-Pivot-Pitch) takes the safety leader through three key steps, each with its own role, in overcoming resistance to safety through a simple conversation. Not only does it flip the script on the influence process, but also enables the other person to widen their perspective. It is as effective for frontline conversations on safety as it is for challenging safety thinking in the boardroom.
Of course, in a perfect world, we’d be so good at selling safety that there’d be no resistance to overcome, but until that time, we need to get better at overcoming it – not through enforcement, but through motivation. And the more we start to motivate others to engage with safety, the less resistance we will see, so it becomes a virtuous circle. The biggest driver of this circle is in the boardroom, so the next time a senior leader tells you ‘There’s no budget for this”, it’s an ideal opportunity to use the 3P formula.
Interestingly, in the Harvard Business Review in Sept-Oct ’24, Mittal, Piazza and Singh said that:
“Managers allocated 60% fewer resources when an investment was presented as a way to mitigate future losses than when it was presented as a way to boost performance.”
Karen J. Hewitt
If there was ever an opportunity to challenge thinking in the boardroom it is this one, because if these words are true, then how we get senior leaders thinking about safety is going to influence the resources we get to manage it. It might also get us an ambitious vision that allows us to create more value from our safety activity.
Move over zero harm – it’s time for infinite value.
Karen J. Hewitt is Director of Leaderlike Limited, the health and safety change specialists and author of ‘People Power – Transform your Business in the Era of Safety and Wellbeing’ and the TEDx talk ‘The Two Questions That Could Save Your Life’. To find out more about the 3P formula for safety influence, or to get your safety community trained in the 3P formula, please email [email protected].
